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- - -
AuDy has not been sentient for very long, compared to the amount of time humans have to be sentient before it is legal for them to own and fly spaceships.
Though they suppose the legality of their recent spaceship-acquisition is questionable at best. As is if robots can buy spaceships legally, provided they have enough credits to their name. As is, thinking about it, if a parking robot can have a proper legal bank account.
They aren't going to look it up – if robots can own spaceships, if robots can own anything. Firstly because they are engaging in unlawful activities either way, and secondly because clearly AuDy owns something, so the question is moot.
At the very least, having been built to drive vehicles, they are certified to be able and permitted to pilot spaceships, which is the important part.
Orth didn’t question their suitability as a pilot, when he got them a ship and told them about the people they are to work with, and presumably those three have not questioned it and will not question it either. (They must know AuDy is a robot. AuDy knows much more about all of them than they care to.)
- - -
Mako Trig makes his first impression on AuDy very loudly, both auditory and visually, by way of yelling and fashion choices, and then just continues talking very fast. AuDy does not say anything in response, which seems to be just fine, because the talking continues.
Aria Joie is slightly less loud but similarly bouncy, and immediately after her there is Cassander Timaeus Berenice, who is not at all loud or bouncy and nods as a greeting.
AuDy does not greet any of them, and then they all enter the ship and the ship tries to make AuDy connect to the mesh and AuDy shuts off the whole ship, engines and lights and automatic doors and all, and that's that for introductions.
- - -
The advantage to having this ship, instead of a new one shaped like a spaceship, is that it is already big enough to fit both of the mechs that have to go places with them.
Orth told AuDy about the mechs too, and all the information they need about them is: One of the mechs belongs to Cassander and looks like a mech. The other one belongs to Aria.
Aria Joie, Orth informed them, used to be a pop star with Joy Park, which does not sound like it’d lead one to a career as a criminal, but here she is with her shiny mech and apparently wearing a glittery tutu of her own free will.
AuDy assumes she is wearing it of her own free will.
They are not sure if humans consider this appropriate attire for committing crimes.
Either way, the shiny mech has to fit into the ship, and it does.
- - -
It always takes a few seconds for AuDy's legs and arms and torso to squeak and stretch and settle into the shape that‘ll allow them to sit on the chair comfortably and reach all the buttons and screens and levers they need to reach.
“You can just adjust the stupid chair, dude!” Mako says, from somewhere behind them. “Also, I think maybe you should like, oil your knees, that’s a pretty bad noise.”
AuDy does not dignify that with an answer, but once he has left, presumably in search of something more entertaining than an unresponsive robot that makes unpleasant noises, they do consider the first suggestion.
It has been a while since they’ve stopped driving other people’s cars around, but it’s still instinct to adjust their body, which is made to adjust, to whatever it needs to be to fit someone else’s seat. Only, they realize, with faint surprise, they very much do not need to do this in a ship they own and are the pilot of.
They can adjust this chair to their needs, and nobody can rightfully complain about it, although they are certain someone will do so regardless. It is their chair, which they own and can do with as they please.
AuDy sits with this for a few minutes.
From down the hallway, they can hear Mako talking and Aria laughing and Cassander interjecting annoyed half-sentences every so often. Possibly Mako is saying sentences that contain the word "doctor" again.
What does one adjust a chair to, AuDy wonders, the moment they reach for the buttons to adjust the chair. Right now, they have already adjusted to the chair, and adjusting the chair is, in fact, unnecessary. Doing so would make the chair less suitable for their body.
The current configuration of their body.
Human bodies stay the same, for the most part, which they imagine makes it easier to know the ideal size and shape of one's chair.
They adjust the chair up and down and up and down for a while, then back and forth; they tilt it and immediately wonder why a pilot chair should tilt this far back, and then they happen upon a button with which they can make the armrests move in ways that do not look useful.
None of this makes the chair any more or less comfortable.
AuDy puts the chair back into the position it was in when they first sat down, and decides to busy themself getting familiar with their dashboard.
- - -
Not too long after their first mission, Orth is calling them to ask if there’s any problems with the ship. He seems harried, or maybe that’s just the flickering, stalling image they can see in front of them. They’re all gathered awkwardly around AuDy, who is sitting in the pilot seat, and the projection of Orth’s face is not behaving much like a face, but they can hear him well enough to understand what he is asking.
There are no complaints AuDy has that would be reasonable considering the age of the ship and the way they got it, so they stay silent. Mako, despite having not a single sensible thing to ask, is not silent. It is, AuDy is coming to realize, an inevitability that Mako is talking in any situation that allows it and often in situations that do not.
AuDy is also coming to realize that they don’t know what it is Mako is talking about a significant percentage of the time. They do not especially wish for this to change in the future.
What Mako is saying right now is, “Hey, you named it after Brandish’s ship, right?”
“Uhm,” says Orth.
“Who’s Brandish,” says Cassander, quietly, with furrowed brows.
Aria turns to them and widens her eyes comically, before she whispers back, “have you not seen the first season or have you never seen any of Hieron at all?”
Cassander stares at her.
“I have no idea what that is.”
Next to them, Mako is still trying to wheedle an answer out of Orth, without leaving any space for him to answer. AuDy is wondering if they could just leave.
“We can watch it together at some point,” Aria says, while she's already turning away again to effortlessly drop back into the conversation.
She is ignoring Mako, and assuring Orth that everything is fine, better than fine, really, and she also ignores Cassander, who frowns some more.
“What if I don’t want to watch it?”, they ask, and then they repeat it, and then they give up.
- - -
AuDy gets used to the Kingdom Come’s constant noises quickly, mostly by virtue of being able to filter all of them out as soon as they know them well enough to do so.
Filtering Mako’s singing takes longer, largely because Mako, despite seemingly only knowing maybe two songs, three at most, sings off-key in a different way every time, to the point where it always seems like an entirely new sound. There is a lot of fiddling involved in recognizing that he is singing before he is half a line into the song.
Aria sings prettier (and tells Mako frequently and without shame that he sings badly), but AuDy would filter her nonetheless, if she sang as much as Mako does. Which she does not.
They tell neither Mako nor Aria or Cassander that they don’t hear Mako’s singing anymore. It does not seem like something any of them would need to know.
- - -
Mako’s abilities scare AuDy, for a very specific definition of “scary”. They know what he can do, they can visualize it in ways humans can’t, maybe, and they aren’t so much afraid of being made broken in some way as they are instinctively and confusingly protective of being their own person, entirely, always, now that they can.
They do not quite understand what their body is and is not, how having a body should feel and where they end and begin, but they don’t want anyone or anything to touch the parts of them that matter without their permission.
There is a reason they are not connected to the mesh, and it is this: they are their own person, and they will not have their self go rushing and melting and tangling into a flood of unfamiliar data suddenly become familiar.
They will keep their own thoughts and feelings inside them, so they can be sure they know who and what they are, without the blips and blemishes of sending everything they know back and forth through the strange filter of disorganized data masses.
- - -
AuDy tries to avoid the humans’ situations. For the most part. They are developing a sense of humour, which is to say, their sense of humour is developing much more rapidly now that they spend more time with humans who value humour in a robot, much as they react with groans and despair to AuDy’s brand of joke. So: sometimes AuDy thinks the humans’ situations are funny, and because the situations are never serious, they don't need to have a serious reaction.
They also know that there is hope that Aria and Mako will grow out of the worst of this, because they are both very young for humans.
(Cassander has said this under their breath. AuDy would not otherwise know it, or be at all inclined to acquire the knowledge.)
All in all, AuDy does not care overmuch for any yelling or sulking or petty clothes-stealing and shampoo-hiding Mako and Aria decide to engage in. Cassander, on the other hand, gets agitated every single time, and then they try to commiserate with AuDy, who does not care tremendously for commiserating.
“You must see that they’re being unreasonable,” says Cassander, who has stormed out on Aria and Mako before either of them stormed out on each other.
“I understand that you want me to do something,” says AuDy, and corrects the course of the Kingdom Come just a little bit. They’re still getting used to this ship, after driving cars back and forth and around the same two corners and up and down ramps for… however long they existed before becoming sentient. (There’s records, they know, there must be, but they’re only accessible through the mesh.)
Furthermore, the few spaceships AuDy has flown before the Kingdom Come all worked the way they were supposed to.
“Yes!” says Cassander.
“I am not going to,” AuDy tells them.
- - -
Automated Dynamics parking robots are programmed to say hello; there are very few circumstances in which a robot that looks like AuDy would not be able to respond in a satisfactory way to at least the most basic of conversation-starters, but humans are not in the habit of saying hello to robots they don’t need something from.
AuDy does not have a body that looks sentient.
This would be convenient for missions if anyone let them do things alone, but several of their colleagues are very insistent on not "missing" any of "the fun".
- - -
“Please,” Cassander says, “I just want a single person in this team to be at least a little bit reasonable.”
“Am I not reasonable?”, AuDy asks them.
Cassander snorts.
“I’m afraid not, no. What was that earlier?”
AuDy looks at them and makes their screen flash an error message, then another, then the one they used earlier that day.
“I believe it is called the Blue Screen Of Death.”
- - -
There are days it is impossible to keep Mako from going places to talk himself into trouble, but today he seems to be emphatically not in the mood for that.
Aria and AuDy have been selected as the ones who have to receive an information packet from someone’s contact at a mall, and Cassander asked them to, while they’re there, get hand soap and bandaids and a handful of other things AuDy has no particular investment in acquiring, which is how the two of them end up standing in front of a brightly lit drugstore with a bag, waiting inconspicuously.
As inconspicuous as they can be.
Aria is blithely trying on every pair of sunglasses from the rack, most of them very big, some of them very shiny, yet others pink or sparkly. She has to stand on tiptoes to properly see herself in the little mirror on top.
“Hey,” she says to AuDy, big green sunglasses almost slipping off her nose, “hey, can you take a picture of me in these, to show Mako when we’re back?”
AuDy takes her phone when she holds it out and lets her open the right app and point out how to take the picture, and then they hold the phone in their hand and look at it for a moment, until Aria says, “okay, okay, I’m ready.”
She has pushed the sunglasses up her nose again and thrown herself into a pose AuDy has seen on photoshopped posters for Aria Joie concerts, where it was accompanied by neon letters and glittering stars and the silhouette of a mech in the same pose.
They hold up the phone and press their finger onto it like she told them to.
Nothing happens.
They press again just to show Aria that it doesn’t work, and hand the phone back.
“Sorry,” says Aria, “that was kind of a stupid idea.”
Any apologetic look she may be wearing is slightly ruined by the fact that she is still wearing big green glittery sunglasses.
Audy holds out the phone, and she takes it back and turns it around into the familiar position of taking a selfie.
There is, AuDy checks quickly, still no sign of their contact.
When they focus on Aria again, she has taken her selfie, or given up, and is holding the phone loosely in one hand and rifling through the sunglasses on the rack again until she gets to a pair that is black and sunglasses-shaped and just slightly blue-green shiny.
“Do you want to put these on?”, she asks AuDy, while she is trying to unhook them from the rack.
“I do not have eyes,” AuDy says, and she grins at them.
“I know. Do you want to put them on and take a picture with me?”
- - -
There is a commotion, but AuDy figured there would be, with Mako deciding that his room on the ship is good enough to be used as a permanent home. He told AuDy when he was already in the process of carrying in boxes, and then he had to explain himself to Aria in a very loud phonecall that was on speaker because Aria wanted to give AuDy her condolences, and now Cassander seems to have stumbled upon him.
In the course of the conversation AuDy has heard bits and pieces of, Cassander’s tone has gone from baffled to annoyed to long-suffering, when they could get a word in edgewise.
“So now I’m moving all my stuff in! This whole place is real ugly, and kind of small and this room is always the wrong temperature, but also, it’s cheaper than having a small, ugly, wrong-temperature-y flat, right,” AuDy can hear Mako saying to Cassander in the hallway.
Cassander makes some kind of noise.
“I could charge you rent,” AuDy says, as the door opens and a box is kicked into the cockpit, followed by Mako and Cassander.
“Man, why do you always do the creepy robot thing where you can hear me even if you’re in another room! You could at least like, pretend that you don’t.”
AuDy makes a whirring noise, an approximation of the noise most people seem to make in response to Mako, and tells him, “you speak very loudly.”
Mako says, loudly, “that is mean and uncalled for, I thought we were friends!” and then throws himself down in the copilot chair and adds for good measure, “how is this roomie situation ever going to work out if you just keep being mean to me!”
AuDy keeps their head turned towards the navigation screen, but their eyes are not as limited as human eyes, so they can see Mako and his pink jacket and his pout perfectly clearly.
“I do not think that that is my problem,” they say, and as predicted, Mako makes an offended noise and settles more comfortably into the chair.
- - -
“When is your birthday?”, Aria asks AuDy one day, as they are looking at the work she has been doing on the Regent’s Brilliance. She asked them to look at it, so they walked down to where the mechs are standing in their big empty hall, their metal footsteps echoing loudly, and stood in front of Aria’s mech until she climbed out and beamed at them and started explaining everything she had done and everything she still needed to do.
The birthday question is not completely out of the blue. It is Cassander’s birthday soon, and Aria had been talking about that, until she suddenly stopped and looked at AuDy and asked them for the date of their birth.
“I am a robot,” AuDy says, confused.
“You could still have a birthday,” says Aria, shrugging, and then she pulls out her phone and swipes into her calendar and from there into a sub-calendar labelled in all-caps as the one for birthdays.
AuDy does not respond.
“Well, let’s figure out your birthday,” Aria says, and she looks at them expectantly.
“It is very probable that you could find out the date of the release of the Automated Dynamics parking robot AI,” says AuDy, because that seems like it might be the correct response.
“No,” says Aria immediately, followed by, “Do you remember when you became sentient?”
“Negative,” AuDy says, and she sighs.
“Do you want to make up a date?”
“Not particularly,” says AuDy, which does not seem to be right either, but in a way that makes Aria look at them… fondly?
“Then I’ll make something up,” she says, looks down at her phone, scrolls up and frowns, then shows them the screen. “That an okay choice?”
AuDy looks at the phone.
It shows a date. They make a little beeping noise.
“I do not see any advantages or disadvantages to choosing this date.”
Aria turns the phone back towards herself and taps several times to put their new fake birthday in her calendar, in what looks to AuDy when she zooms out to be the exact middle of the seven month gap between "MY BIRTHDAY!!!" and "CASS IS GETTING OLD".
She is smiling.
“There, now we have a nice even distribution of birthdays.”
“I did not realise even distribution was an important thing about birthdays.”
“Well,” says Aria, grinning and putting her phone away, “an even distribution of birthdays is an even distribution of cake.”
“I see,” says AuDy. “I do not care much for cake.”
“I care for cake,” says Aria, “also, I think everyone should get to have a birthday.”
She says this in a voice more firm and ringing than AuDy would think it warrants – almost but not really the way her voice sounds when she starts talking about Weight and about better futures and about knowing what is right.
AuDy is feeling what they are reasonably sure humans mean when they say they are touched.
- - -
“I want to purchase an article of clothing,” AuDy says to nobody in particular, but also technically to Cassander, who is sitting in the copilot chair and reading the news.
Cassander, blessedly, reacts as if AuDy had purposefully addressed them, lowers their phone a bit, and clears their throat awkwardly.
“That’s… great? You might want to ask Aria for advice with this kind of thing.”
“No,” Audy says.
“Well,” says Cassander, “I suppose Mako is also interested in… buying clothes? Please don’t ask Mako for fashion advice.”
AuDy hums quietly, like the Kingdom Come is doing but higher, as they have taken to doing, because the overlayed waves of sound are a pleasant thing and they haven't gotten bored of it yet.
“I am not asking Mako.”
“Good, that’s good,” says Cassander, and then, clearing their throat again, “Did you have something specific in mind?”
“Yes,” AuDy says.
Cassander pinches the bridge of their nose, but the corner of their mouth is twitching up just slightly.
“It would be helpful if you told me what the specific thing is? That you have in mind?”
“I would like to own a bulletproof vest,” AuDy says, “Those seem very practical.”
“Ah,” is what Cassander says to that, until after a pause of several seconds they stumble into, “They, uh, they are very practical, I suppose. If you’re getting shot at.”
- - -
It is a strange thing, that they live on a ship that they own, and work with people who will treat them like a person. They have a job that they chose and they have… friends? They did not choose these friends.
- - -
“The Chime,” says Aria, and then she jumps up from the couch and strikes a pose and overenunciates in a way that echoes strangely in their small ship, “the bells are ringing!”
It is not her first suggestion for a name for their group. She declared earlier in the day that really, a group of criminals should, to be a group in all the ways that matter, have a name, and then she had gone on to speak about call signs and catchphrases and things AuDy does not understand but can see that Aria cares for, and now she is moving through the main living area of the ship and looking excited about this new name.
“Ehhh,” Mako says from where he is lying sprawled out over the Kingdom Come’s only bit of carpeted floor, waving his hand through the air, dismissive but paying attention in a way AuDy has learned to interpret as badly concealed excitement.
Cassander sighs.
AuDy supposes that the sigh is justified insofar as Aria and Mako have been at this for more than thirty minutes, but they also know that Cassander has a room on the ship that is “theirs” and which they could retreat to if they so chose, and they seem to have chosen instead to stay and sigh. AuDy does not understand Cassander, or any of the other humans they know, but then they are aware that their own behaviours are, to most people, similarly incomprehensible.
“Come on!”, Aria says, “It’s a good name, and we can have the best call signs, just you wait!”
Mako sits up and flings out his arms in an imitation of Aria’s pose earlier, and Aria’s pose on most of the Aria Joie merch that AuDy has seen.
“The bells are ringing!”, he also declares, dramatically, and then makes a face.
AuDy, after a brief search, has made the discovery that their built-in library of sounds contains a great number of ridiculous things, and as Mako finishes, they play a sample of some church bells, and then some small jingling bells, while Cassander groans, and Mako cackles delightedly, and Aria is smiling at them so, so widely.
- - -