Digital Galaxies

“You know, I’m actually amazed at how good you are with your hands,” Cerri commented as I flopped down onto the only sofa we’d put together so far.

My head almost immediately popped up and I gave her an amused look. “You what now?”

I could actually see the gears turning in her head as she tried to compute why I was looking at her like that. Then she went red and laughed. “No, I mean… you built the coffee machine, then the sofa, then you hooked up the oven. Didn’t you say you used to be in finance before all of this?”

“Yes…?” I said, confused. What did that have to do with it?

“So you learned all of this stuff while we were playing? You had no background knowledge?” she asked, settling down next to me.

Reaching out, she pulled me into her lap with an absentmindedness that had me smiling. She’d been doing that the whole morning, dragging me into an embrace like it was something she didn’t even need to think about. I really liked it. Was that weird? That I liked being moved around by her like I was some inanimate object for her to cuddle?

Replying to her question, I said, “Yeah, no background knowledge. I just pointed my adhd hyperfocus at the task and pulled the ripcord. According to the net, it’s pretty common for people with adhd to get really interested in something and then focus on it to the detriment of literally everything else in their life.”

“Sounds like a superpower, if you have the right support network around you,” she said, exploring my face with her gaze as she thought.

“The right support network, like a loving, amazing girlfriend?” I asked, heart bouncing with joy.

She blushed and gave me a coy little smile. “Yeah, something like that.”

“I love you.” I had waited way too long to be able to say those words to her, I couldn’t not tell her at every opportunity. "I love you so much that it feels like I'm going to explode if I don't run around in circles for an hour to burn off the energy."

I perked up mid ramble and fixed her with an excited grin. "Oh, what do you think generates more power? An aether reactor or a really happy fox girl?"

She burst out in laughter and pressed a long, toe curling kiss to my lips. When we parted, she panted, "You are such an adorable dork. I love you too."

Euphoric bliss bubbled up out of me in a rush, for the millionth time this morning, and I leapt up and ran around in circles for a second or three. It was too much, I couldn't sit still when I felt like I was going to detonate into a cloud of confetti hearts.

Cerri watched me bounce around on the carpet of the lounge area for a few moments before she got up and captured me. We fell to the ground in a cascade of giggling, which was cut short when our lips collided. I don't think I'd ever get used to kissing her. The soft silk of lips, the taste of her, the care she took with me, but also the passion in each motion of her body against mine.

Laying on top of her in nothing but a hoodie proved to give her an awful lot of access, but she went for my back rather than anything further south. Her fingers traced delicate patterns across my skin as they followed the contours of my spine. She really liked my back, and I was discovering that I adored it when she touched me there.

A noise caused me to falter, but Cerri, with her normal ears, didn't hear it. I broke the kiss off and glanced up…

"Well," Gloria said, her eyebrows up near the ceiling. "This is… uh… you left the door open. Oh, and Alia isn't wearing pants."

It was Gloria too, in Exodus City, trailing a mortified, haggard looking Elissa. Gloria had brought her DG body with her, although it didn't have the space vampire parts to go with it.

"Meet the minor emergency," Elissa sighed, breaking the awkward silence with a gesture in Gloria's direction.

Carefully, Cerri began to move, propping me up and tugging my hoodie down to cover my bare ass. Her face was bright red with embarrassment, but she was also staring at Gloria with a worried expression.

"Sorry we barged in," Gloria mumbled, scrunching her eyes shut for a second. "We uh… brought food."

Ohhh, this was so awkward! I felt myself cringing up into a little ball, hoping that nobody would look at me.

Cerri was onto me though, her hand coming down to scratch behind one ear before she offered me a hand up. I took it, and immediately found myself in a backwards hug, Cerri's chin resting on the top of my head.

"What happened?" She asked, gesturing to Gloria. "Does this mean what I think it means?"

"Does that mean what I think it means?" Gloria snapped, giving my pantlessness a pointed look. Almost immediately after she was finished speaking, she cringed in on herself slightly and said, "Wow. I'm a bitch. Sorry, that was very rude… I'm hungover… twice."

"It… ah, yes," Elissa said, still staring at Cerri and I, but with a happy smile on her lips. "She means that in a literal sense. She got very drunk last night, and felt left out of the computer gang."

"So she digitized herself," Cerri finished, pinching the bridge of her nose in exasperation. "And now she's literally double drunk because the transfer took the intoxication with it, and the Exodus digitization techs figured the easiest way to fix the issue was to get her drunk again, thus, resetting the whole thing. Jesus, Gloria."

"I felt lonely," the pilot said in a small, vulnerable voice. "Is this sofa safe to sit on?"

“Why wouldn’t it be safe to sit on?” Cerri asked quizzically.

Gloria’s grumpy hungover expression vanished, replaced by a big grin and wiggling eyebrows as she glanced pointedly between Cerri and myself. “Girls, please.”

I looked over at my girlfriend with amusement tugging at my lips, but it faded when I saw her face. She was blushing and looked all… uncomfortable.

A dozen different reasons for that expression all flashed through my mind, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was about.

Grabbing her face with both hands, I gently guided her eyes to mine. "Cerri, I love you, and you don't need to be ashamed of your sexuality. It's amazing, to me. You're amazing. I love you, I love you, I love you."

I punctuated the last with three quick kisses to her lips, then gave her a shining grin. "You are welcome to ruin the couch, and me, later."

I watched her as her eyelids fluttered closed and she leaned into my embrace, inhaling deeply. She didn't speak, just held onto me with both hands.

"You two…" Gloria said, voice soft and reverent. "You fit together so well."

Cerri shifted to stare at her friend. "You think so?"

"Look at you both," was the reply, as though the answer was obvious. "She knew what was wrong in less than a moment and said the right thing. I feel like we should call our little fox, the heart mechanic, or something."

A blush heated my cheeks, and I had to hide it by snuggling into Cerri’s neck. I loved the idea that I was healing her, fixing things inside that nobody could see. I wanted to be good for her, I wanted to make her happy. So Gloria saying that she thought we were good together, it filled me with joy.

Cerri didn’t seem to have anything to say in reply to Gloria’s comments, but Elissa did. “Gloria is right,” she murmured quietly. “I think you’re both very cute together. Makes me wish I had someone.”

“Who are you into?” I asked, leaning around my girlfriend to look at her as I asked. “Sexuality wise, I mean. I just kind of assumed you’d be gay, like us, but that doesn’t seem statistically accurate.”

“In a broader population, that would be the case,” Cerri interjected. “However there’s a good amount of data to suggest that in much the same way other cultures like to group together, queer people will find each other. So the chances of her being entirely straight are actually very slim.”

I flicked my eyes to Gloria and watched her closely as Elissa replied to my question. “I’m… not sure. Can I just be into everyone? Is that a thing? Jason is sort of attractive, I like his sense of humour, and he isn’t hard on the eyes either. There’s also… uh… women, that I’ve been attracted to. A few of my colleagues were non-binary, they were very cute as well.”

Extricating myself from Cerri’s grasp, I made for the storage room and said to her, “Tell us about it while I make a second sofa. We barely know anything about you.”

“O-oh, okay,” she said, hesitating all shyly. It was so endearing coming from a girl who was so mind-blowingly attractive. “Well, um… oh! There was this really cute enby that used to work for Digital Galaxies. They were very fun. Presented a little on the femine side actually. Uh… but yeah, we fooled around for a while. They made me realise I wasn’t really bothered by gender and stuff. Everyone has qualities that I like.”

Cerri followed me in order to help with the sofa while we listened to Elissa continue to ramble about herself. She told us about how she was more or less thirty years old now, subjective time. Her job required that she spend a ton of time at higher speeds in order to keep all of her puppets moving in realtime.

“What age did you instate your EAM?” Cerri asked curiously as we were putting the final parts of the sofa together.

“Oh, I actually haven’t, yet,” the other SAI blushed. “I’m just… slow to develop, I guess.”

“What’s an EAM?” Gloria asked, putting voice to the question that had been on my lips as well.

“Emotional Aging Manager,” Cerri stated, plopping herself down onto the sofa, snagging me on the way down. I flopped down at her side, immediately curling my feet up under myself as I snuggled in against her side. “It drastically slows the emotional aging of SAI and DH. A few of the earliest SAI ran into a problem where they were rapidly out-pacing their terrestrially bound friends in that department. A week of objective time could go by and a busy SAI might experience a year of subjective time.”

“Plus, we’re all immortal, and I don’t know about you, but I’d like to stay young, fun, and stupid for a little while longer,” Elissa said with a broad smile. “Well, the first two anyway. I think I’m stuck with the stupid part.”

"Disagree," Gloria said quietly, reaching out to poke her with a foot. They were on the other sofa together, although not cuddling up close like we were.

Elissa rolled her eyes. "I knew you'd say that."

Silence descended as the two women stared at each other, unspoken conversation passing between them.

Using their silence as a distraction, I tilted my head up to place a kiss to Cerri's jawline. I felt a shiver run through her body, and one of her hands landed in my hair, where she began to scratch behind my ear.

Our eyes met, but she didn't lean into a kiss like I desperately wanted. Instead, she just kept playing with my ear, stroking up and down its furry length. The moment stretched out, calm and soft, as we just gazed into each other's eyes. Wonder and affection bloomed in my heart as I watched her. Each subtle movement of the eyes, the gentle brush of her warm breath over my cheeks, the smile that danced on her soft lips. It was a quiet orchestra of personality that I had fallen in love with.

Reality set in, right there and then. She was my lover. Cerridwen, the goofy, horny, intelligent SAI, she was mine, and I was hers.

"I love you," I whispered reverent lyrics. "I love you so much. It's like I'm… it feels like I'm a fusion reactor that's teetering on the brink of containment failure. So much warmth and light and energy, all bottled up in a space that feels too small to hold it."

“You like doing that,” she smiled, kissing me with those gorgeous lips of hers. “Coming up with big, elaborate descriptions of your love for me. It’s… nice. I really like it.”

“It’s because I always feel like I’m going to explode, when you look at me like that,” I mumbled bashfully. “I need to let it all out somehow.”

“And little miss silent, of all people, chooses words to let it out,” she asked, amusement creasing the corners of her eyes.

I let out a surprised, quiet giggle. “Yeah. Bit weird, I know… but whatever.”

Our smiles grew as we shared our amusement over my weirdness, and I wished that we were alone so I could just start making out with her. Sadly, a cleared throat reminded me that we weren’t alone.

“So… when did this happen, anyway?” Gloria asked, gesturing between us.