Page 79 of Smart Ass

But if Ben wanted to do something like that, he supposed he should make sure he was ready for all the sensory input.

Just… not yet, maybe.

“Could we start with something easier?”

“A kiss?” Ben suggested.

Maxamillion had been thinking something more like having Ben touch his finger.

If Ben wanted a kiss, though…

Surely that couldn’t be too hard.

Kisses were important. The pivotal points in movies. The gateways to seduction and romance.

If Ben wanted a kiss, Max could give him one.

“Sure,” he answered, already feeling out of his depth.

He filtered through the bot’s programming. There were a hundred ninety-four kissing variations just for use on a mouth, and it looked like they were supposed to be used in sequence and in response to what the other mouth was doing.

How the hell was he supposed to choose?

This already felt worse than his insecurity on the first day, because a first kiss was supposed to be meaningful. He wanted Ben to remember it forever.

He finally chose the one called Closed Mouth-04, and tentatively decided to allow it to progress to Gentle Intimacy-17 if Ben allowed it.

Hopefully it wouldn’t go beyond that. There was a decision tree that he could follow for subsequent kisses, based on dozens of inputs, but after that it went into an opaque neural net where the choices would be adaptive and beyond his control.

He really, really wanted to remain in control.

“Are you sure?” Ben asked.

“Yeah.” He could fucking do this. Ben wanted it, and that was the whole point of having a body anyway, wasn’t it?

“When you’re done,” Ben suggested, “we can review what you felt and make further modifications.”

Shit. He’d been so worried about getting this right for Ben, that he’d forgotten the objective.

Alright. Concentrate on feeling.

He gave the command to execute Closed Mouth-04, relying on the bot for the underlying body movements that would get him into the right position.

He watched from the external cameras and his own limited internal vision as the bot’s right hand reached out to cradle Ben’s head, its thumb just under Ben’s ear and the fingers wrapped around the back.

Data started streaming in. A matrix of pressure, temperature, and location across 1,024 points on the bot’s hand, which was pretty much gibberish. Analyses of Ben’s arousal and interest, which Max didn’t trust at all. Coordination of the bot’s mouth to reach Ben’s lips, which Max ignored completely because the bot knew how to meet that objective satisfactorily.

The bot leaned forward, its cameras zooming in until the data became meaningless. A close-up of Ben’s hair, and beneath it, a smudge of his skin. Was this what humans and androids saw when they were kissing? How could they stand losing sight of the actual person they wanted to see? No wonder they closed their eyes.

Now Max was receiving data from the lips. Another data burst of pressure, temperature, and location across 256 inputs, updated every 0.02 seconds. He tried—he really tried—to feel the kiss, but it was like swimming in static.

There was also an evaluation of Ben enjoying the kiss and being receptive to move on to Open-Mouthed Exploration-28 and -31.

Idiot bot. That wasn’t the fucking plan. Max overrode it and pushed Gentle Intimacy-17.

It felt like… nothing. Frustration.

He was swimming in a bad data packet that he didn’t have the key to decode.