Page 14 of Leviathan

"If I wanted to abandon stealth and shorten our journey, I am equipped well enough to fight off even the most advanced singular battleship in the Taygetan navy, but evasive maneuvers would risk damage to the birds and larger plants in my gardens," I said. "I have methods for securing them, but there is always a risk that I don't catch them fast enough or one gets free from the webbing. I would rather be more cautious and avoid a fight."

"So you're telling me that the reason that I have to spend months on board is that you don't want to risk harming your birds?" she asked.

"Yes," I replied.

Now was the moment that she reminded me why I didn't take passengers. They were entitled and demanding, expecting me to be a servant who catered to their whims, and though I did love taking care of other creatures, there was a difference between caring for someone who appreciated it and caring for someone who demanded you harm yourself for their benefit.

Maria lifted her face and smiled upwards. "I think that is a wonderful choice to make. I respect that."

Her words made me feel something strange, like a warmth in my chest that spread outwards through my filaments.

I turned my garden drone around to send it back to its holding spot and focused on the garden, unsure what to do with those feelings.

"What are those divots on the back of the drone?"

I stopped the drone in place and extended my mobile neurofilaments out from the back.

"These are me," I said. "A part of me, anyway. I call them neural filaments, though they have greater functionality than the title fully suggests."

She leaned in closer to look at them.

"What is that spot?" she asked.

I zoomed in with my optics to see what she was talking about, but I couldn't see anything. My neurofilaments looked like they always did to me, with a pearlescent, pleasant glow.

"I'm not sure what you are talking about," I said.

"Right here," she reached out, touching a single bare finger to one of my filaments.

Sensation.

It overwhelmed me.

For a moment, all I could experience was her.

Her skin was soft, delicate, slightly salty with the flavor of the flowers I had put in the lotion I had made for her. I could feel the pulse of her heartbeat, as loud in my mind as a drumbeat, inescapable as the utter shock of something completely and utterly new. It was good. But describing the feeling of her finger, lightly touching against me, as something good, was inadequate.

Her touch was like basking in the sunlight of a star, soaking in the energy and heat through my solar thermal collectors.

It was life, creation, the promise of a future.

It was pleasure.

Then it was gone.

"I shoudn't have touched you without asking," she said as she withdrew her hand, an apology and a question in her tone.

How long had I been stunned into silence?

My mind tumbled through what to say as words fled from it like birds startled from a branch.

"You can touch me as much as you like," I said, a rasp in my voice as I struggled to process what had just happened. "I don't mind."

I did mind very much.

I minded that she stopped.

I hadn't let her touch me until this moment, keeping a barrier of metal and material between us. I never let anyone outside of my immediate family touch me. I didn't realize how much I had been missing. I enjoyed petting my birds when they landed on my neurofilaments and allowed me to stroke them, but those soft, feathery sensations were nothing like the utter barrage of sensation that was the feeling of her skin.