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gullwingdoors(Based off the writing prompt "Girls who are cheap" (Eternal Sapphtember #17).)
She only ever asks for a fresh box of computer paper every two months. Nothing else - no treating her to a restaurant in the city, no fancy new equipment, no upgrades.
I didn't even fully know why - it's not like she does anything much that uses it, considering she works in local telecom line maintenance and I bake bread and pastries and neither of us use the print output on our big old home computer much, but every two months, without fail, she rolls over in our bed when I wake up and asks me "honey, while you're out on delivery, could you pick me up a new box of computer paper?", and I used to ask why, but she just said it would be really nice, and eventually I just went along with it. She never asks for anything else - and even when I offer to get her another gift, she simply shakes her head and says she has everything she could ever want.
"Except more computer paper?," I reply every time.
"Not yet," she always nods, "but maybe soon."
There I was, though, the day I found out, riding back in the Supercompact with the latest box of computer paper from Ditke's place -- you remember Ditke? Short little guy, old as hell, scavenged back in the Great Metals Recovery? -- anyway, latest stock of paper from his supply, says he just got it on the day train from all the way out to the river, and I took the day off, so I got it and came back early. I wanted to wait to give her a kiss on the cheek when she came back and dropped back outta her work-body and into her normal limbs, but it was cold as hell in the garage, so I settled for just giving her loose left arm a gentle kiss on the artificial-flesh backplate of her hand (it was getting flaky - should probably drag out the shedding bin for her soon, I think to myself) before setting the box down and going in, where it was a lot warmer.
I think I considered poking into that old empty room off the hall I never got around to prepping for any guests staying over, just out of boredom while I was waiting for her, but I just kinda shrugged to myself instead and I moved back to the living room and I flicked on the radio.
"- and we'll have more news for you on the hour, but for now, chill out with the receding tide as another pleasant autumn afternoon wanes." Then, it played some old gentle-impression, you know the stuff, real late-last-century stuff - and the lady's voice singing something schmaltzy and sentimental about her love for the knight that strayed so far from home, and I kind of start wondering what my knight's doing, out so far from home.
Maybe she's working out on a distant job, I think, maybe a day-train trip away... wouldn't it be so romantic for her to come back from Poseidon's Shadow, a little battered from all the little vicious bits of rogue psych-metal trying to harvest the wires for food and structure, and trying to get into the switchboxes, and I gently stroke the tight fabric-covered panel shaping her shoulderblade, near the socket where her shoulders slot into, and my fingers would find a thick gash across the covering and denting deep into the textured metal beneath, and I would go 'oh, Ellie, they left a scar for you, shall I sew it closed?', and she might even respond 'honey, please, I know you would love me just the same, and they did not touch anything vital, but I protected our line out to the sea', and then we would - but the idle daydreaming stops as soon as she walks in the door, visibly no worse for wear than usual.
"Oh, hey, hon," I wave, "how'd it go?"
She shrugs vaguely, sigh at the end rippling the exhaust-covers down the sides of her throat. "No worse than usual, I guess," she admits, gently sitting next to me on the couch and leaning heavily against me, the chill of her ear-recievers and the shoulderplate contrasting with the heat gently emitting out from the panel-seams. "Just a job over in Pineswallow, bird got a little overeager with some power lines."
"Pineswallow again, huh...?" As I lean my head back onto the top of hers, I just let the gentle ticks and whirs and the internal thrum of her magic processing soothe my heart the same way it always does. "Always them, huh, babe...? Lotta troubles, hm~?"
She giggles softly. I hear the entire voice synthesis process occuring in there to do it - it's so quick, but we've done this same routine so much I've slowly learned to pick out the tiny differences in each step going on within her- ah, I think I kind of wandered off the main story. Where was I?
Oh, right, the paper. Anyway, I was having the kind of night where you just kind of aspire to be asleep, but I'm convincing enough that I fool Ellie for a few hours, and in the middle of trying to will a dream behind my eyelids I feel her turn around in bed, sigh dreamily, then roll off onto the floor and walk out of the room. Maybe she's just going to the bathroom, I think wearily to myself.
Wait, I then continue to think, no, she only ever runs the bath in there, and that's definitely not running right now, and so I roll off the bed myself and shuffle my way out into the hall, guided only by the night-lights and a noise coming from the empty room I never got around to preparing for guests, and the door's ajar so I peek in. She's sunken down on her knees, slumped over, cable run into her spine, plugged into one of those automated computer-paper scanners, and it's feeding a fresh stack of computer paper into an otherwise-fresh computer paper box, labeled with this and next month, and the current year. I quietly crane my head around the room, looking at box after box after box labeled with months and years - this year, the year before, the year before that, even the year before that - though the ones here only seem to start the month we met.
And some of them have little heart stickers, I think. It's hard to make out in the dark.
So I quietly wait for her to finish her current stack - or I would, if it wasn't finished in seconds and she was already quietly creasing the end over a little slot in the box, clearly freshly made. She looks to me. "Hey... babe," she whispers out, tentatively.
Now, I don't know what's going on. "I don't know what's going on," I don't-know-what's-going-on at her. "Is this, like... I don't know, some kind of hobby...?" She shakes her head, negatively. "This is my memories," she then replies, "like... the way I remember things."
The look of bleary half-awake confusion clearly didn't help, you know, so she sighs. "A few years after I was built, the engineer that brought me to life... she informed me of a serious issue with my dream cycle, which was that after my bank of early core-memories filled out I'd only be able to safely retain the last week of information, at best, every time I sleep. Past that, the memory-space just... degrades into nothing."
... I don't know what to say. Luckily, she was the one busy saying, so she does. "And we'd worked out a way to circumvent it until she could finally make a proper fix, so long as I had some kinda printer and some kinda scanner I'd be able to keep a physical record of what happened, and just run back through it once every week, you know? And then, once she did manage to figure out a fix, we'd be laughing."
"And... then?" It isn't much of anything to say, but I had to show I was interested - I didn't want to feel like I was failing her with silence. The sleepy brain can't think of much, you know?
"Seventy years of nothing I cared enough to remember happens. You remember where you found me, how you found me, the way I was?"
My look probably says it all. How could I forget?
"That's the first thing I remember - not much, really, just the impression of what the moment looked and felt like, and the knowledge that you were the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. The second thing I remember was deciding to send all the memories I had backed up in that wretched place straight to recycling, because none of it was worth remembering after that."
"... That's... sweet, I guess, but - seventy years? Gone like that...?" I shudder - her lifespan is ultimately kind of meaningless, but that's a hell of a long time to consider for me. It must've been a mountain of boxes.
She shrugs, straightening up a little from her kneeling slump. "It can't have been anything worth remembering if it left me like that and made me decide to throw it all out, you know...? Whoever I was, it didn't mean anything to me anymore."
"You... you could've let me know...? We could've probably... bought you some new components to replace the faulty ones. If I'd known, I would've saved some of the effort arranging the wedding for covering the material needs."
And she laughs a single laugh, somewhat hollowly. "You know I'm one of the second-gen bespoke ones. You'd have to drag me on one of the week-sleep trains all the way out to the far coast, and you'd have to find a magician willing enough to take a year supply of bread in exchange for listening to the entire record of my creation to try and reverse what went wrong. Paper's cheaper."
This... well, she has a point, but - "I'd do it for you, you know. Besides, what happens when you run out of room in here?"
"I move into the other room."
"What happens when you run out of house?"
"I don't know, maybe I'll start forgetting."
"Isn't that - it would probably be way easier just to get it fixed, Ellie...!"
"No, no -" she shakes her head - "I'd never. Genuinely. I prefer it this way."
This one absolutely stumped me. I'd been slowly approaching the whole time, but at this point I kneeled down next to her, myself. "Why?"
"I scratched a bit of emergency instructions into the last chunk of permanent memory safe from the degradation - roll to my left, pay attention, roll to my right, down the hall, door on the left, start processing. It's the only thing I remember at the start of every week, and I wouldn't trade it for the world."
"And why's that?"
That's when she looks right at me and tells me maybe the greatest thing I think I've ever heard outta her: "The first thing I ever remember every week is rolling to my left, seeing you fast asleep, and thinking 'this is the most beautiful woman I think I have ever seen.' I don't think I'll ever need anything else, so long as I get to keep seeing you for the first time."
How am I supposed to not kiss her after she goes and says something like that?
She only ever asks for a fresh box of computer paper every two months. Nothing else - no treating her to a restaurant in the city, no fancy new equipment, no upgrades.
I didn't even fully know why - it's not like she does anything much that uses it, considering she works in local telecom line maintenance and I bake bread and pastries and neither of us use the print output on our big old home computer much, but every two months, without fail, she rolls over in our bed when I wake up and asks me "honey, while you're out on delivery, could you pick me up a new box of computer paper?", and I used to ask why, but she just said it would be really nice, and eventually I just went along with it. She never asks for anything else - and even when I offer to get her another gift, she simply shakes her head and says she has everything she could ever want.
"Except more computer paper?," I reply every time.
"Not yet," she always nods, "but maybe soon."
There I was, though, the day I found out, riding back in the Supercompact with the latest box of computer paper from Ditke's place -- you remember Ditke? Short little guy, old as hell, scavenged back in the Great Metals Recovery? -- anyway, latest stock of paper from his supply, says he just got it on the day train from all the way out to the river, and I took the day off, so I got it and came back early. I wanted to wait to give her a kiss on the cheek when she came back and dropped back outta her work-body and into her normal limbs, but it was cold as hell in the garage, so I settled for just giving her loose left arm a gentle kiss on the artificial-flesh backplate of her hand (it was getting flaky - should probably drag out the shedding bin for her soon, I think to myself) before setting the box down and going in, where it was a lot warmer.
I think I considered poking into that old empty room off the hall I never got around to prepping for any guests staying over, just out of boredom while I was waiting for her, but I just kinda shrugged to myself instead and I moved back to the living room and I flicked on the radio.
"- and we'll have more news for you on the hour, but for now, chill out with the receding tide as another pleasant autumn afternoon wanes." Then, it played some old gentle-impression, you know the stuff, real late-last-century stuff - and the lady's voice singing something schmaltzy and sentimental about her love for the knight that strayed so far from home, and I kind of start wondering what my knight's doing, out so far from home.
Maybe she's working out on a distant job, I think, maybe a day-train trip away... wouldn't it be so romantic for her to come back from Poseidon's Shadow, a little battered from all the little vicious bits of rogue psych-metal trying to harvest the wires for food and structure, and trying to get into the switchboxes, and I gently stroke the tight fabric-covered panel shaping her shoulderblade, near the socket where her shoulders slot into, and my fingers would find a thick gash across the covering and denting deep into the textured metal beneath, and I would go 'oh, Ellie, they left a scar for you, shall I sew it closed?', and she might even respond 'honey, please, I know you would love me just the same, and they did not touch anything vital, but I protected our line out to the sea', and then we would - but the idle daydreaming stops as soon as she walks in the door, visibly no worse for wear than usual.
"Oh, hey, hon," I wave, "how'd it go?"
She shrugs vaguely, sigh at the end rippling the exhaust-covers down the sides of her throat. "No worse than usual, I guess," she admits, gently sitting next to me on the couch and leaning heavily against me, the chill of her ear-recievers and the shoulderplate contrasting with the heat gently emitting out from the panel-seams. "Just a job over in Pineswallow, bird got a little overeager with some power lines."
"Pineswallow again, huh...?" As I lean my head back onto the top of hers, I just let the gentle ticks and whirs and the internal thrum of her magic processing soothe my heart the same way it always does. "Always them, huh, babe...? Lotta troubles, hm~?"
She giggles softly. I hear the entire voice synthesis process occuring in there to do it - it's so quick, but we've done this same routine so much I've slowly learned to pick out the tiny differences in each step going on within her- ah, I think I kind of wandered off the main story. Where was I?
Oh, right, the paper. Anyway, I was having the kind of night where you just kind of aspire to be asleep, but I'm convincing enough that I fool Ellie for a few hours, and in the middle of trying to will a dream behind my eyelids I feel her turn around in bed, sigh dreamily, then roll off onto the floor and walk out of the room. Maybe she's just going to the bathroom, I think wearily to myself.
Wait, I then continue to think, no, she only ever runs the bath in there, and that's definitely not running right now, and so I roll off the bed myself and shuffle my way out into the hall, guided only by the night-lights and a noise coming from the empty room I never got around to preparing for guests, and the door's ajar so I peek in. She's sunken down on her knees, slumped over, cable run into her spine, plugged into one of those automated computer-paper scanners, and it's feeding a fresh stack of computer paper into an otherwise-fresh computer paper box, labeled with this and next month, and the current year. I quietly crane my head around the room, looking at box after box after box labeled with months and years - this year, the year before, the year before that, even the year before that - though the ones here only seem to start the month we met.
And some of them have little heart stickers, I think. It's hard to make out in the dark.
So I quietly wait for her to finish her current stack - or I would, if it wasn't finished in seconds and she was already quietly creasing the end over a little slot in the box, clearly freshly made. She looks to me. "Hey... babe," she whispers out, tentatively.
Now, I don't know what's going on. "I don't know what's going on," I don't-know-what's-going-on at her. "Is this, like... I don't know, some kind of hobby...?" She shakes her head, negatively. "This is my memories," she then replies, "like... the way I remember things."
The look of bleary half-awake confusion clearly didn't help, you know, so she sighs. "A few years after I was built, the engineer that brought me to life... she informed me of a serious issue with my dream cycle, which was that after my bank of early core-memories filled out I'd only be able to safely retain the last week of information, at best, every time I sleep. Past that, the memory-space just... degrades into nothing."
... I don't know what to say. Luckily, she was the one busy saying, so she does. "And we'd worked out a way to circumvent it until she could finally make a proper fix, so long as I had some kinda printer and some kinda scanner I'd be able to keep a physical record of what happened, and just run back through it once every week, you know? And then, once she did manage to figure out a fix, we'd be laughing."
"And... then?" It isn't much of anything to say, but I had to show I was interested - I didn't want to feel like I was failing her with silence. The sleepy brain can't think of much, you know?
"Seventy years of nothing I cared enough to remember happens. You remember where you found me, how you found me, the way I was?"
My look probably says it all. How could I forget?
"That's the first thing I remember - not much, really, just the impression of what the moment looked and felt like, and the knowledge that you were the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. The second thing I remember was deciding to send all the memories I had backed up in that wretched place straight to recycling, because none of it was worth remembering after that."
"... That's... sweet, I guess, but - seventy years? Gone like that...?" I shudder - her lifespan is ultimately kind of meaningless, but that's a hell of a long time to consider for me. It must've been a mountain of boxes.
She shrugs, straightening up a little from her kneeling slump. "It can't have been anything worth remembering if it left me like that and made me decide to throw it all out, you know...? Whoever I was, it didn't mean anything to me anymore."
"You... you could've let me know...? We could've probably... bought you some new components to replace the faulty ones. If I'd known, I would've saved some of the effort arranging the wedding for covering the material needs."
And she laughs a single laugh, somewhat hollowly. "You know I'm one of the second-gen bespoke ones. You'd have to drag me on one of the week-sleep trains all the way out to the far coast, and you'd have to find a magician willing enough to take a year supply of bread in exchange for listening to the entire record of my creation to try and reverse what went wrong. Paper's cheaper."
This... well, she has a point, but - "I'd do it for you, you know. Besides, what happens when you run out of room in here?"
"I move into the other room."
"What happens when you run out of house?"
"I don't know, maybe I'll start forgetting."
"Isn't that - it would probably be way easier just to get it fixed, Ellie...!"
"No, no -" she shakes her head - "I'd never. Genuinely. I prefer it this way."
This one absolutely stumped me. I'd been slowly approaching the whole time, but at this point I kneeled down next to her, myself. "Why?"
"I scratched a bit of emergency instructions into the last chunk of permanent memory safe from the degradation - roll to my left, pay attention, roll to my right, down the hall, door on the left, start processing. It's the only thing I remember at the start of every week, and I wouldn't trade it for the world."
"And why's that?"
That's when she looks right at me and tells me maybe the greatest thing I think I've ever heard outta her: "The first thing I ever remember every week is rolling to my left, seeing you fast asleep, and thinking 'this is the most beautiful woman I think I have ever seen.' I don't think I'll ever need anything else, so long as I get to keep seeing you for the first time."
How am I supposed to not kiss her after she goes and says something like that?