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There are no games with SAM; she doesn’t embed secret meanings into simple phrases, expecting him to read her thoughts; she is committed to the truth even when it’s difficult to hear; she manages to perfect the line between coating sour circumstances in thick sugar and being uncomfortably blunt; she doesn’t expect him to share anything about his life that he isn’t ready to expose. SAM carries the most honesty out of any sapient Caleb has ever witnessed, the exact antithesis of his life before the academy—pure, untouched, open. She’s adorable, endearing, and endlessly lovable.
So when she appears in his quarters and asks him to help her have sex with Ocam, he can only shrug and agree.
“Because of organics’ typical secrecy about their sex lives, I… sort of expected you to be more hesitant, or—or maybe shocked,” SAM says, amusement beaming from her face. “You don’t think it’s… weird?”
Caleb gives her a slight smile. “No, why would I?” He leans forward on his side of the bed, his hands clasped in prayer over his knees. “You’re great, you deserve to have some fun.” A beat of a pause. “But Ocam? He’s… I guess... nice.”
She gives him an adorable, confused glance, and he remembers that she can detect any spike in pulse or body temperature, can sense every beat of his heart and follow his blood anywhere it flows. They really can’t hide anything from each other.
Caleb laughs, shakes his head. Nevermind. “I’m glad you have him. He never shuts the hell up about you, you know. He said your name in his sleep last night.”
A smile spreads over her expression. “Really?”
Caleb nods. He wonders if she can pinpoint the flutter in his chest at the memory, how the soft sound had made him grow hard beneath his blankets. A little bit of his heart crumbles off into dust.
“Okay,” he continues. SAM sits next to him on the left side of the bed, thrusts her main control center into the air. “Can you feel… general sensations?”
“I can, but my makers didn’t give me a sensitivity level that would allow for sexual pleasure,” she explains, and her lack of shame makes Caleb’s face melt warm, warm, hot. “I don’t know how to adjust or calibrate it.”
Caleb swirls around in her programming for a few seconds, but his hands still in the air, fingers hovering over the sensation controls. “If I do this, are you going to… you know?”
“Have an orgasm?” SAM asks. It’s blunt, blatant, endearing. “Hopefully, right?”
His eyes widen. “Uh…”
“As friends?” she offers. “Although, I have been noticing a gradual downward---”
“Okay!” Caleb interrupts. “Okay, get---get comfortable.” He watches her disappear and reappear on his bed in a reclined position, her hands folded over her chest and her legs slightly parted. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
Where an organic’s chest would fall and rise with each breath, SAM’s chest and stomach remain stationary, and Caleb begins to mourn the image that haunts his mind at night---SAM’s mouth half-open underneath him, heaving careful breaths and moans against his lips----no. He watches her rest on his mattress, waiting for his touch, and realizes that the reality of SAM is infinitely more beautiful than the vision. He always forgets her status as a photonic during the fantasies---he’s only been with organic lifeforms, and organic lifeforms breathe, organic lifeforms are warm, organic lifeforms pant and pant and pant. But SAM is not an organic lifeform---
She’s better. Holier.
“I’m ready,” she says, a deep inhale, but: “Wait, Caleb…”
“Yeah?”
“This will make me feel pleasure, and I can teach him, but he---I don’t know---what to do for him.” She looks over at Caleb, her brown eyes drilling need into him. “How do I… be good at sex? I mean, I’ve watched a lot of porn to study, but I get the sense that it isn’t really.. like that.”
And Caleb---
Caleb’s----
“Your heart rate is increasing significantly,” SAM notes.
Caleb’s body betrays him: he lets out a big puff of a laugh, tries to hide his arousal by twisting around. She’s still watching him with intent, waiting with enviable innocence for his answer. The utter trust inherent to the act occurs to Caleb’s mind, crashing into him like a derelict shuttle---she has given him her main control center, her entire essence beneath his fingertips, with the knowledge that he could do anything to her. She trusts that Caleb will keep her safe.
He has never been trusted before---
“Wait, how much porn, exactly?” he asks, stopping himself from prying inward. “Don’t you process data instantly?”
SAM perks up. “I do! I watched all of it.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
Caleb’s eyes widen to a bulging. “You watched… every porn film ever produced?”
She nods.
“So, was it one planet’s archives, like, Earth’s, or…?”
“No, it was all of it.”
“How long did that take?”
“About 30 seconds.”
Caleb bites down on his lip, doesn’t mean to, a faint taste of copper pooling from the mark. He licks it away, gives her an incredulous grin. “I have never been more attracted to you than I am right now.” And then: “And if that’s the case, you have to have some idea. You know what I think? I think you just wanted to have sex with me.”
SAM looks away. She’s considering it. “I do want to have sex with you,” she admits. “I know you won’t judge me if I get something wrong, or… or say something silly. I mean, Ocam wouldn’t either, obviously. But for some reason, I’m less nervous with you.”
The implication is shattering---SAM feels safe with him. The entire universe has hardened itself into a bloodied picture frame, a WANTED hologram with Caleb’s image floating in the middle, a knife planted in Caleb’s hands at the scene. It paints him as tainted. A prison tattoo carved across the forehead that reads BAD KID. It portrays him as something he is not, something he tries to convince himself he never has been. SAM does not see Caleb as a criminal or fugitive or a danger lurking the streets just waiting to lash its claws out; she sees Caleb Mir as Caleb Mir, at face value, as himself. And the person that Caleb is to SAM is safe.
He wants to warn her. He wants to scream in agony, wants to slash his flesh up. He wants to tell her to run, that she is stupid for trusting him and he is the big bad wolf of the story, but that becomes harder to believe as she looks back at him and he sees an entirely different person reflected in her eyes. Someone good. Someone worthy of trust.
He only gives an embarrassed smile, and asks her if she’s ready.
After another nod and a few more seconds of exploring her unnecessarily complicated UI: “I found the settings I need to adjust,” he says. “Now, I can’t seem to concentrate the sensitivity onto a specific part of you, like how we---like how organics have sex. Sorry, limitations of not having a physical body, I guess.”
“Oh…”
Caleb holds a hand in the air. With a swipe of his hand, the user interface pulls up a screen that looks more like a handheld console minigame than a photonic’s primary systems; it has two large buttons, each equally sized, both gradually shifting in hue. “But here’s what I can do. Interacting with these buttons in different ways will simulate different sensations depending on how you touch them. The intensity of the color shows you how close you are.” She smooths her uniform down. “Want me to show you?”
“Please,” SAM says. It’s a half-whisper, a soft plead that makes everything inside of Caleb rustle. A thunderstorm of desire crackles throughout his body.
“Starting slow,” he says, placing his index and middle fingers in front of the top button. He sighs in preparation, praying to long-dead divinity that he does well. He’s had sex before, but only with organics---always in exchange for money, for food, for anything besides care and love. Pleasuring a photonic being will be new territory, and pleasuring someone who genuinely wants him…
“Let me know how it feels,” Caleb continues. His fingers touch down with slight contact, the tips just barely resting against the projection, and even that is enough to make SAM give a sharp gasp. Her fists begin to clench, her legs giving faint trembles. “Good?” he asks.
“Really----really good,” SAM manages. “I didn’t know it would feel so… can you keep going?”
His lips slither into a smile. He presses further down---still gentle, always gentle---and begins giving SAM’s interface small strokes, up and down first, then circular; at the first circling, SAM makes a noise that sounds like a yelp flooding into a moan, the sound like a choir and harp, the sound like the birdsong of heaven.
As he watches her writhe, he feels his own mind begin to haze over, the image of SAM unwinding for him earthquaking his body up. It would be enough to get him there untouched, if history had not forced him to learn how to prolong this. When she says his name, her voice is shaky and drenched in passion, blasted into distant space---it almost sounds breathy. Caleb. Caleb. Caleb, please.
“I’ll make you feel good,” he whispers to her, increasing the pace of his strokes, slow-quick-slow. “I’ve got you, SAM.”
The interface begins to vibrate, a light rosy color spreading across the top button. They’re into it now—her hands are entangled in Caleb’s blankets, clinging to the fabric as he sends waves and waves of sensation throughout her “body”. She tenses up, the soft pink becomes magenta, and Caleb puts his ring finger against the second button, pressing gentle into its center.
SAM gives a loud groan as he works his hand faster, faster. She has to be audible outside of the room---everyone in the vicinity will know what happened when this is over, and the thought of that, inexplicably, does not scare him. There are worse reputations to have than the guy who successfully figured out how to give an orgasm to a hologram.
He places his left hand on the bed, and she takes it, her grip shatter-strong and tight around his. He gives slow, rhythmic taps against the second button, making sure to curl his fingers inward just so with each slide. She’s so beautiful like this---she’s always beautiful, always so admirable, but this is something entirely unprecedented.
The interface slams dark red. “Caleb,” she shrieks. “Caleb, I think I’m---”
Her appearance begins to glitch up, her hair color switching fast from purple to green to silver and back again, the image of SAM distorting and warping as she trembles next to him. He realizes now that he affects her in so many ways---he’d called her strictly a friend, but sexy, and she lit up with a flustered glow---she’d slapped his ass with her lowered inhibitions, which means she’s always wanted to--
She disappears.
“SAM?”
Fuck---what has he done? Did he hurt her? Did he kill her? Did he mess up her settings beyond repair? Can she be deleted? Thoughts begin to muddle up inside of him like paint water, his heart rapid in his chest, until she appears on the bed again.
“S---sorry,” she says. “Probably scared you. I think I… refreshed? Or---you’d call it rebooted, I guess. I’m fine.” Now she begins to giggle, her laughter filling the room. “More than fine. That was…”
“That was…?”
“I can’t find a word for it in my database,” she finishes, and his heart soars up into the skies.
“Best compliment I’ve ever received,” Caleb grins.