“You wish me to cohabitate with you, learn about Tiralan arts and culture, and…do nothing more productive? At present, I am fairly useless, but I should master basic tasks quickly. I can assist with household management and make your life easier in countless ways. I am fully versed in—”

“Helix.” Qalu wished she could touch him to offer comfort, as his situation must feel quite precarious.

“Yes?”

“You are not my employee. I hope in time that we shall be friends, and I don’t require anything of those who are dear to me.”

“But I am not.”

“Not what?”

“Dear to you. We have not known one another long.”

While technically true, it didn’t account for the time she’d spent caring for him before he woke. It would put too much pressure on him if he knew, but the memory came, sharp and unbidden. That day, she had been walking with Aevi when the ship came down in a ball of fire, smashing into the hillside, close enough for her to see the smoke. She’d run straight toward the flames, fearful that there might be survivors in need of rescue.

She’d planned to notify Tiralan emergency services, but when she got in range, her scans revealed no organic life. As she was about to leave, her sensors pinged with a different alert. There was a sentient being in peril, just not the usual sort. She hadn’t crawled into the fire, but she had saved him and raced home, with Aevi complaining the whole way. First she’d carefully transferred his data and then safeguarded it with multiple backups. Afterward, she worked for weeks to ensure the prototype was ready to receive such a beautiful and complex code.

The day she activated his current neural matrix and started the stream, she had suffered such thrilling trepidation, agonies of excitement. Like a nurse, she tended him for a full span, monitoring his health. It was even longer until he came fully alert, offering more than baseline responses to stimuli. In truth, the day before he opened his eyes, she had feared abject failure, that her prototype wasn’t capable of housing such a beautiful mind.

“True enough,” she said. “But it doesn’t change my expectations. My only request is that you pretend to be fond of me when my mothers inevitably ask to meet you.”

“Fondness, what does that entail, precisely?”

Here was another question that she was ill-equipped to answer. She had never been natural at forming the connections that other Tiralan found so effortless. Her mothers all cherished one another, and their bonds had been tight and functional for long, stable cycles. They anticipated each other’s needs and always seemed to know when space was required. Such interactions felt alien to Qalu, akin to asking someone else to fill in pieces that didn’t seem to be missing in the first place.