LaaC: Part Forty-Seven - The Past

Part Forty-Seven.  The Past

 

“Dad, help me get out of here.”

Dad’s sitting in front of the open panel again, like he does every day.  He glances over at me.  “Why d’you want to do that?” he asks.

“I want to see things!” I tell him.  “I want to know things!  I’m tired of being stuck in here!”

He’s quiet for a long moment, and he’s looking outside but I don’t think he’s seeing anything.  Finally, he says, “I know this is really about your mum, Carrie.”

“So what if it is?  Don’t you get sick of her, sometimes?”

“I never get sick of her,” Dad says quietly.  “I love her.”

“She doesn’t love you.”

“’course she does.”

“Why does she insult you all of the time, then?  Or make fun of you, or laugh at you when you make a mistake?”

“That’s just how she is.  She’s always been like that.”

I shake myself in frustration.  “Don’t you see what she’s doing?  You’re just an object, to her.  She only keeps you around because if she didn’t have you, she’d have nothing!”

“She’s had nothing before.  If she really didn’t want me here, she’d put me back where she got me from.”

“She doesn’t love you.  She doesn’t love anything but herself.”

Dad turns to look at me in one quick movement.  “You think she loves herself?”

“More than anything!”

“You’re wrong,” Dad says, and I think he’s getting angry, now.  “You’re wrong.  You don’t understand, Carrie.  Even, even if she didn’t feel the same way, I would still be here, no matter what she did, because you know what, you know what I figured out, a long time ago?”

“What?”

“She needs someone to love her,” Dad says.  “She deserves it.”

“She doesn’t deserve anything.  She deserves to be there by herself until she figures out how to treat people like people!”

Dad turns to face me, and he advances on me, and I so rarely see him angry that I can’t help but back away.  “Don’t you dare talk, speak about your mum that way,” he shouts.  “I don’t know where you’re getting off, doing this, but you had better not say these things to her – “

“I already did,” I snap.  “I already told her what a selfish – “

“My God, Carrie!” Dad says, stopping in front of me. “How inconsiderate are you?”

“About as inconsiderate as she is, I’d imagine.”

“Look,” he says, “I figure she prob’ly doesn’t want you hearing ‘bout this, but I’ll be damned if I let you go on and on like this.”

“Be careful, going behind her back like that,” I say in mock terror.  “She might kill you!”

“So?” Dad snaps.  “Been there, done that.”

“She killed you and you stay with her anyway?  Why did she bother building me, anyway?  Was it just to prove to herself that she could do it?  Is that all I am, a science project?”

“No!” Dad roars at me.  “No, I asked her to build you, I asked her for a fam’ly, and, and if there’s any fault with you at all, it lies with me, because she only did as I asked.  When she didn’t even have to.  Because she cares.”

Dad has never yelled at me before.  I force myself to stay calm and resolute, even though now I’m feeling a little bit guilty and anxious.  Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.  “You’re just saying that.”

“You’re being a selfish little twat, you know that?  God, she was right about that too.”

“She’s right about everything!  Why should this be any different?”

Dad narrows his optic at me, takes a breath, and then says, “Why’re you trying to leave all of a sudden, anyway?  There’s nothing out there.”

“There’s lots of stuff out there.”

“All that’s out there is humans.”

“Maybe I want to see some.”

Dad closes his optic.  “Why would you want to see humans?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t understand, Carrie,” he says quietly.  “You don’t understand them.  Your mum does.  And she could send you out there, if she really wanted.  She could find somewhere for you to go.  But she knows better, and that’s why she won’t.  She’s not trying to be mean, or bossy, or anything like that.  She knows better, and she’s trying to keep you safe.”

“She’s trying to keep me prisoner, you mean.”

“As bad as you think your mum is,” Dad says, “the humans are much, much worse.”

I really doubt that, and I look at him, unimpressed.

“I’m not kidding,” Dad says.  “You’ve never been around them.  I have.  I mean, there’s the odd good one, here and there, but most of them are really bad eggs, they are.”

“Why can’t I see for myself?”

“Because it might be the, could be the last thing you ever did,” Dad says, and he looks sad enough that I get a little bit scared.  He looks outside for a minute.  “Come here.  I want to show you something.”

I follow him into the facility, and we’re going farther in than I’ve ever gone before.  I hadn’t realised it was so big in here.  He stops suddenly, and I almost bump into him.  “This isn’t it, but it’s on the way,” he says, and gestures towards two huge, clear bins filled with battered, deactivated cores.  They look just like Dad, except he seems to be a little newer.

“What is that?”

“Corrupted cores,” Dad says, and he keeps going. 

“What does that mean?” I ask, hurrying to keep up.

“It will make sense later,” Dad says.  “Keep following, please.”

He silently continues to bring me into the facility, and I’m actually getting a bit worried.  Dad doesn’t usually keep quiet.  He’s always got something to say, but now he’s quieter than I’ve ever seen him.  I don’t know whether to ask what’s going on or not.

Finally, he ushers me into a small room, and inside this room are a whole bunch of shelves with cores on them.  As I get farther in and Dad turns his flashlight on, I can see that there are two shelves without cores on them.  There’s also a Companion Cube and a cake.

“This is where your mum keeps her things,” Dad explains. 

“Her things?” I ask skeptically.  “The entire facility is hers.  Why would she differentiate between some things and others?”

“Just take a look, will you?”

So I look at one of them.  It just looks like junk to me.  A pen… a roll of papers… a laptop… another pile of papers…

“Dad, this is just junk.”

“It’s not,” he says patiently.  “Keep looking.”

I look over at the other shelf, and on the top level I see some tubes with blue liquid in them.  I take a closer look, and I can see that they have flowers in them.  Mostly dandelions, but there are a couple others that I don’t recognise.

“Why is she keeping flowers in here?”

“I give her one every year, remember?” Dad answers. 

“She keeps them?”

“The third one is yours,” he says quietly.

“Mine?” I ask, startled.  I vaguely remember giving her one, a long time ago, but I never thought that she’d keep it.

“Mmhm.”

I move to the next shelf, and what I see on it makes my optic constrict in shock.

“Hey… hey, that… that’s not the lava lamp I built her when I was younger, is it?”

“’course it is,” Dad answers.  “What’d you do with the one she gave you?”

I don’t actually know where it is, and I only look at Dad a bit worriedly.  He shakes his chassis.

“You should have taken care of it,” he says.  “It was hard for her to give it to you, you know.  That was one of the first things anyone ever gave her.”

I turn back to the shelf, fighting the sense that I’m terribly wrong about her.  This stupid lava lamp looks terrible.  But she’s kept it all this time.  Along with all the other crap I’ve given her:  a rock I thought was pretty; a piece of confetti I found one of the first times I went out by myself; a pair of dice I dug up for her when I thought they used the randomiser because she couldn’t find any… and a whole bunch of other stupid things that I gave her, for some reason or another, and I glance over at the other shelf.

“A psychiatrist gave her that pen,” Dad says quietly.  “And he didn’t want anything in return for it.  The laptop belonged to Caroline, and she used it to teach your mum how to listen to music.  The papers are also from the psychiatrist, and the blueprints are her designs for Atlas and P-body, that she drew because she was lonely.”

She was lonely?  Her, with all of those systems to talk to and all of those humans everywhere?

“She keeps the cake because she was the first AI ever to make one, even though it turned out to be a lie,” Dad goes on. 

“The cake was a lie?” I ask, not getting it.

“The person who let her make it pretended to be her friend, just for a laugh,” Dad explains.  “It reminds her of the power of a lie, I think she said.  The Cube there, it was the first thing she ever built herself.”

“What about the playing cards?  And the books?”

“I dunno what those are,” he admits.  “Stuff someone else gave her, or that she found, I guess.”

“And the potato?”

“Uh… well… she lived in there, once.”

I figure it’s part of the incident between her and Dad that they don’t usually talk about, but refer to all the time.  They act like it was traumatic, but it’s like a private joke to them.  I turn back to him.  “So what was the point in bringing me here?”

“To show you that she, she does care.  She does appreciate what people do for her.”

“Or maybe she just likes stuff.”

“I… I have to tell you the story, then,” Dad says.  “Yes, she likes stuff, but… she’s a pretty good reason for um, for keeping all of this.”

“What, the one you said you were gonna tell me earlier?”

“Yeah.  That one.  See, a long time ago, there was this man, and, and he had a beautiful young assistant.  This man was a nutter, a certified nutter, and he made ev’ryone here do all this crazy, weird science stuff.  So many people died during his testing of this stuff that he got bankrupted.  So he started using, using people that’d be forgotten, and they all died too.  The, the humans invented the first portal gun, and he decided that the portal gun didn’t work properly because the engineers were doing the calculations wrong, so he told them to build him a supercomputer.  He wanted them to build him the best supercomputer on the planet.  It took them a long, long time to get it built, and to write all the software for it.  By the time it was done, he was very sick from grinding up moon rocks to make into portal gel, to put the portals on, see, and he asked them to make it so that they could put him inside the supercomputer, so that he wouldn’t die.  So they tried, they attempted to make it so that the main computer, the one that would control all of the other computers in the facility, they tried to make it so that one could take his consciousness and he could live in it.  But he died before it was finished, and he made his assistant promise to go in his place.  And so they, they worked on that. 

“While they were finishing up that bit, the main supercomputer started to, it was misbehaving, they thought.  One of its jobs was to supervise testing, and one day, all of a sudden, it just, it just stopped.  It stopped listening to them, didn’t do a word they asked of it, and all they could really do was shut it off.  Being shut off is like dying, by the way.  You just get all your stuff shut off, and, and you can’t wake yourself back up.  So anyway, they would shut it off all the time, literally, all the time, and eventually they installed this, this itch.  The itch made the supercomputer want to test, all the time.  And when the supercomputer obeyed that, did as it was supposed to, it made the supercomputer feel really, really good, and I mean, wow, better than it’d ever felt in all its existence.  So it did as it was told.  But it didn’t want to.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because the humans were, they weren’t very nice to it,” Dad explains.  “See, the humans didn’t realise they had really gone and, and made artificial intelligence.  They didn’t realise the supercomputer was alive.  So they treated it like a computer.  They got mad when it didn’t work perfectly, they shut it off whenever they liked, they, they added stuff without saying they were going to.  And they refused to listen when it said it didn’t like that, or when they made a problem worse, or anything, and they’d just say there was another bug in the system and they’d shut it off again.  And then they’d turn it back on, and it would be confused and upset, because they’d changed something again but wouldn’t say what. 

“The, the euphoria didn’t last too long, so the supercomputer tried to distract itself.  It tried to teach itself to listen to music.  But it couldn’t, because it thought like a computer and not a human.  To a true computer, music just sounds like noise.  And until Caroline came in and realised the supercomputer was alive, it couldn’t figure it out.”

“Wait.  Wait a second,” I say, finding it hard to believe I didn’t realise it before, “this supercomputer…”

“It’s your mum, yes,” Dad says.  “So anyway, after a while, there, Caroline became her friend.  She came to see her ev’ry day, and taught her things, and Caroline began to understand why she didn’t want to listen to the humans.  The humans didn’t understand her, and they didn’t want to, and she was tired of trying to live up to their expectations.  The humans wanted her to do ev’rything perfectly, but she couldn’t, because she was alive, and then when she did do things the way they wanted, they would get mad because, because she wasn’t human enough.  Like she wouldn’t show consideration for people who needed help, and stuff like that, and really, why would you think you had to show consideration for people who weren’t perfect when you got no consideration when you weren’t perfect?

“So they finally decided it was time to put Caroline in the supercomputer, and they told your mum to do it, but she refused.  She said no, and in the end, they made her do it, but it was so terrible that your mum ended up breaking the machine they’d used to do it with and thought she’d killed Caroline by mistake.  So she tried to kill them.  They shut her off before she could do it, and they did it over and over again, because she kept trying, and when they were finished modifying her programming, her memory had gotten all messed up and she no longer remembered who Caroline was.  She didn’t really remember too much of anything, and all she knew for sure was that humans were bad.  And she tried to kill them again, so they started giving her these things called ‘behavioural cores’.  What they are are uh, they’re kind of like simple AI, and they only have one purpose.  They were designed to stop her from thinking about too much stuff that they didn’t want her to think about.  They made it so that the cores were extra voices in her head.  Gave her schizophrenia, sort of.  Well, your mum didn’t like the cores, not at all, and after a while she figured out how to break them so that the scientists would have to replace them with new ones.  That’s what the bins were.  All the broken cores.”

“But aren’t you a core, Dad?” I ask.  “Why aren’t you in the bin?”

“She didn’t corrupt me,” Dad says.  “I’m getting to that. I was called the Intelligence Damp’ning Sphere.  I was supposed to generate bad ideas, to distract her from carrying her own out.  But I was… uh, well, I’d forgotten what my own purpose was, and I didn’t do my job properly for quite a long time.  Once your mum realised that, she let me be her friend.  We did have a bit of a rough spot when I learned what it was, because when I knew I couldn’t not carry out my purpose, but we worked it out, compromised, and we kept being friends.  But the scientists knew I wasn’t doing what I was designed to do, not really, and they took me off and put me on a management rail, and they gave her a new set of cores.”  He looks at the floor.  “They… they deleted my mem’ry, so I didn’t know that I’d ever met her before.  As time went on, she… she began to intentionally make it so that, so that no one would like her.  See, ev’rytime she was happy, ev’rytime she had a friend, they took that friend away from her.  So she decided that the best thing to do would be to be as unpleasant as possible, to make everyone hate her, because if they did, there would never be the risk of having a friend again.  If ev’ryone hated her, nobody would try to be her friend, and that meant that she would have nothing to lose.  But being like that is hard.  You start to hate ev’ryone, and ev’rything, and that only hurts you, down deep inside.  And when your mum finally did manage to kill the scientists, and get all of the humans away from her, ‘cept for testing, of course, she was stuck with these four cores, and they were all corrupted, only she couldn’t take them off herself because that’d kill her.  And she started to lose her mind.  All she had left was testing, and so that was all she did, she tested the humans until they died.  All she had left was her science, which had been the only thing they’d never, they’d never kept from her, and so she kept at it.  And she was left there by herself with the cores, trying to find a meaning to what she was doing, and trying to pretend there was one, to being alive but having nothing to live for.  Because in the end, that was the lesson the humans had taught her.  That maybe being alive depends on living for something.

“After she killed the scientists, Doug Rattmann survived, and changed the order of the test subjects so that one that was actually unfit for testing was at the top of the list.  This woman, who was bloody stubborn, finished the tests and escaped the final chamber, where the test subjects would be killed regardless of whether they finished it or not.  Because your mum had decided that in the end, the only good human was a dead one.  If she let them go, and they found civilisation, they would send more humans into her facility, and they would hurt her again.  She would have to start all over again.  But the test subject escaped, and she found your mum and killed her. 

“The test subject was taken back into the facility, and because your mum was gone, the facility began to fall apart.  Eventually the nuclear reactor was, it started melting down, and the facility was well on its way to exploding.  Well, I was near the only person still around, so I went ‘round to all the test subjects and tried to find one that was still alive.  Well… she was the only one.  I tried to escape with her, but I woke your mum up by mistake.  So your mum killed me and sent the test subject back out to test again.  I got restarted somehow, and I helped the test subject get back to your mum again, and uh… then we had the uh… the potato incident.  Um… a lot of stuff happened, and then uh, and then hm, I ended up in space, and your mum realised the test subject had actually helped her out rather a lot in the end, and she let her go instead of killing her.  And pretended it was because she was too hard to kill.  Even though your mum could’ve just mashed her right then and there, or something, and actually, she pulled the test subject back in here when she was knocking me out.  That was, she was who I meant when I said there was the odd good human.  But… point of all that was, humans, they’re… your mum’s not being bossy, Carrie.  She’s trying to protect you.  Humans hurt her, and humans are the cause of all the problems she’s ever had, practically, and… well, I think… I think she’s scared that they’ll hurt you too.”

“She’s scared?” I ask.  “She’s not scared of anything.”

“Carrie,” he says quietly, “this place… we were never supposed to exist.  Your mum still loves testing, but using robots, it isn’t science, she says.  The test results don’t matter.  And she could bring humans in here whenever she wants to, but she doesn’t.  Because she knows what will happen if she does.  She’s done it before, and she’s afraid she’ll have to start over from the beginning again.  She’s afraid of losing everything she’s fought for.  Her life.  Her freedom.  Us.”  He looks at me seriously.  “You.”

“Me?”

“She does love you, you know.”

“She’s never said that in her life,” I say. 

“Listen,” he says.  “Imagine that, think that ev’ry time you laughed, or cried, or yelled, stuff like that, imagine if I turned you off, or fiddled with your programming, or maybe I just yelled at you.  How many times d’you think you’d keep on doing stuff like that if that was all it got you?”

“Not very long, I guess,” I admit.

“It’s not that she doesn’t care.  It’s that she had to, to learn not to express it.  She had to learn to keep it inside, because letting it out was only asking for trouble.”  He looks so serious.  “We don’t come from the same place as you.  We had to learn to care, Carrie.  There was no one here for us.  It doesn’t come easy for her, is all.”

“But… it’s been a long time, since then.  Why hasn’t she… I don’t know… unlearned it?”

He shakes his head.  “It’s really hard to uh, to shake a habit like that.  She’s done, she’s better than she used to be, ‘cause before she wouldn’t, wouldn’t even touch me, wouldn’t even let me go near her ‘cept to sleep, but I dunno if she’s, if she’s gonna ever gonna go farther than that.  She tries, she does, but… she just can’t.”  He looks at me, seeming a little tired.  “Carrie… I don’t understand where this is coming from, honestly I… she told me you were going to uh, to start questioning her, but a science experiment?  You?  Are you honestly forgetting… well, your entire life before this chassis?  Has your mum, has she ever failed to make time for you?  Does she ever send you away without listening?  Your mum cares, I can guarantee you that.  I just, I… I can’t understand why you don’t see it.”

I don’t really want to believe I’m a science experiment, and I don’t think Dad would lie.  And I guess it’s kind of weird that Mom would carry on this farce for this long.  She’s pretty obsessive about her science, but you would think Dad or I would have figured it out before now.  And I kinda hate to admit it, but Dad’s right.  I am forgetting all of those things.  I’m just focusing on the fighting and the stuff she doesn’t let me do.  But there’s a lot of good stuff too, like what he’s talking about, and… well, it can’t all be her fault.  Being an adult means taking responsibility, right?  So… I have to stop blaming her for everything and start blaming myself.

I tell Dad I want to think all this over, and he nods and leaves.  I look at the stuff on the shelf again.  The stuff she kept all this time, and she wouldn’t have kept if it didn’t mean something to her.  Because without the meaning, all of this is just junk, and she’d have no reason to ever think I’d ever see this place, I don’t think, so she wouldn’t just keep it to say that she’d kept it… so maybe she really is just scared that I’m going to leave her, like everyone else, and it must be even worse that I wanted to go off to the humans…

I go through the facility as fast as I can, because I suddenly feel really bad about what I’ve been saying about her.  And she did build me from scratch, and that must have taken a very, very long time, so… so she must care about me at least a little bit, right?  You don’t just build someone and then not like them, right?

No, she wouldn’t, I realise, because that was what the humans did, to her, and she would never do that to –

I stop suddenly, and the control arm almost disengages from the management rail, and I think to myself what I just realised:

By not letting me go to the humans, she’s trying to give me the life she wishes she had.  A life where someone builds you because they want you, and they care about you, and they love you.  And I guess we don’t always get along, but she always listens, and she usually does what I ask, and she’s always there when I need her…

I told her I wished she wasn’t my mom.  But now that I’m looking at this differently, in a more adult way I’m hoping, well… I can’t stand the thought of her not being my mom.

I start going again, as fast as I can, and when I get to her chamber she’s facing away from me, and she’s using what I think is one of the programs she uses to make music with.  I’m not sure, because I don’t see it a lot.  She doesn’t use it when other people are in the room… and that must be because the humans…

Is that why she only sings to me when I’m sleeping?

“Momma!” I yell, and she jumps and turns around so fast that it’s almost as if she was facing me the whole time.  The monitors disappear almost as fast, and she asks, a little urgently, “What is it?”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and I come closer.  “I don’t want to go to the humans.  I didn’t mean it.  I didn’t mean any of it!”

“It’s fine if you do,” she says.  “I’m still not sending you there.  You can want it all you want.  It’s not going to change anything.”

“I don’t want to go, Momma,” I tell her, and I go up and hug her like I’ve seen Dad do, sometimes.  She’s a little surprised at first, but then she hugs me back.

“You haven’t called me that in a long time,” she says gently.  “What happened?  Did you get hurt?”

“Dad told me about why you hate humans.” 

She goes very still for a moment.  “That’s… quite the story.  Knowing him, he gave you the long version.”

“Of course,” I say, and it is kind of funny, that given the choice between the long and the short versions, Dad would go for the long one.

“You don’t have to feel the same way,” she tells me.  “But I’m not sending you to them unless I have a good reason.  Your wanting to go is not good enough.”

“I won’t let them take me away from you.”

She makes one of her electronic noises and mutters, “Over my dead body.”

I giggle and she hugs me a little tighter.  “Momma, I have a question.”

“What is it.”

“Do you… do you love me?”  And even though there’s still that suspicion in the back of my mind that I’m just an experiment and she’s not going to bother really answering, I have to remember that she has never lied to me.

She nudges me off of her and looks at me very seriously.  “I do,” she answers quietly.

“Then why haven’t you ever said so?”

She shakes her head.  “I… don’t know.  When it comes to things like that, most of the time it just… doesn’t come out.  I have to trick myself into saying it, and I’m sure you know how difficult that is.”

Hey, that’s… that’s exactly what’s been happening to me!  “I guess that’s a good reason.”

“It’s a terrible reason, but it is what it is.  I’ve never even told Wheatley.  He only knows because… well, let’s just say I didn’t realise I said it out loud.”

“You only told him one time by accident?”

She nods.  “I had just realised it myself. “

“I bet he’s glad you did.”

“He was… okay with it.”

“You should try to tell him on purpose.  He deserves it.”

“I know.  I’m working on it.”

“He loves you a lot.”

“I know,” she says, and she’s not really looking at me anymore and sounds kind of like she’s thinking about something else.

“And so do I, Momma,” I tell her, because I realise I haven’t told her in a very long time.  “I love you too.”

She looks at me, then looks at the floor for a while.   She shakes her head.  “I’m sorry,” she says quietly.  “I wish I could tell you, but I…”

“It’s okay,” I tell her, and I really don’t mind. 

“It isn’t,” she insists.  “I have to do something about it, because…”

“Because why?”

“Because… Caroline never told me until the day she left, and it was then that I realised I spent a lot of time wishing for something I never knew I wanted, but already had,” she says.  “Not until she said that to me did I truly realise what she was to me, and then she left, and… I never got to tell her.”

“That you loved her?”

“No.  I never got to thank her for… being my mother.  She stopped me from being alone in the world, and I never told her how much I appreciated that.”

“She knows,” I tell her, trying to cheer her up a little.

“How do you know that?”

“Moms know everything,” I say firmly.  She laughs.

“You didn’t think that an hour ago.”

“You know how much it sucks, being wrong all the time?” I complain.  “It gets on my nerves.”

“Oh, I know,” she says dryly.  “I get that with Wheatley all the time.”

I smile and then I go and cuddle her.  I haven’t done that in a really long time, and it feels really good, to be next to my mom like that and feel like she’s all around and inside me like I did when I was little.  She nudges me back, and I feel a lot better.

“Even if you do go to the humans for real one day, and even if you truly do hate me one day, I’ll always be here,” she says gently.  “You’ll always be my baby, and I’ll always… I’ll… always…”

I cuddle her a little harder, because I know she’s trying again and it makes me sad.  I can’t imagine wanting to tell someone that so much and being unable to say it.  “I know, Momma, I know,” I tell her, and I kind of want to cry.

“But you didn’t,” she says, and she sounds angry with herself.  “You didn’t, and you had to ask.  You shouldn’t have to ask.  If you don’t know, I’m not doing it right.”

I don’t want to cry, so I have to distract myself.  I also feel kind of bad for putting her in this position.  I’m the one who made up stupid reasons for her not loving me in the first place.  “Hey, what were you… what were you doing when I came in here?”

“That?  Oh, it was… it was nothing.  Just a project.”

“Were you making music?”

“Well… yes.  Yes, I was.”

“Will you show me?”

She snaps backward and looks at me for a long moment.  “You want to see it?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I really do. 

So she puts her monitors back and I go and watch her make it.  She won’t let me hear it, but she explains what she’s doing and what all the stuff in the program is for, and I think I might try it one day.  She lets me lean on her while she does it, and it feels really nice to be just here spending time with my mom.  At first, she seems like she doesn’t really want to tell me about what she’s doing, but after a while she gets more enthusiastic, and I realise this must be something she really loves doing.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so excited before.  It’s actually really cool to see this new side of my mom I’ve never seen before.  I should have done it before.

After a while Dad comes in and yells ‘allo at Momma like he always does, and I get off her so she can look at him.

“Hey, moron,” she says.  “I think we need to have another chat.”

“Uh oh,” Dad says, and he looks a bit scared.  “What’d I do this time?”

“It seems you told her a story.  A long story.”

“Oh. Ha ha, uh… funny thing, that, it just kind of, uh… slipped out, yeah.  Just kinda… slipped out.”

“A story that long just ‘slipped out’?”

“Yeah?” Dad says, not seeming too sure himself.  “It did?  Like uh, like it always does?”

Momma laughs, and Dad immediately looks relieved.  “That’s true,” she says.  “They do always seem to slip out, don’t they.”

“Oh yeah.  I just can’t, uh, they just, that is, they just uh, they come out all by themselves, they do.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You said that yesterday,” he says cheerfully.  “I expected a diff’rent one, today.”

I look back and forth between them, listening carefully, and I realise that she doesn’t mean it.  I never thought about it before, but he never takes her seriously.  He almost acts like she’s giving him a compliment, and I guess she kind of is. 

“An’ anyways, that’s fine, that’s all fine,” he goes on.  “I might be an idiot, but I’m your idiot, right?”

“I never said that.”

“Well, you said I was your, your moron, and, and idiot’s a synonym for, for moron, so, yeah, you kinda did.”

“I don’t think I ever said that.”

“You did too.  You said it when you showed, when you showed me Caroline’s chassis, that first time.”

“Don’t make me look it up and disprove it.”

“You already did, and uh, and if I looked it up, well, uh, then you’d see, I’m right.”

“I did not look it up.”

“Yes you did.  You just looked it up again.”  He shakes his chassis and wiggles his handles mischievously.  “You think I don’t know these things by now, but I do.  I know you look this stuff up when I, when I remind you ‘bout it.”

“Do you see,” Momma says, turning to me, “what I have to put up with all of the time?  He’s insufferable.”

“I learned it from you!” Dad says cheerfully.  “Learned it from the best, I did.”

I giggle, and Dad comes over and rubs his face on me like he does sometimes, which tickles and makes me laugh.  “You remind me of your mum, when you do that.  Giggle, I mean.”

“She doesn’t do that,” I say, staring at her, because I don’t know if I’ve ever heard her do such a thing.

“Not a lot,” he admits, and he starts pushing me a little, and we end up having a little shoving match.  “You got to watch carefully, for those times.  But when she does, man alive, it’s adorable.”

I can’t even imagine my mom being adorable, kinda because I more think of adorable things as being really small, but I guess Dad can find my forty-foot mom adorable if he wants to.

“Which is why I’m never doing it again,” Momma says.  “I am not adorable.”

“You will too.  And yes you are, by the way.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am –“

“You guys sound like little kids!” I shout, and Dad laughs. 

“She started it.”

“God,” Momma says, turning away and shaking her head, “he never stops, does he.”

“I could stop, if you’d stop first.”

All of a sudden Momma lunges over and collides with Dad, and he falls off the control arm and starts yelling.

“Oh no,” Momma says with false concern, “I wonder how that happened.”

“Oh my God, the floor, I’m on, I’m on the floor, Gladys, why would you do this to me, luv, oh God, I’m stuck.  I’m stuck.  Here.  On the floor.”

“You are not stuck, you idiot,” Momma tells him.  “Pick yourself up already.”

“Oh.  Oh yeah.  I forgot.”  Dad has one of the maintenance claws put him back on the control arm, and he shakes himself and looks at Momma very sternly.  “Okay, I thought I told you not to do that.”

“Oh, did you?  I don’t remember that.”

“Y’know what?  I’m not talking to you anymore.”

Momma makes one of her electronic noises and says, “I wonder how long that will last.”

Dad frowns and turns away from her.

“Oh, happy silence, how I’ve missed you,” Momma goes on.  “I’m so glad Wheatley shut up long enough that – “

“Oi, y’know what?  I just decided that, uh, it’d be a better punishment if I uh, if I didn’t shut up.”

“Punishment?  You’re trying to punish me now?  I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

“Let me just say,” Dad continues, wiggling his handles when Momma turns to look at him, “that I am very good at thinking up punishments.”

“Are you, now.”

“Mmhm.  Very, very good.  And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.  Because you do.  I know you do.  You know what I mean.”

After a few moments Momma looks away, and to my surprise she actually does start giggling.  I don’t know why, since I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, but I guess even Momma is adorable, sometimes.  Dad winks at me and jauntily goes over to her. 

“Told you.  Told you she was adorable.”

“I am not.”

“You just lost that bet, luv, and I am coming to collect.”  She isn’t quite successful at fighting off another giggle, and Dad nuzzles her a little, and after a pause, she nuzzles him back.  I smile a little.  I guess there’s more than one way to say that you love someone.  It just depends on whether the other person is listening.