After my shower I decided to lay down and curl up next to Jason, letting him wrap his arms around me in his sleep. I had a lot to think about and I found this position to be oddly comfortable for doing said thinking. It was best in my opinion to try and figure things out while enjoying the scents and feel of the world around you.

First, why did I like Jason? I knew it wasn't because he was smart, because honestly he was kind of an idiot. The things he did didn't make too terribly much sense, but he had a good heart. Was it because I knew he actually wanted to do the right thing? Well, that seemed not the worst part of him. It was true he had strong ideas on consent, and how things should be, but I didn't think that was all of it. I feared that it might be because I was programmed to. The idea that I was still just a puppet shook me to the core. Truth was though, that I didn't know.

Then was last night's activities. I expected I would enjoy sex on some level, but there were a few things I didn't expect. I didn't anticipate such a strong feeling of connection and closeness, nor how much I liked that. I knew that I liked being close to people, but this was something more. Would that continue if I slept with other people? I thought it would, but there was only one way to find out.

Then came the fact that I could actually orgasm, that had been totally unexpected. I thought it would be fun sure, but that was something else. I knew for a fact that before the update it was fake. There was a series of programs to simulate that, but there was no real pleasure associated with it. Or was there? I never had actually had sex before gaining my freedom. Were the other Seraphina or androids the same? How had they even managed to put that into me? Again, I was very unsure.

I also needed to consider what we were doing here. Was I planning on staying? I had planned to wander the world for a bit, but that seemed less appealing now. I wanted something more than just a nomadic life. I didn't know what yet though. What about the rest of Jason's crew? Nobody knew what was going on, or how to respond to it. So far the whole group was just in a holding pattern, but that was surely not what the rest of the world was doing.

I sat there, my head spinning round and round with these thoughts. Eventually though I felt Jason begin to stir. With a few different breaths he finally opened his eyes, looking down to me.

"Good morning," he said as he moved to kiss me.

"How was your sleep?"

"Well, I thought you might run off to go read or something."

"I decided I liked laying here, it is a good place to think."

"What about?"

"How different I am, how my opinions are changing all the time, what the world is going through."

"Sounds deep."

"Mmm."

"Well... breakfast?"

"It was Karl's turn to cook."

"Not exactly what I was talking about Aurora." I felt his hand slip down my back to rest on my backside.

"Not now, we have a full day ahead of us and you've already slept in."

He pouted. "Have I?"

"It's nearly 1PM."

"Oh shit, I guess we have." With that he quickly sat up, looking for his own clothes and tossing mine over to me.

"Are you on lunch or something today?"

"Dishes. Hey, is this going to be something we do a lot, or just a one time thing?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"Oh... did you at least enjoy yourself?"

I had to give him a bit of a look at that, before considering a bit more. "I did."

"That's good, so, um, yeah..." It was a bit cute when he was out of words and didn't know where to go, but it was late.

"Let's go for lunch then." I said as I slipped my shirt back on.

"That sounds good actually, wonder what we're having."

The two of us headed downstairs where the rest of the group was eating. Apparently it was some kind of soup or perhaps it would be better to call it stew. A rather thick broth filled with veggies and small hunks of meat.

"You two sure took your time." Abbey seemed a bit miffed at us, but I had no idea why.

"I had things I wanted to think about. Have we got any communications with the outside up yet?"

"No." Several responded to that one.

"What about something old style, like a radio? Could we get one going?"

Karl seemed to think for a few moments on that one. "We might have most of the pieces we'd need. I could print a few but something really, really basic should be doable. I believe we might even have some plans for one. Do you think it would actually work? Far as I know nobody has used them much for the past... awhile."

"I think it's worth trying, with receiver only we could at least get some news without advertising that we're listening."

"Why does it matter if we're listening?" It was Josephine who spoke up. She and I hadn't had much interaction yet.

"Because we do not know the state of things, there could very well be a war going on that we don't know about. If that is so, we should not stick our heads out. At least not yet."

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"I didn't see any signs of fighting when we went to go get supplies." Sara seemed to be thinking about that a bit more seriously.

"You wouldn't, at least not here. If it we me, I'd focus on major supply and military structures, along with civilian authorities. I'd wager there has been a good bit of fighting around all Cidel buildings, but those aren't near here." Karl was taking this as an important topic too now. "Okay, I'll see what we can do on a radio, though it'll be fairly basic, and I don't know that we'll get anything."

"Any other ideas on figuring out what's going on?" I asked, there was always room for more attempts.

"Nothing practical, is there any way we could check for sat traffic? Could we even understand it if there was?" It was Sara asking this time. Her sister leaned in to take up the topic.

"Sadly no, while there are some comms sats up there most of those are rather encrypted. Add to that that there have been less and less in near Earth, they're still trying to clean up some of the micro-debris."

"I thought they had all of that gone?" Jason perked up.

"Most of it, there were only one or two fields left that were still in orbit, but getting that crap gone is a pain, seriously great-great-whatever grandma and grandpa have some crap to answer for on that account."

From there the discussion broke down to all the pollution that had been spread out, particularly in near Earth orbit by people a couple hundred years prior. How massive sats with laser arrays had finally been moved up to start cleaning up all the mess. I knew little about the details of that, but it would seem that humans had been stuck on Earth for nearly thirty years by a series of collisions between comms arrays in the mid 21st. A large number of treaties had been signed after that restricting who could put what in orbit and where. They were policed by a number of automated systems. I wondered if there were now sentient laser sats, but got a lot of slightly scared looks when I asked. Nobody seemed to have considered that one.

After lunch we broke, Karl did indeed have designs for an old toy radio. Some project from a school assignment many years before. The man hoarded information in a way that was frankly impressive. He saved everything, and even organized it. There were literally thousands of designs and projects and reference materials holed up on various drives he had, as well as a number of plans for objects whose patents had run out.

Karl gave Abbey and I a list of parts that he couldn't reasonably get one of the printers to shove out and we went off to see if we could scrounge something from the various piles of stuff all around the warehouse. There was a room for old electronics and the like and we started there.

"So... Jason?" she asked as we picked through a couple of boxes.

"I was curious."

"Why him though?"

"I dunno, it just seemed like the place to start."

"Hold up, to start? Does that mean..."

"I imagine that I'll go have fun with other people later on. Just not right now, why?"

"Well... I don't know, it's just Jason, he's... kind of an idiot sometimes."

"Oftentimes, yes, but he's also very... I don't know, true? Devoted? You know what I mean?"

"I think so. Any luck on the wire?"

"I'm not finding exactly what we need here. There's plenty of chips, but those are all useless. What we need is a really basic speaker, do we have all the wire we need?"

"Yeah, I got a whole roll of that. It's easier to buy the stuff used for that and wire up my own lights sometimes, also for deco, I like the look. Speaker ideas? We could always take apart something we're using, like one of the vidscreens?"

"No, simpler than that. Lots of those are running setups that won't work with this. We need like... a toy or something way old."

"A toy? Hmm, let's go check the other room."

She led me off to another storage area. Here we did indeed find something that had a more primitive speaker. It was some kind of weird old fuzzy purple toy, full of motors and a speaker. Something that came out a museum if i had to guess, as the power supply had been replaced with something that was definitely newer. Turning it on even had it say a few words and do some motions. I didn't like it, it was creepy and the huge eyes and little jewel thing on it's head sent shivers down my spine. Taking it apart for it's speaker was something of a mercy for all of everyone everywhere.

"This thing is creepy as hell, what even is it?"

Abbey looked at a label. "Toy from the late 20th. Says even a lot of them found it a bit off-putting. Hey look, they were banned from a security agency for awhile."

"I'm glad they stopped making these."

"It's not that bad."

"The eyes, the ears, just too much."

"I didn't know androids were weirded out by things like that, huh."

As I finished up our 'surgery' on the device and put it back in place we had everything we'd need to go and find out what all we could about this absolute information blackout that we'd been taking a bit too lightly.