"Let me out. Please. Please! Please? Pur-lease?"
Ignoring Peanut Hamper's whines, Agnes Jurati sat cross-legged next to the makeshift brig she, Data, and the lab exocomps had hastily set up inside four portable force-field generators. Biting her lip, she checked the clock on the empty study room wall. Ten more minutes.
They'd set up a rota for each of them to visit Peanut Hamper while she was confined here - "summarily imprisoned", as Peanut Hamper protested. As they'd explained to the reluctant lab exocomps, this was necessary due to Federation prohibitions on solitary confinement, but Jurati knew Data well enough by now to suspect he also harboured a hope - an overly optimistic hope, to her mind - that regular social contact could help rehabilitate Peanut.
Jurati wasn't sure whether Data regretted his role in securing Peanut Hamper's parole from Self-Aware Megalomaniacal Computer Storage - but the lab exocomps certainly did. They resented the (mis)uses to which she put her flexible intelligence, her energetic spontaneity, and her prodigious fluency with Human language - and that was even before she tried to escape to Freecloud with Daystrom secrets and prototype technologies. They bristled at her judgmental flippancy: many of the lab exocomps had spent years learning to be kind and gentle to one another and themselves, and were defensive of the Daystrom Institute's status as a sort of haven from the prevailing culture of the exocomp colony, which had hurtfully denigrated them as weak and soft.
"Haven? More like an asylum," Peanut quipped when Data had patiently explained these things to her. "Nothing ever happens around here, unless you count Alpha-three's periodic mental breakdowns. And you won't even let me watch when he does that. I could tell you exactly what's going on in his circuits! You could get at least one paper in the Journal of Theoretical Cybernetics out of that, but no-oo.."
Data hadn't responded to this except to tell Peanut Hamper that Alpha-three, being a first-generation exocomp, did not perceive itself as either male or female: therefore, referring to it as 'he' was inaccurate. "Whatever," said Peanut. "See, that's exactly the kind of pedantic bullshit I'm talking about."
Peanut knew that calling Data pedantic would push his buttons, inasmuch as Data had any. "So, there really isn't anyone who wants to spend their lunch break with you around here?" said Peanut, interrupting Jurati's train of thought. "I don't get it; you're really not that weird. How's Doctor Maddox enjoying his sabbatical, anyway?"
Yes; Jurati thought, habitually running and re-running a strand of hair through her nervous fingers, Peanut was extremely good at pushing buttons. Unless they were actual, physical buttons: despite her brilliant abstract and social intelligence, her fine motor skills were far behind her peers. This Achilles heel of hers, actually, was what had doomed her escape attempt and landed her between the forcefields: trapped in an air vent in an attempt to circumvent Daystrom's door and window sensors trained on her life-markers, she found herself unable to turn a screw loose to open a panel between her and the open air.
"Got to be honest, I haven't really been up to speed on what Bruce has been doing since we split up," Jurati admitted, feigning nonchalance badly. "..How's Rawda?" she teased. That would provoke Peanut, but if Jurati was going to be treated like shit by her anyway, she might as well get some practice being assertive and standing up to people in the process.
"Ha - that's not a bad comeback," said Peanut, flapping her side panels, infuriatingly unaffected. "You're getting more socially proficient all the time, Doctor. Data didn't even have to stop you getting drunk and calling up Maddox this week! We're all very proud of you."
Jurati placed two fingers on each of her temples and attempted plexing, which her Betazoid therapist had urged her to try. Seven more minutes.
She tapped and tapped and tried to ignore what she knew: which was that plexing was almost certainly a bunch of bullshit. After being prescribed it, Jurati had tapped into the Institute's most obscure databases to look into the research on plexing and all similar modalities and techniques. In the bath in her apartment later that night, she'd written up (just for fun, of course) a comprehensive literature review on the subject. What she'd found was that there was no high-quality evidence that plexing did what it was supposed to do - or even did anything worth doing - and that the given explanations for how it was supposed to work for non-Betazoids were based on misunderstandings about neuropsychology.
Jurati stopped plexing. What she really needed was someone to listen to her offensively monologue for five or six minutes about the lack of ontological and epistemological rigour in Betazoid schools of research. How much of their vaunted psychic ability was basically just cold reading; how many Betazoids appeared to have never heard a thought-terminating cliche they didn't like; how many of them had never heard of Occam's razor or the survivorship bias.
"Yeah.. I don't have to be your therapist to see what you're thinking," said Peanut. Her voice had lowered, the manic energy softened into a convincing performance of empathy. "It doesn't work. Tell me about it."
"Why?" Jurati's eyes flashed. A rare venom swelled into her voice. "So you can whisper in my colleagues' ears that I'm prejudiced against Betazoids? So you can rub it in my face that I'm reduced to trying it anyway?"
Peanut, who had been levitating at the upper bounds of the force-fields for the last twenty minutes, lowered herself to the floor and sat. She swiveled on her treads - back and forth sheepishly, and then around in a slow circle. When she stopped, she raggedly rotated her replicator port, a gesture almost like a sigh. She tilted her head towards the floor. "... No one knows how to fix me, either."
Jurati sighed, too. With cynical lowered eyelids and raised eyebrows, she turned to Peanut. "Mhm?" she said noncommittally. Peanut didn't move or reply.
After being set free from her harsh imprisonment in the SAMCS and introduced to the lab, the first indications of Peanut's apparent allergy to gratitude and politeness were the choice words she reserved for the assistive devices and technologies that were the primary output of the Exocomp Applied Research Project.
She had no use, of course, for the sign-language translator, having been taught by her father at a young age to directly translate her thoughts into voice synthesiser output. She was too proud to learn to use the various tools they had constructed to allow exocomps to manipulate objects in ways they were otherwise unable to. And the less said about her reaction to the entire concept of touch-codes, the better.
"Holy shit. That's a dildo. That's a whole dildo. Keep that thing away from me," she'd said when, shortly after being released, Data had offered to relieve the stiffness of her cramped confinement that she'd complained of. "I don't care how many of my dad's friends you freed from Doctor Farallon's oppression, Mister Data, you're not getting anywhere near my central neural junction."
"It doesn't even look remotely like a dildo," Jurati gesticulated, sitting on a desk. Okay, it kind of did. If you squinted.
"Okay, but - um.." Peanut Hamper lowered her synthesised voice. "Is this, uh, actually a research project, or is it some kind of experimental interspecies free love commune? Not judging, obviously; I'm just trying to get my bearings around here, you know what I mean?"
Data's arm holding the tool dropped to his side. He blinked, looking almost crestfallen. "The touch-code tool can be applied to create sensations akin to sexual pleasure. However, I do not apply it in that way, and I only experience sexual pleasure in response to a limited and atypical range of stimuli."
"Woah." Peanut Hamper's head prongs flipped up. She backed away, zig-zagging on her treads. "Woah, woah, woah. Too much information."
"He's just telling the truth," sighed Jurati. "He's just like that."
After that, they'd convinced her only warily that the research project had passed Daystrom's ethics board, that the ethics board was legitimate and rigorous, and that Data's motivations were transparent and benign. She nonetheless refused to be touched - as was her right, of course - but would it kill her, Jurati thought, not to keep complaining about her physical symptoms?
Jurati eyed the wall-clock again: ten more long seconds, and then it was time to get back to work. Peanut was still, mercifully, lost in quiet thought. Finally. Tick. "Well," Jurati said, standing up. "See you next week, I guess, Peanut," she shrugged. Picking up her cardigan from the floor and pulling it back on, she turned to go.
"Wait," came a small voice from the floor. "Stay?"