“It needed to read my reactions to the show to really understand what was happening.” -Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

                The “it” here is a super intelligent AI starship pilot, very much an important character in the series, and the speaker is our main character murderbot — a part organic/part synthetic construct designed as contracted security that’s now playing around with its hard won freewill. Playing means lots of watching tv, it turns out, and the AI pilot wants to watch too — but since its whole experience is being a spaceship and piloting a spaceship through space, it needs murderbot’s reactions to help fill in the meaning and context of the tv shows. It needs to watch together.
                I think I need to watch together. Because my partner and I have been reading Wells’ novellas together, and it’s lovely to sit with how much of what they mean flows from our lying in bed at the end of every day and reading together. Because I’ve gotten more interested in gardening (see all my gardening and compost metaphors in the last months/years), and that has a lot to do with my friend Dusty, who gardens a lot and who I sometimes get to garden with. And what gardening means — my understanding of what we’re doing, what gardening is, and my attempt to be with soil/water/seed/plant — has a lot to do with watching and sharing in Dusty’s reactions. Because my novel manuscript grows from talking with so many friends about how we experience gender, community, fear, magic. Although maybe that adds a layer to “reaction.” I think it’s in our shared sensing, our overlapping experience. That’s where I feel us making a happening out of all this is in front of us. We weave into so many sensings to find our way here.