It feels like an unreasonably long time to wait with the reading homework hanging over him but it is eventually time.
He was really hoping for his life to contain absolutely nothing like this for a long time. People making claims is stressful - it's better, and more interesting too, when they're teaching Ashkon how to do things, rather than just making statements that can't easily be tested - and it's stressful to have an assigned job, though not half as much so as having his eyes held open and being forced to look at a book full of claims about sin and society that he's expected to pay attention to while someone reads his fucking mind to confirm that he's paying enough attention. But at least the book doesn't claim to be about what is actually right and wrong, or even about what people actually care about, so that's something. And Ashkon could just force him so he's not about to refuse because why would he give Ashkon less of what Ashkon wants just for having mercy?
He sits near the fish. He keeps all his thoughts private. He skips ahead to chapter two in case it happens to contain all the information he needs right now.
And the book...
...actually, free to think, able to think, and in no particular hurry to memorize anything, he doesn't feel like it's worming its way into his mind. He doesn't feel like it's very persuasive about anything at all. He probably ought to believe it, since he wouldn't rather be made to believe it, but the closest he gets is doing extensive reasoning about what might follow from the book's claims if they were true and resolving to act as though he believes them. But there's not a lot to be done about the idea that some people think that some other people think that it's important to only masturbate in ways you're comfortable with. None of this actually matters to him at all. He's not going to get involved in anyone else's business. For so many reasons it didn't even occur to him to worry about going blind. He's not sure he cares whether anyone realizes he also thinks sex outside of wedlock is wrong. For that matter, he's not sure he cares whether sex outside of wedlock is wrong. What would be the point of caring about that? He cares about torture, and he cares in a very tentative and fragile way about music and decorations and flowers and the sky and not being in Lórien. He doesn't really have the ability to make choices about right and wrong, not even if he wanted to. He doesn't have the ability to independently verify any claims about reality, not when people can read his mind and check what would convince him, so why bother having moral convictions? Even the world's wisest philosopher could hit someone in the nose if he were trying to navigate in blinding fog while also deaf and incapable of feeling objects and having no sense of smell or direction or movement. And he's probably not the world's wisest philosopher. And that's in addition to the thing where the fact that he can ever move any part of his body at all is just down to other people's mercy. He's already been warned that if he's disobedient they can take his freedom of movement away. He can make choices, a little, sort of, by asking for things from his unaccountably generous new masters, and they've been very kind and he has no real complaints, but it'd be silly to imagine that makes him a moral agent. He's a pet.
And this is the wrong chapter to be reading, anyway. Unless he wants to get off right here right now, he isn't well described as having any solo sexuality at all. He's just reading this to try to understand why Ashkon thinks it's okay to use him for this. Which is exactly the only thing he said he wasn't offering anyway, so maybe he should just call it quits.
And maybe he gets it now, anyway. Maybe the idea is that if he has no complaints then it's fine because the badness is located in the fact of him having complaints, even if he can't voice them aloud. Only how exactly does that square with how Ashkon has taken every opportunity to help him have more preferences?
...Now that he thinks about it that way, and without Ashkon keeping his heart steady, he really doesn't like that either. It's a kind thing for a generous friend who can predictably protect him from most harm to do. It's a terrifying thing for someone with absolute power to do. But he wasn't complaining about it and he's going to keep not complaining about it.
Sort of.
His complaints matter, in this model, even if he can't voice them. Maybe they matter even if he can't voice them even to himself. Maybe vague inchoate unease also matters. And he does have plenty of that. And maybe the deliberately suppressed wish for the pain to let up for a while is also the kind of thing that Ashkon objects to.
This doesn't really make it easier to be a passive tool that happens to be blessed with the ability to enjoy things. And it doesn't really make him more comfortable with... anything, really. He doesn't want to try to navigate some kind of horrible catch-22 where if he has any misgivings about anything that thing becomes wrong and his misgivings become justified forever. He doesn't want to make Ashkon try to navigate that. He wants it to be as simple as having already fucking said that Ashkon can do anything short of turning him into an immobile sphere of pain. He doesn't want to analyze his feelings to death for signs of inadequate joy. He doesn't want to try to care about more things. He doesn't want to hear more about acting like a decent person. He doesn't want to satisfy his curiosity about how exactly this fits with everything else about Ashkon. He doesn't want to have to do moral philosophy, and he doesn't want to have a choice between doing complicated moral philosophy and not knowing what to expect from the person who controls every aspect of his life.
He wants to hit his head on something hard until he passes out but he's not sure if that would bother Ashkon while he was healing from it.
He wants to stop having his mind read but if that means being dumped back in the apartment alone... well, it would suck, but he could put a garden on the balcony and get coffee from the replicator and play games. It wouldn't be good, but it wouldn't be constant agony. It would just be such a waste, to leave Ashkon without the ability to sing, to have no purpose in life, to lose someone whose company he really enjoys. But of course Ashkon will immediately see that he's bothered and - he has no idea what Ashkon will do.
But actually, so far, every time he's had a problem where Ashkon can see him, Ashkon's response has been to come up with some amazing thing he never knew was possible that completely solves it. He doesn't feel like that could happen this time but some of that is probably the constant unending feeling of wrongness that just exists in the background whenever he's alone.
...If he's not going to pretend like he gets to be a moral agent and he's not going to think about what moral philosophy Ashkon is following he can just take it as read that if Ashkon says there's some kind of justification, then there's some kind of justification. And he doesn't have to care what it is. And that doesn't have to matter to him, if whatever extremely justified thing Ashkon wants to do bothers him; and since he's not going to insist that Ashkon not do things that bother him, it doesn't have to matter to Ashkon how he feels about it. It was stupid of him to care about any of the details here. The only thing he has to have an opinion on is whether he thinks it'd feel nice.
...But the answer to that is definitely yes, but differently if he's just kind of there than if he's part of it, unless he doesn't know which of those it is, in which case no. And he doesn't know which it is. So the entire thing he just went through is completely pointless.
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