[all right, then! i said if i got stuck for a topic, i'd get back to my book, so here we go. the earlier chapters are linked below!]
(Chapter Two)Sitting alone on her couch, Bitsy felt her processing power getting sucked away into a single analytic: considering everything she'd learned today, wasn't it possible that she had gotten caught up in one of those multi-order amplifications Cord had gone on about that morning? He'd seemed very unconcerned when tossing about the possibility that an unremediated crushroutine had lodged itself in her circuits and made her behave so peculiarly the last couple of days. Surely, being in dream feed management, his diagnostics would have noticed anything worse than a crushroutine ... wouldn't they?
Except, Bitsy, she told herself, he's a Real. He doesn't have diagnostics constantly running in the background, parsing and collating data to help him spot glitches. He has ... whatever's in those biological brains of theirs that made them so brilliant and creative and occasionally mad. He's got to be extraordinary, if he's monitoring and helping correct something as crazy-complicated as the dream feed. But they're not as good at multitasking as we are, are they? That's what people say in the holos all the time, anyway. And he kept getting distracted by whatever problem kept pinging him on his phone. What if all his abstract-thinking ... brain-a-mabobs ... were focused on that work crisis, and all he could spare, talking to me, were those wibbly-dribbly organic emotions, the ones Reals are supposed to have so much of, sometimes their logic goes completely out the windows?
She didn't feel sociopathic or psychotic. And even distracted and letting his emotions handle most of his talk with her, wouldn't he have noticed something of that magnitude six or magnitude eight amplification he said it took to reach that point?
Only ... what if I'm at magnitude five? She sat up out of the deep cushions, suddenly no longer comfortable in them at all. Not only that ... he kept talking about one android's variance beyond spec interacting with another android's variance beyond spec and adding up or multiplying ... but Reals don't even have specs! What happens when a magnitude five amplification runs into a Real and is dealing with something their programs aren't used to at all?
Her circulator lumped fiercely in her chest, apparently working overtime to make sure her processors didn't overheat with all these thoughts and feel-routines.
I should go to bed, she thought. It's not that late, but I should go to bed and let the dream feed smooth all of this out. That's what it's designed for. That's what Cord and his coworkers in dream feed management spend all day making sure it can do, isn't it? I'll go to bed, I'll go to sleep, and in the morning I won't be so cross-wired about all of this.
But ...
Will I even be able to get to sleep? Of course I will. If I toss and turn for too long, I'll just swallow a harp-drive to lullaby me into sleep mode and drop right off.
Nodding and feeling more certain, she stood up to do exactly that.
Only to see her phone vibrate and glow against the black glass top of her coffee table.
And the screen had that number on it, with the contact name right underneath.
Cord 76S.
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