CHAPTER! TWELVE!

Bitsy woke up. It was morning.

It's morning! She sat up with a jolt.

I'M ON THE COUCH.

If there was one thing an android wasn't supposed to do when she thought she might be having system issues, it was fall asleep without her head on the dream-feed pillow. Bitsy couldn't believe she'd been so stupid.

Wait. No. I so totally can believe I'm that stupid.

Her phone sat on the coffee table nearby. She wondered if she should pick it up and immediately call for an appulance to come and give her an in-home scan.

Maybe I should call in sick to work first.

She looked around the room.

Everything looks so normal. Except maybe the sunlight's coming in a little steeper than if I'd woken up when I ought to. What if ... nothing's really all that wrong with me?

It wasn't like she'd never fallen asleep on the couch before. You weren't supposed to make a habit of it, but it happened. Especially if you ran a little too much drinkware at a party or something.

Cord said the odds of a magnitude whatever whatevermajig happening were only once in a decade or a century, didn't he? And he's an expert who works in dream-feed management. Does it really make sense he might be wrong about that, and I'm going completely fray-wired less than two days after I met him and started crushroutining over him?

Bitsy felt herself calming down.

Maybe I don't even need to call in sick. Maybe I just need to call in and say I'll be late.

She reached for her phone...

And it buzzed and lit up.

And the call ID field said Cord.

review! love and realness, chapter 11!

yipes! this isn't looking good -- i actually started off the post with chapter 11 by saying it wasn't much of a chapter!

okay, let's get going. i guess we can hope i was wrong ...

snort! i'd forgotten that instead of tv, the androids have holo-projectors, which abbreviates to "hp." i'm just killing myself with these computer puns!

cmd+entertainment! ahahahaha!!!

holy smokes, the whole first paragraph is one hilarious techno-jargon wordplay after another. i mean, if i was trying to find a way to make info-dump exposition a total kick to read, i couldn't have come up with a much better way to do it.

anyhow, the scoop is, all bitsy has available to get her mind off cord is her hp favorites list, and she can't manage even a little enthusiasm for any of it. instead she just mopes about it and wonders if she ought to go to theraputery and then realizes she couldn't possibly explain to a theraputist why she was feeling off. they might think she was glitching or crashing -- which makes her start worrying maybe she is crashing.

wowzers, turns out i was totally wrong! it's short, but this is a heck of a chapter, if i say so myself.

so ...

time to write more -- right?

xoxo,
claire

review! love and realness, chapter 10!

bitsy gets to work all worried people will notice she's out of sorts ... but the whole office is oblivious to her. nobody has any reason to ask her what's up except gigory, who certainly doesn't. kind of tickled with myself for pulling that twist on poor bits. she may be borderline too hapless, but it's fun seeing her flail around in her obsession only to have no one even notice her flailing. then she works herself up to talk to her friend about it at lunch and realizes she can't actually say anything without either embarrassing herself with how badly she handled the coffee date and gigory, or else giving away a big secret like cord being real or working in dream feed management.

and then things get even worse for our heroine, because she realizes that maybe cord told her a heap of hogwash to get rid of her once he saw what a ditz she was.

you've got to feel for this girl. she's her own worst enemy.

anyway, we're back to short chapter format this time, and that's really all that happens.

only one chapter left before ... time to write more???

xoxo,
claire

juicy personal details!

you guys know there are like 8 of us around here, right? (i'm assuming you've been reading here a while. if i'm wrong, now you know. 8! feel free to scurry back through some of my older posts or click through some of the links on the sidebar in search of scandalamorous poly-yam-delish background info.) and you also know that msg is mister fret-trified four-eyes who sometimes can't see the forest for his anxietrees.

pretty much ever since my (and elle's) factory-made bod gave up its silicone ghost, he's been fretting up a storm over whether he's not spending enough time with me, and you may have noticed this sometimes bleeds over into me whinging on about being old and past my prime, but early last week (or week before?) i told myself i was really tired of that b.s. on both our parts and i told him, "okay, my dude. ultimatum time! from now on, we're going it once a week. bare minimum."

(i don't know your living situations, dear readers, so maybe once a week sounds like not that much to you. but remember ... 8 of us! even if he averaged one of us a day, that's only once a week apiece, and that would end up being a near-constant bang-fest, you know?)

so maybe that sounds greedy on my part. (i did throw in that it didn't have to be a once-a-week twosome for us; it could be a ménage à trois or ménage à quatre or ménage à lots-and-lotsa.) and if it is, then so be it. but we're a thing. we've been a thing almost 18 years now, and if it takes twisting his arm all the way into bed once a week, we by damn need to do what we gotta do to make sure we're both feeling that.

right?

anyway, we're three gittin' bizzays into this new rule, and so far he's not complaining.

me either!

xoxo,
claire

review! love and realness, chapter nine!

uh-oh! what's an android girl like bitsy to do when her she's-sure-he's-real-and-hopes-he'll-be-her-boyfriend coffee date, cord, comes face-to-face with her awkward-but-good-hearted-and-she-impulsively-invited-him-to-dinner-to-make-up-for-making-him-late-on-a-deadline co-worker, gigory?

obviously, she's got to angst over accidentally summoning gigory out of the coffee-shop line when she waved to get cord's attention and then gigory swept in to save her from disaster when she almost toppled a potted fern. and then she's got to angst over how to introduce these two guys that she's standing between while they're both asking if she's all right.

and then she's got to spook herself by almost ending her introduction of the two of them with the revelation that cord is real (she thinks). but she catches herself, and now there's a handshake offer from cord to gigory, followed by said handshake, followed by gigory trying to excuse himself to get back in line only to realize the line is now a ton longer and he won't have time to make it through for his coffee if he's going to get to the office early enough to make up for the deadline-miss that bitsy flubbed for him.

eureka! bitsy has a two-for-one moment of brilliant inspiration and offers gigory her coffee to make up for the report disaster and for him saving her from the fern disaster. but ...

disaster. gigory is surprised she's offering him coffee, since he thought she hated coffee, and he says that out loud.

now cord knows bitsy's a coffee aficio-fraud-o.

can i just say how happy it makes me that bitsy notices cord shift his view from gigory to her as soon as gigory reveals her deception, and bitsy is too petrified to look and see what cord's expression is?

now she's feebly claiming not to hate coffee, just that you have to put enough cream and sugar in it ... meanwhile, mentally begging gigory to just take the coffee. when he does, at last, she turns to cord (who's putting away his phone again) and tries to make an excuse about gigory seeing her waving and cord and thinking she was waving at him --

and cord basically calls her bluff, speculating that she's got a crushroutine running on him. leading straight to ...

worldbuilding!

okay, so this is pretty slick of me. bitsy says surely the dream feed would have taken care of a crushroutine, to which cord says, "the dream feed's not perfect."

shock!

she defends the dream feed's reliability. it's supposed to be 100% -- assuming you round up from the two-thousandth digit after the decimal place. cord responds that reliable and perfect aren't the same thing.

more bitsy mooncalfing! gigory's reliable, you're perfect.

but now the plot thickens, as cord reveals the secret that he's in dream feed management, which she's surprised to learn is even a thing.

cord goes into a worldbuilding, worldbuilding, worldbuilding explanation of how the dream feed might let a few dozen crushroutines slip through in a day, and those might end up creating a feedback loop the next day, and when you multiply this out by millions of androids existing for hundreds of years since the system was set up, it becomes statistically unavoidable that once a decade you'd get a "magnitude six" amplification and once a century, a "magnitude eight."

bitsy doesn't know what that means, so cord tells her: the android equivalent of old-style human "sociopathic or even psychopathic behaviors." and from there, he segues through an admission that he wouldn't normally reveal this sort of thing, but because he likes her (hooray!) and because he just found out he has to leave on the next train (what?!?), he's giving her the background to assure her he's not leaving because he's blowing her off.

so after a couple of shorties, this was a real-deal chapter. i mean, not like a real book's real-deal chapters, but a lot more of a real chapter than some of my earlier two-paragraph ones. worldbuilding out the wazoo! relationship progress! possible romantic triangle tension developing? (not that it looks much like bitsy would ever have an interest in boring gigory over real cord or anything.)

it really makes me feel like i should jump right into writing more once i review these last couple of chapters!

xoxo,
claire

review! love and realness, chapter eight!

right to it!

more misadventures with this artificial potted fern. she tries to hide behind it, realizes all she's doing is keeping cord from seeing her when gigory already has, then tries to push some fern fronds out of her way to get cord's attention -- which works, but tips the whole potted plant away from her and into some androids at the neighboring table.

i don't know if i'd call this the most original physical-comedy-of-errors bit i've ever read, but it's pretty funny, and then gigory comes to her rescue, tipping the plant back upright and kindly checking on the neighbordroids who squawked at the sudden fronding they'd been dealt.

and ... end scene right after both cord and gigory ask bitsy if she's okay.

even shorter than the last chapter!

holy moley, i'm starting to remember how short this book is. i mean, yeah, i was aware i worked on it for several years ...

uh-oh, now i'm clicking on links to see how many years ... ugh, even more uh-oh, now i've found out: eight! eight years! and as long as we're counting, actually, eight and a half! wow, i'm bad at this.

it's kind of coming back to me now that after eight (and a half) years and 11 chapters, i never even got to 10,000 words. msg has probably written close to that much in a day when he's really on a tear. how does he do it?!? (so obviously, i know how he does it, i've been living with the dude for going on 18 years. he just sits down and writes. and when you sit down and write every day, or most days, or at least a couple of days every week or two, it adds up. and the more used to doing it you get, the easier it is to cram in a lot of words even in just a couple of hours.)

three more chapters to review, folks. then i have to face the music and decide if i'm gonna push myself to keep doing this or throw in the towel.

on the plus side, i am actually enjoying this reviewing bit!

xoxo,
claire

late!

yep, i'm super-late with my next love and realness review.

and yep, i'm going to be even super-later, because tonight, it's late-as-in-past-our-bedtime late, so no reviewing before hitting the sack.

but ...

tomorrow!

(for sure!)

xoxo,
claire