two days in a row! score! i feel totally back on track now. let's get to it!
more on this dream feed thing, and ding-dang jangle-jang, i want one of these! a gizmo that makes your dreams reach a perfect moment of closure right in time for your alarm to wake you up? why does this have to be fiction???
pfft! and now bitsy's getting ready for her morning coffee-date, to be followed by work, and part of it's "emptying her recycle bin in the toilet." who goes this all-out making an android realistically human? (it's me, obviously. lol, i did that!)
but you know, as immersive as all these android details are, it's the real-life ones that make the story feel alive, you know? like bitsy panicking because she sees a passenger she's used to seeing on her normal train and freaking out because if she's on her normal train, that means she's going to be late for her pre-work date -- and then coming down from her panic when she remembers that it's wednesday, and that passenger is never on the train with her on wednesdays. not only am i feeding the reader a new angle on a bit of bitsy's reality that had been mentioned before, but i'm also feeding them some reality in the form of this background character having their own life completely separate from the plot of the story. (wait! did i just spoil the fact that this asian girl with weird makeup isn't ever going to show up again? maybe ... or maybe i'm saying this as a red herring because she's totally going to show up again. or maybe i don't actually even know myself.)
the doors open ... she looks around for cord ... their eyes meet, and ... no boom, no fireworks -- cord smiles but looks like he's having to force it. uh-oh. trouble in paradise for bitsy?
cord's explanation when she asks if his day got off to a bad start is that someone ditched on him for a work appointment later. but he lightens things up by saying his day would have been off to a much worse start if she'd been the one who ditched.
more worldbuilding! cord asks her how she got into her work field, and she's puzzled because the answer is what it is for most androids: she came off the factory line and went to an employment office, and they used a copy of her "childhood simories" and "simucation" to figure out an ideal job for her. the implications abound! and then bitsy realizes that cord has to ask because he's real, which means he didn't go through the routine most of the androids go through.
okay, and now this part is pure bitsy: they're getting near the front of the line at the coffee stand and she suddenly remembers she doesn't like coffee!
did i mention i keep getting impressed by the swearing in this book? instead of "oh, shit," bitsy thinks, "oh, shorts." which for a second sounds like she's cursing with a garment name, and then you realize it's "shorts" as in "short circuits." (or at least, with my semi-awful memory, i realize it. maybe you caught on right away and showed the author herself up.)
and of course the coffee sizes are memory prefixes.
even more world-building! cord reveals his work sometimes takes him out of town, and bitsy's immediate curiosity means it's an oddity for people to leave the city. what's up with that? bitsy wonders if she should make small talk by mentioning that she went out of town to "the parklands" as a kid because her family's lottery number comes up, but stops herself because she thinks a real wouldn't have any interest in her "implant memories."
and the cliffhanger arrives! bitsy finishes stirring cream and sugar into her coffee and steps aside to look for a table while cord uses the counter to prepare his own cup -- and who does she see entering the end of the line? gigory!
i'm thinking (and semi-remembering) things are about to get awkward in chapter seven!
xoxo,
claire
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