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
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