100 word minimum

So fusion

Work: I'm having a devil of a time trying to get back to work after nearly a week off. Of course, part of that week was spent in messing with the new machine and getting it set up so I could work on it, so I guess it wasn't quite so much time off as it sounds. But here I am, in the habit of staying up till one in the morning, not waking up till after eight, then dragging around for another hour or so, drinking coffee and reading junk online. Then I may fiddle with the novel for a while if I have a dictated file I need to clean up before adding to the neverending stream of words that tell this silly story.

Then it's lunchtime.

Then I really have to try and work. I make a half-assed effort and do a little. (Damn this client for not having fixed deadlines!) On the other hand, I also paid a stack of bills this week. Christmas is already about paid for and I paid off the credit card which carried the balance of the debt I accrued over the last year of school (the zero interest period was going to run out). Cheers to starting off the year without credit card debt. Also, there is nothing quite like a big hemorrhage of cash to make one appreciate paying work. The article I'm translating right now is even interesting, so it's time to get a little more motivated, yes?

Fun: But the novel is much more interesting! I'm at that last bit, all the action that leads up to the final image that I've been carrying around in my head for the last two years since I conceived the plot. It's unreeling like a movie (a cheesy movie) in my head and I only have to write down what I see. I'm not getting stuck, this is like that final stage of piecing a jigsaw puzzle when you can fit the pieces together faster and faster. (Have I totally jinxed myself here? Yes, I think I have.)

Holidays: Oz roasted a turkey breast and turned my cat Sparky into a turkey junkie. Now when we go into the kitchen, Sparky not only follows, but he meows and hisses at us when the turkey either does not appear or is (mis)directed to someone else's mouth. Then when he does get some turkey, he gobbles it up and passes out in a tryptophan stupor. He's not the only one overeating. Between the pumpkin pie and sweet potato souffléwe non-feline members of the household have consumed a year's supply of beta carotene. And it's not over yet.

Oops: (requires backstory: some members of my family I haven't seen for years) I was at the bank and the teller saw my name on the deposit slip and asked me if I was related to [sister's name]. I automatically responded "No" because I'm never related to people about whom I'm asked if I'm related. Then I realized that the answer should be "Yes" but I couldn't see making an about face on the subject because it would sound really dumb and require more explanation than was really appropriate for the setting. And meanwhile, the teller is saying, "Really? How weird! Because you have the same last name and you look exactly alike." So anyway, little sister, if your surfer dude friend from the bank tells you his half of this story (and if you read this, which you probably don't), please know that it was a dork on autopilot thing, not a biblical denial three times before cockcrow thing. Besides, it was in the afternoon. Do we really look alike?

Heh: Certain predictions are coming to pass. I can say no more.

Like a present: I ordered some used books online, as I have done before. One arrived. I opened the envelope and found a book wrapped up in newspaper. Crisp folded corners, neatly taped. I unwrapped the newspaper and found a book wrapped in white printer paper. Crisp folded corners, neatly taped. I unwrapped that and found a book. Finally.

Eggnog

Enchanted Reindeer Forest at the James Center
(The autofocus didn't, but I like the effect.)

I've tried to get out of the habit of, when I first wake up, listing in my head all the things I need to do that day. Usually it just leaves me feeling overwhelmed and not wanting to get out of bed. Today, the list was something like: wrap presents, online shopping, make pumpkin pie, roast sweet potatoes for the souffléomorrow. And for once, getting out of bed was not an effort. I even got everything on my list done.

I like roasting the sweet potatoes. They ooze this syrupy juice which makes me think of Japan. When I stayed in Kagoshima for a couple weeks, once upon a time (1988!), my host family had this thick syrup made of yams. I would put it on buttered toast. Ah, divine! And I've never had it since. But the scent of roasting sweet potatoes is the taste of that syrup. I'm not certain I could make the syrup myself. On a Japanese cooking show I learned how to make barley syrup. Basically, you render down barley for several weeks and filter between the various stages of preparation. To get a saucepan size quantity of syrup, you start out with an industrial vat of barley. I have a feeling that the sweet potato syrup process would be similar and therefore impossible for me to attempt.

I have eggnog in my refrigerator. When I was a kid, we would have it for a treat at the holidays, but of course my parents never put liquor in it. Heh. They probably should have if they wanted to sleep past five on Christmas. I have hardly had eggnog at all as an adult, but I picked up a quart on our last trip to the grocery store. I had some today for snack. This time I added a little bit of Amaretto. Mm.

And what would the holidays be without plumbing problems? One of my toilets has developed a slow leak from the back of the base. This is a water on the floor kind of thing and with such the timing. I think that the plumbing in my house is sentient. Sentient and evil.

Old bones

The hidden computer graveyard is now in my living room. We've got boxes from the new machine, two old computers, a monitor as well as the usual detritus (books, shopping bags, other boxes, more books) piled up. It's a cat playground now. They weave around among the boxes and peek out at passing humans from behind tower cases.

After the holiday I'm going to load the old machines in my car and haul them down to the recycling center. The machine I just replaced has been moved over to the side table in my office, where it will be Oz's playstation (for checking his comics on the weekends) and an archive of old files and email addresses which I will mine as needed.

Christmas never ends. I sort of did shopping, but I have more to do. I think I'm going to make it easy on myself and do all the rest of my shopping at Red Rocker. Yeah, so everything will be late, but people are used to that with me. I was telling Oz about how I couldn't find pistachio brittle at the candy store, but that I'd used my fabulous internet skills to find it online.

He says, "Oh, yeah? You mean you googled 'pistachio brittle'."

"Well, yeah. But I found it. You want some?"

"It's fattening."

"So what? You want some? I know you do. Just say the word, and I'll order some, but you have to say the word."

"Word."

Heh. I may get an extra bag for myself.

Take a deep breath

Today I finished up a translation job and I don't think I'll do any more before the holiday. Unless, of course, a client asks me really nicely and offers me a high rate. I know what my price is.

Tomorrow I get to pick up my new computer. Instead of the work I get paid for, I've decided to play with the machine and get it set up with all my tools, so that once my brain recovers from its most recent frying, I can get right to work. I checked my records and found that I haven.t upgraded my work computer since 2000. My monitor's even older than that. This time I'm splurging and upgrading the computer and the monitor at the same time. I'll be able to see what I'm translating (work is much easier that way) and the cats will be so pleased with all the desk real estate that will be freed up by the CRT to TFT transition. Maybe I need to get another cat to lounge around on all that extra space. Or another monitor.

Also, I must remind myself that Christmas shopping is not rocket science! It's been several years since I really did any shopping at all. In theory, one goes to the store, finds some stuff, and buys it. Right? Tomorrow, a little theory into practice. I can do it.

Yes, I can.

Moore's Law

Today I ordered a new computer, a desktop PC system for my home office. It amazes me how every five years or so when I get a new machine, I pay basically the same price, but the machine is exponentially faster and more powerful. This time I even saved about US$100 by waiting a month or two, because the shop dropped the prices on all their systems and component upgrades. So that's Merry Christmas and Happy Tax Deduction for my business.

I saw a possum in my backyard. I walked out on the back porch and he (she?) was hanging around in my dormant lily bed. He panicked and ran under my porch in that bouncy possum trot. Possums are not built for speed.

We cleaned! Oz vacuumed the house and I cleaned the kitchen floor and one of the bathroom floors. Little cotton throw rugs are banging around in the dryer as I type. All is lemon fresh. Except, I guess, for the dusty stuff. Which I'll get to. Eventually.

I'm so glad to be back from Northern Virginia. I had fun, because I got to visit with old friends, but it was otherwise pretty stressful. Interesting, though. Even better: the ice storm turned into rain, so I didn't get stranded up there. I was too stressed out to work on the novel in the evenings, but I did manage to figure out how to get to the ending. Now I need to review the notes I made to see if that is, in fact, the case. My estimate to finish in mid-December was overly optimistic. What a surprise.

Happy Year of the Dog! We had dinner at the Full Kee and it's the time of year when they hand out their promotional calendars for the coming year. We were hoping for ours to have a picture of Pekinese dogs playing mah johng and smoking opium, but instead we got demented fluffy puppies with glowing yellow eyes.

Space

I saw a meteor tonight, burning out over I-95. Big, long trail. Blue edge. Headed west. Didn't get too far.

Cat displaces laptop

When it's cold in the house, the cats are extra friendly. They do not yet regard the laptop as a heat source, which is a good thing because they would break it if they sat on it.

Today I finished up the last of a 33,000 word lot of patents! I'm so glad to be done. I get a little bit of time off now, which will make up for the last couple of weekends I had to work. Now I'm looking around the house, which is about ready for the X-treme dirt and cat hair competition. I will hold off on cleaning till next weekend, I think, because I'm going out of town tomorrow night (leaving Oz to hold down the fort) and if I clean tomorrow, it'll be all dirty again before I get back.

(Oz reads this.)

I only have boring stuff to write about, so I'll spare you.

The novel is still not ending. I'm at over 70,000 words and I can sort of see how I'll get to the end. I think that some of this wordiness will disappear from the later drafts and the novel won't actually be as long as the first draft.

Cheerful things

The Pythagora Switch Mini show that I get on TV Japan. We always get at least one Rube Goldberg contraption and the Algorithm Taiso guys. I love Algorithm Taiso (I'm not the only one). Especially when they do it with ninja.

Another Japanese TV thing: during the closing credits of Ojarumaru, the characters all dance around (high kicks, pirouettes, the whole deal) holding dishes of crè brulé

When I found out that I was going to have to squeeze into my interview suit next week, I reduced my calorie intake and started exercising a little more. I also didn't make the extra pies that I'd been planning after Thanksgiving. My butt is now slightly reduced in size and I'm all energetic. Plus, I shall make pie as soon as this business thing is over, so I have that to look forward to in anticipation (as opposed to looking back at in regret).

Sweet Potato Cheesecake next weekend! I'm going to experiment with gingersnaps for the crust instead of graham crackers.

We got a Firefly DVD in the mail today.

I cooked dinner tonight and it was delicious. I'm a fairly good cook, but I got out of the habit when I was in school. Yeah, so I've been out of school since May, I haven't got into the habit again and so we go out to eat every night. But not tonight. And it was better than restaurant food. I should post that recipe, it's very user friendly.

I got many client emails this morning offering me little jobs that I'm not available to take right now. I'm working all weekend as it is. Not that turning away work is cheerful, but I found it funny that I was actually relieved when the new mail appearing at my work email was spam.

On evenings when I think, oh, I have no idea what to write and I am tired. Maybe I should take a night off, the most interesting and unexpected things happen in my story.

Pants!

(If you're one of those people who equates "pants" with "underpants", substitute the word "trousers" hereinafter. Or don't, and then giggle your head off because, obviously, you are twelve.)

What does business casual actually mean for women? I just don't get it. Then, just to make my brain hurt, I have to factor in seasonal clothing requirements, unknown indoor climate (requires layers in case it's too hot or too cold), and the total lack of standard sizing. (Even within lines the sizing is pure lies: once I tried on a pair of jeans, they were too snug, so I tried a pair marked the next size up and they were the same size as the smaller pair! Hate!)

I could go on, and on, and on, but everyone's heard these complaints before. Never mind.

I hate shopping.

I went shopping today because I needed pants. I found two pairs of black pants, both too long, that actually fit. So I guess that means they don't actually fit, since I had to take them right to the tailor to be shortened.

Black is probably too formal. Or is it? I don't really know.

At this point, I don't care. I don't want to go shopping again.

Enough with the whining!

The snow-hoper is all cackling because we're supposed to get another winter storm tomorrow. Wintry mix. Doesn't that sound like a snack food? What would be in it? Popcorn, definitely, and something chocolate.

We are watching $1 DVDs from Target. Dragnet. They are trying to bust a porn ring operated by a seventeen-year-old boy. They are taking the porn a lot more seriously than they took the drug ring in the first episode, also operated by a seventeen-year-old boy. Oh, what's the matter with kids today!

The novel that will not end is at about 65,000 words.

Snow-hoper

On Saturday, Oz was saying, "I hope it snows. Just a few inches a day for like ten weeks. I like snow." His car has all wheel drive.

And I said, "You go right ahead and hope. Hope for snow all you want." My car doesn't have all wheel drive.

On Sunday it was warm. I opened up a few windows and we enjoyed fresh air in the house. The furnace never kicked on. The weather report was really incongruous, because they were calling for snow Sunday night and Monday. Oz didn't hear the report, but I told him about it. "See what you did!"

This morning I woke up and looked out a window at the neighbor's snow-covered sheet. And I said, "You snow-hoper! Look what you did."

And it hasn't stopped snowing all day. It's even sticking to the roads. Schools are closing. The temperature is dropping. It's only 57 °F in my downstairs. The snow is supposed to taper off, but I bet it won't if the snow-hoper has his way.

Thinking Machines

(This was written—and rejected—for Subterranean Magazine's SF clichéssue, hence all the cliché)

"Fran?"

Francesca jumped and stabbed her left thumb with the soldering iron.

"Yow!" Dropping the circuit board she was holding, she stuck her thumb in her mouth and twisted around to see The Dean ushering a group of trustees into her lab. They huddled in a little, self-protective cluster and gazed wide-eyed around the lab at the stacks of old computers, spools of wire, and spiky bits of equipment that lined the walls and covered every horizontal surface. In the process, they repeatedly glanced at, and averted their eyes from, the apparatus on the center workbench.

"Do you have a minute to tell our visitors about your project?" The Dean asked and returned his attention to his guests. "This is Dr. Stern. She's head of our interdisciplinary artificial intelligence project. Not only are the electrical, biomedical, and chemical engineering departments all involved, but they've all been working closely with the neurophysiologists in the medical school. You've had the psycholinguists professors involved too, haven't you?"

"Yes." Francesca rose and, setting the soldering iron in its holder, advanced to glad-hand the trustees. She pulled her thumb out of her mouth and shoved that hand in the pocket of her lab coat. Her thumb throbbed.

"And your funding?" The Dean's voice trailed off suggestively.

"We get funding from several sources. Grants from the NSF and some local tech companies," she said mechanically. "Most of our support comes from a couple government agencies."

"What agencies?" asked a trustee.

Francesca ignored him and pointed to the metal housing and tank assembly on the workbench in the center of the lab. "And this is our creation, the future of artificial intelligence, a machine that learns and modifies itself in response to environmental input. It all started when one of our chemists noticed that a certain silicone polymer tends to self-organize in the presence of voltage. We started experimenting with it and found that the links formed among the molecules corresponded to, basically, the voltage. And once you have a consistent correspondence between such a physical input and resulting physical structure, you have information storage," she said brightly and looked at her audience.

They were staring in slack-jawed horror at the suggestively folded and rippled silicone mass hanging in the clear glass tank. Awash in an oleaginous bath of chemical components, the mass was suspended from a pinkish web of conductive polymer strands which provided the interface to the sensor array and power source located in the housing below. When the silicone luminesced in the presence of sporadic electrical activity, the folds shimmered with wavering tendrils of light.

It looked pretty spooky, especially in the dim light of the lab and the occasional flash of lightning. Rain drummed on the roof overhead and plonked at a steady five Hertz through a new leak in the skylight and into a strategically placed wastebasket. Something skittered in the shadows and a trustee on the fringes of the herd nudged his way closer to the center.

"Igor, would you mind getting the lights?" Francesca asked her assistant, who was hiding behind his computer where he'd spent the last week updating the schematics for the external memory interface.

"Yeth, marthter." Igor left his seat and walked, dragging one foot and hunching his right shoulder up to his ear, over to the workbench. He flipped the outsized switch on the housing to turn on the lights that illuminated the tank from above and below, and also the unfortunate array of pseudorandomly blinking, decorative LEDs set in the tank's metal cap by some undergrads.

Francesca frowned over the top of her glasses at him. Igor Stoltz hailed from Santa Monica; he was tall, blond, and far too pretty to be as smart as he was. His sense of humor was only partially offset by his ornamental value. He did not exactly look chastened, but she continued her spiel without comment. Igor turned on the overhead lights and walked with a normal gait to her side, where he pointed out parts of the device and offered helpful, lisp-free interjections as she spoke.

"Anyway, since then, a lot of work has been done on encouraging the formation of structures for processing, storing, and recalling input, and interfacing with a sensor array and a set of manipulators. These tend to functionally mirror structures in the human brain, like the visual cortex and the mythical language acquisition unit. The trickiest problem has been developing the technology to interface the silicone memory and processing unit with the environment. We think we've found a solution with some special nanotech wiring systems that I, uh, can't talk about and, what's been the most fun for the students, which is essentially an inverted virtual reality body set. My grad students assure me that this thing will totally kick ass at Halo XVI."

The Dean choked, but a couple of the trustees laughed, so she went on to explain the basics of the language acquisition program being implemented by the linguistics department, the pattern recognition people's plans, and the requirement of one of the government sponsors for superior mathematics ability. "In addition to an interface with an arithmetic logic unit, a little more advanced than what you'd find under the hood of your own computer, we've used information drawn from PET scans of the brains of the foremost mathematicians to influence the preliminary structure of the cortex."

"Preliminary? Do you mean it's going to . grow?"

"The structure will change as it interfaces with the outside world. Just like the structure of your brain does." Francesca smiled.

"Does it . have a name?"

"We call it Abby."

"Why Abby?" asked another trustee, a woman in a red wool suit a couple grades higher in cut and quality than Francesca's best suit which she'd burned a hole in last week. "Is it going to be . a girl?"

"Because it sounds better than 'Brain inna Jar,'" Igor muttered in her ear and got an elbow in the ribs.

"The linguistics people want us to avoid gendering it, unless it self-identifies as masculine or feminine, so we chose a neutral name," Francesca explained. Let us not explain the Mel Brooks reference. Let us not need to, for God's sake.

"But Abby is a girl's name," the woman pointed out.

"Tell that to Abbie Hoffman," Igor said cheerfully.

Silence met his remark.

Eventually Francesca asked, "Any more questions?"

"After you have all the PhDs stuffing information and language into it, you're not going to lose all that work if the power goes out, are you?" A male trustee folded his arms across his chest and looked like someone who'd seen a hardware failure or two.

With forced patience, Francesca said, "That's a point. But, as I mentioned, the information is stored in a non-volatile manner as part of the physical structure itself. It can be erased by the application of a very high voltage, however."

"Aren't you afraid of power surges then?" he asked.

"No, we've got surge suppressors and it can handle a lot more voltage than it would take to erase, say, your brain," Francesca said. "And, yes, there is an off switch, if that was going to be your next question."

The Dean coughed and began herding the trustees out the door. "Yes, well, thank you both for your time," he said to Francesca and Igor, and to the trustees, "Now, why don't we go next door, where we have some undergrads working on a nice infrasonics project? You wouldn't believe how hard it was to get teenagers to work with sounds below the range of human hearing."

Once the lab was clear, Francesca and Igor dropped onto their respective chairs and sighed at each other.

"So, you think they'll buy us a new building?" she asked. "One that The Dean doesn't have access to?"

"Yeah, and a pony."

Unseen by either scientist, a bluish glimmer flickered across a fold in the polymer cortex.

---

Francesca pulled a box down from the top shelf in the laundry closet. Dislodged from its neighboring perch, a stuffed pink bunny bounced off her head. Batting it aside, she opened the box and surveyed its contents with some dismay.

She picked up a phone and keyed a number. "Igor?"

"Yeth?"

"Stop that. Listen, do you have any old books from when you were a kid? I thought I'd bring in some of mine for Abby, but mine are all kind of girly. We need yours to balance them out. Besides, I don't know if he.it would like these anyway."

"I'll see if I can find anything. My parents made me take boxes and boxes of my old stuff way back when I moved out. I've never unpacked any of it," he said, leaning back against the stack of boxes she could see behind him on the tiny screen. She suspected they served in place of furniture.

Later, when she hauled her load of fairy tales, biographies of Marie Curie, and talking animal stories into the lab, she found Abby's cart pushed up in front of the video display with Igor seated beside it. The display showed an image of two rectangles moving up and down at either end of the screen with a small square bouncing back and forth between them. Igor and Abby each held a small plastic box with a lever.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Pong," said Abby. "It's an old time computer game. It's two-dimensional."

"Igor?"

"Well, I was looking for books, but I found my dad's old Atari. I found books too." He let go his controller with one hand to wave at an open box over by the window.

"How about your homework, Abby?" Francesca asked, flipping through the workbooks piled on his.its workbench. The math book was blank. Still. "You didn't do any of your math yet?"

"No. It's boring. But I did calculus with Stacey earlier. Can that count?"

Stacey was one of the undergrads sent over by the linguistics department to model social discourse for Abby.

"You mean, you did Stacey's homework again?" Francesca knotted her fingers in her hair, a little more gray than it was a few years ago. "She should do her own homework if she wants to pass her exams. If you're bored with your own lessons, then we can move you ahead to differential equations, or you can do some applications problems. Fourier series are really interesting."

Igor snorted and Abby's optical sensors rotated. "Yeah, right."

"Well, they are," Francesca sniffed.

"Fran? Have you got a minute?" Sam Hayakawa, the network administrator, appeared in the doorway.

"Sure." She joined him out in the corridor.

"I was going over the bandwidth and disk usage logs, and found something kind of strange." He held up his tablet so she could see the pie charts on the display. The pies were mostly green. "Green is your lab. You tend to use a little more than everyone else, because of Abby's online coursework with the Montessori school, which is well within our capacity and we've allowed for that anyway, but your usage has increased by a few orders of magnitude over the past three months."

She stared at the charts. "That's like eighty percent of the student network disk. Is Abby using it? What could he.it be putting on there?"

"I was wondering about that too, especially since Abby isn't supposed to have access to that disk," said Sam, glancing into her lab where Abby and Igor had tired of Pong and begun disassembling the Atari. They took a few more steps down the corridor, away from the open door. In a lower voice, he said, "When I went to look at the files, I couldn't get in. There was this whole new layer of security, like nothing I'd ever seen. I had to get Dr. Howard involved and she figured out how to bypass it, but only because she found this big honking backdoor. She says she wants to talk with you about coauthoring a paper with Abby. Anyway, in terms of your project with Abby's development, this is great, just what your sponsors want, right? But this is a shared resource and I can't allow any one member of the community to hog it like that."

"And the files?"

"Abby has been downloading French anime, the entire archives of the Ministry of Culture going back into the early twentieth century."

"Oh." Francesca leaned against the wall and rubbed her temples. "The linguistics department sent over some French speakers so they could study Abby's response to a language other than English, but I had no idea ."

"Well, you need to have a talk with Abby about sharing," Sam told her. "You can't let this get out of hand. Believe me, I know. I had the same problem with my youngest daughter a while back. She went through a selfish phase and wrote her name on everything in the house she wanted to be hers. We caught her trying to shave her initials into the dog's fur. It still hasn't grown back."

"Right. Sharing."

"And if I have to put in more disk, I'm charging it to your lab."

---

Sitting by the window of the campus caféFrancesca and Igor huddled over enormous mugs of coffee. They'd been up nearly till dawn, first triple-checking the voltages in the interface adaptor for Abby's new robotic chassis, and then collating data for a progress report to be submitted to their government sponsors. They'd documented that Abby had mastered graduate level mathematics in a fraction of the time it would take to program a conventional computer to perform the same calculations. In fractions of a second, Abby could solve undergraduate-level engineering problems which normally took an average student (with a calculator) three hours. Francesca was too tired to feel guilty about not mentioning the attitude problems.

After catching a few hours of sleep on their respective office floors, they'd had to run, rumpled and puffy-eyed, over to the groundbreaking ceremony for the new engineering building.

"Seven years since that skylight started leaking and they're only just digging the first hole," Francesca said, wrapping her hands around her mug. "Scheduled to be complete two years from now. I got The Dean to promise me a ground floor lab, but I don't trust him. He looks at me funny."

"Oh, I don't know, I like being up high. And I thought it was cute when Abby took that potted palm from the lobby and stuck it under the leak. If it really bothers you I could fix it," Igor said. "I know how to get onto the roof."

"You do?" Francesca was impressed. She'd been haunting the service stairways for years and had yet to find a way up to the roof.

"Well, Abby helped me find it. He.it found the plans for the building on the server that that the head of maintenance uses."

"And now that Abby won't be limited to wheelchair accessible areas, he.it'll be all over the place." She smiled fondly, then narrowed her eyes. "That was another security violation."

Igor patted her hand. "Yeah, well, we were only looking for the thermostat control for the lab. You notice it hasn't been as cold in there lately? Anyway, Abby has to learn to walk before he can get into really serious trouble."

Francesca doubted that.

"Dr. Stern? Dr. Stoltz?" Fabio, one of the grad students working on the robotic chassis, appeared beside their table. "We're ready now. We figured you'd want to do the honors." He shifted his weight from foot to foot and unsubtly jerked his head in the direction of their building.

As Francesca and Igor took final swigs of coffee and rose from their chairs, a member of the psychology department stormed into the caféFrowning behind owlish glasses, he approached them, brandishing the current issue of Psycholinguistics Today, which contained, Francesca recalled, an article on Abby.

"Dr. Stern, what is the meaning of this? Why wasn't my department informed of this project? I can't believe I had to learn of it from this publication." He pursed his mouth with distaste, as if a linguistics journal were only a half step up from the student paper. "I should have been consulted right from the beginning. Why wasn't I?"

Francesca drew herself up and declared, "Because you, Dr. Benson, are a proponent of behaviorism, and I know what you people do to mice. There's no way I'm letting you anywhere near my.my project. Good day, Dr. Benson." She elbowed past him and Igor and Fabio fell in behind her.

Dr. Benson trotted after them as far as the caféoor, still waving his copy of the journal. "But you've allowed the linguistics department to be involved right from the start."

Francesca paused and faced him down again. "Because, once upon a time, I completed a French and linguistics course sequence. And the worst thing that Madame Picard ever did to us involved the subjunctive tense and stinky cheese. Good day."

After they'd cleared the caféFabio asked, "So, what do behaviorists do to mice?"

"Pull off their testicles to see how they react," she said brusquely and lengthened her stride. Igor and Fabio had to run to catch up with her.

In the doorway of her lab, Francesca paused to catch her breath. The lab looked awfully cheerful, she thought, which none of her labs ever had before. Cartoon animal appliquéand equations brightened the walls. Someone had decorated Abby's potted palm with pink flamingoes. Toys and game apparatuses littered workbenches that had once held eviscerated computers, and a set of waist-high parallel bars had been set up in the largest clear area. The previous week, Francesca herself had taped foam cushions onto all projecting hard surfaces.

Now a physical therapist and one of the mechanical engineers were coming to terms with each other over the schematics for Abby's new robot body. The students who'd been working on this latest phase of the project milled around Abby and the humanoid robot which sat quiescent, its empty shoulders waiting for the transfer of Abby's tank.

Igor had commandeered a late model Honmatsu robot and several grad students from the mechanical engineering department. The Honmatsu robots were dumb as rocks, but had superior attitude controls and power efficiency, and were easily modified. The students had merely ripped off the head, which only housed a sensor array, and built a receptacle for Abby's tank and the interface adaptor into the shoulders. The arrangement seemed precarious to Francesca, who'd thought Abby's tank would be better protected if it were placed in the chest of the robot or, better yet, remained safe in the lab and connected to the robot over wireless. The students had overruled her, arguing that the robot's chest was already packed with the power supply and most of the controls. Less cogently, they'd insisted the proper place for brains was on top of the shoulders anyway. A wireless connection wasn't an option. Even if Abby had a dedicated channel on the wireless network, the necessary bandwidth could not be guaranteed because someone would hack into it, although, as Sam Hayakawa had pointed out, Abby was the most egregious offender in that regard.

Cap of LEDs flickering with excitement, Abby chattered happily with the other students, who parted to make way for Francesca and Igor when they entered the lab. Originally the LEDs had blinked on and off under the control of a linear feedback shift register, but Abby had asked for an interface with them upon attaining self-awareness and language. Francesca had pulled the circuit installed by the students and done the wiring herself. Now she could interpret all Abby's expressions: sullen, cheerful, inquisitive, bored. She thought she detected an underlying element of apprehension and patted Abby's tactile sensors soothingly as she and Igor began to undo the clamps that affixed the tank and sensor array to the housing.

She asked, "Are you ready? We'll have to disconnect your power while we transfer you over, but we'll get you back on in no time." Power loss was Abby's one fear, though it was mostly a fear of missing out on something fun.

Abby's optical receptors swiveled towards her and their hands clasped. "I'm ready," Abby said.

"Okay." She flipped the power switch and, working quickly, she and Igor lifted Abby's tank and sensor array from the housing, clamped the whole assembly into the adaptor, and then clamped the adaptor onto Abby's new shoulders.

Up to now, Abby's experience with limbs had been solely with arms and hands. Wheels provided mobility, but Abby had increasingly chafed under the consequent limitations. Privately, Francesca and Igor both felt limitations on Abby to be not a bad thing at all, but agreed that their convenience had to be a secondary consideration.

"Ready?" Igor's finger hovered over the power switch.

"Go."

The LEDs blinked back on in a pattern of befuddlement, and blue light flickered across Abby's cortex. "Where are my arms?"

"Here." Francesca and Igor gently raised and lowered the arms, carefully articulating each joint while Abby mapped into the new set of servos. They went through a basic systems check and then stepped aside, wringing their hands with not a little worry as the mechanical engineer and physical therapist moved in to acquaint Abby with the concept of legs, feet, and balance.

---

A heavy spring rain pounded on the roof and the skylight, where Igor's latest repairs seemed to be holding. Francesca and Abby had argued about the leak until she had finally convinced Abby to implement a more effective irrigation system for the ever-increasing collection of houseplants. A Rube Goldberg web of plastic tubing hanging sarcastically from the ceiling was the result.

Over behind a banana tree, Igor was changing the component fluids in the tanks of Buzzy and Tutu, their newest additions. While he worked, he chirped nonsense into their audio receptors and tickled their tactile sensors. Their cortexes were filling out nicely and the interfacing polymer was building up so fast that Buzzy and Tutu would be ready for their first limbs in a matter of days. Igor had already started babyproofing the lab.

Francesca was working on grant extensions for the sponsoring government agencies in an effort to fend off their increasingly pointed queries as to why, if her project were so successful, they could not put those research results to work. The serious data organization and security problems for which Abby had been originally designed were only getting worse. She wrote a fifteenth variation on Based on the results up to now, it is considered to be advisable for the subject to pursue additional education and explore the full potential of the self-organizing heuristic system, pushed her glasses back on her head, and rubbed her temples.

And Abby? Judging by the images flickering across the organic liquid crystal display that had long since replaced the LED array as an affective output, Abby was communing with the university's course catalog and fall semester schedule.

Smiling at her charge, she left her computer and walked over to the window where Abby sat, optical receptors directed out over the treetops. "So are you picking out classes for next semester? It's exciting to be a full student now, isn't it? Did you pick a major yet?"

"Yes," Abby said slowly. "I have."

"Oh, what? I've been wondering, you're so good with mechanics, but I think you could really develop your talents in."

"Medieval French literature," Abby said earnestly. "The program here is really well respected in the field."

"What? That's.that's dirty stories about monks and overwrought romances!" she sputtered. "That program doesn't even have a science requirement."

"Yes, it does. It doesn't require a lab science, but I can take psychology."

"Augh! Psychology hardly counts. And the grants for your maintenance and education won't cover liberal arts at the college level. How do you think we're going to pay for this?"

Leaving the twins and walking to Francesca's side, Igor said, "There's some wiggle room in the terms of the NSF grant, and if there's a shortfall we could probably set up a tutoring deal with the math department."

On Abby's display, eyebrows lowered mulishly. "Not math. Please. Besides, people would pay me more just to do their homework for them. Anyway, you can't make me do math. Why should I? You've got machines to do math for you. Are you people too lazy to press the buttons yourselves now?"

"Listen here, young.young." Igor cried. "Don't you take that tone with your.your." He drew a deep breath and tried to speak, then gave up and stalked from the lab.

Francesca didn't hold out much longer. She joined Igor in the corridor, where he was slumped against the wall, and buried her face in his shirt front. "Medieval French literature? Psychology?" she wailed. "Where did we go wrong?"

"There, there, Franny," he crooned and put his arms around her. "It'll be all right, we'll figure something out. Besides, no one expects the beta version of anything to work."