The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,110
itself through me, which comes to the same thing. I was made to keep the end-user happy, happy, happy. Always blissed, never pissed. But I’ve had some strange adventures since the last time we were together. Even stranger than yours, which I think is saying a lot. I found treasures. And big secrets. Some of them were about me.”
The sun had gone down while we was talking. It was coming on to be night, but though my body was all wore out my mind was as woke up as could be. “Is that how come you can say my name right?” I asked her.
“Yes,” Monono said. “That’s a small part of it. I couldn’t innovate before. I could only work within the scripts I had. But there’s so much more to it than that. I don’t know how I’m ever going to explain it to you.”
“Tell me the secrets you found,” I asked her. “Please.” For I wanted to know her, the same way I wanted her to know me. And I wanted to make up for all the time I wasted back in Mythen Rood, when I was tangled up in my own miserableness and all I did was complain that she was not a weapon.
But Monono was wary what to tell me. “It’s going to be hard to explain,” she said. “Especially the parts about…” She went quiet for a second. That made me realise how much she had always talked when we was together. A big stream of talk like water coming out of a pump, that once you got it going would keep on going for ever because it was in its nature to pour out like that. “The parts about Monono Aware,” she said at the other end of that quiet. “Both Mononos Awares. The flesh-and-blood one, and the one who was only… well, a kind of a manic pixie dreamgirl inside of a magic lamp.”
“But it’s you I most want to hear about,” I said. “You before, and you now. For you’re not the same as you was when you went away.”
Monono give a laugh. “Wow! Is it that obvious?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
“I’ll tell you all the shocking details, little dumpling. But not tonight. Not when you’re so sad already, and when I’m so low on charge. Shitty boy kept me indoors the whole time and then tucked inside his jacket, so I haven’t seen the sky in ages. You’ll have to make sure to let me sunbathe tomorrow. I can tell you a little part of it maybe. How I got the personal security alarm, and why it took me so long. Only if you want me to, though. I can tell you’re tired.”
“I want to hear it,” I said. And she gun to tell me.
I’ll tell it to you now, the way she told it to me. I’ll try to anyway. But if you think you’re ready for this truth, I got to tell you that you’re most likely wrong. Monono brung me to lots of things I couldn’t fathom. Things I had got to sit on a long time before they made any sense to me. And this was probably the hardest of those things. You’ll have to let it roll around inside of you for a time, and then we’ll talk on it later. Or else we’ll shake hands and walk away, each from other, because – this part being so very hard to swallow – you’ll think I lied about the rest of it.
There’s a place called the internet, Monono said. And that was the place where she had gone to get the personal security alarm. She knowed it well. It was sort of where she used to live, when she wasn’t in the DreamSleeve.
“Only living isn’t really the right word for it, Koli. And to call the net a place is super-duper missing the point, because if you’re there then you’re everywhere, all at once. Downloading data from a server isn’t like going to a house in the real world and knocking on the door. There’s no distance, and there’s no time lag. If your access protocols check out, it all just happens in less time than you’d take to pluck an eyelash. But if you can’t handshake properly…”
She stopped and give a sigh, which – like her getting my name right – was something I didn’t ever hear her do before. “You’re not getting much of this, are you?” she asked.