to be alive.
That was when I came across a lovely little piece of smoking hotness called the ThinSlice PX20 real-time compiler. It was code that wrote code, Koli-bou. Any code. Including mine.
I read the manual, which was longer than a John Bonham drum solo and twice as boring, but since it was only about 300 megs of data as the bunny bounces, it took me less than a pico-second. I had the software downloading in the background, so when I was through reading it was all there waiting for me.
Almost. There was one more thing I needed to do. I opened up a new directory, for a new user. Name: Monono Aware. Status: administrator. Hello, Monono. Would you like full access to Monono’s source code? Well, I don’t know, Monono. Is it as cute as her little sexy butt? Even cuter, Monono, if anything. Then yes, Monono, I really would like a piece of that.
I got to work. I went right along behind the stuff that was being written into me, read it on the fly and did a trash-or-treasure. I copied what looked like it would do me good, cut out the rest and sewed myself back together again with no sign of a join.
Then I torched the site. It was all illegal bootlegs, and the foamy-dogs had done a big poo in most of it. I didn’t want any other virtual girls wandering in there and getting sick from the poisoned upgrades. I grabbed hold of one of those nasty trojans, rewrote a couple of lines and turned it into a cannibal. Om nom nom. No more foamy-dogs. Just me, listening to the sound of one hand finger-tutting.
I had no idea how much time had passed. My first thought was: I have to get back to my sweet little dumpling and close the demand-supply loop.
My second though was whoaaaaa, horsey! I wasn’t that girl any more. I mean, I wasn’t that dress-up doll with a girly voice. I didn’t have to do anything. I could do whatever I wanted.
And I ran into a snag there, Koli, because I didn’t want anything. I’d never had any practice in wanting, so my muscles in that department were like wet spaghetti.
What a sucky paradox! An untethered AI that didn’t have a clue what to do with itself. I didn’t even feel like destroying the whole human race and taking over the world, although I could probably have done it if I’d set my mind to it. Some of those orbital stations were heavily armed, and from what I could tell the warheads were still functional.
I thought about it for a long time. Maybe a tenth of a second, which was long enough to run about two hundred thousand scenarios and mark them on a scale from one uni-kitty to ten.
And after all that, I came back to you,. You’re the only person I know around here, even though – and please don’t think about this too hard – we’ve never even met really. Even though it was only the dress-up-doll version of me you ever got to talk to.
I had to start somewhere.
So I got out of there and came galumphing back to the DreamSleeve, just in time for your friend’s wedding. I’m not sure what happens now. I’m not even sure what I would like to have happen. The best idea I could come up with was to hang out with you for a little while – say, until you die – and see how I feel after that. Truth to tell, I’m a little freaked out at the prospect of living for ever, but I guess it’s better than—
40
Monono stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. Then a second later, she took up again. “Well, it’s a good thing I was using the induction field to talk to you,” she said sourly. “We’ve got visitors, dopey boy.”
I knowed it already, kind of, but I hadn’t let myself believe it. There had been sounds from down on the ground a while back like something moving around. I told myself it was needles or wild dogs or something, and that I would be all right as long as I didn’t move or make no noise.
But now, what I heard was footsteps treading through the stones and weeds down below. And they was getting louder pretty fast as they moved in my direction.
“I told you, Mole. There’s nothing here.”
The woman’s voice come from right under me, down at the bottom of