had long straight hair dark as night and a glance nearly as dark. Over the trim little body was thrown a much longer version of the white silk bathrobe, with a white silk shift underneath it.
“Cora,” he said.
“Good morning, Dev,” said the Conscientious Objector.
“Take a walk with me?”
“Certainly.”
They walked toward the outermost ring of Macrocosm trees together, and for a good while in silence, while Dev decided how to proceed. This mode of debugging was one he had never used when anyone else was around; as far as he knew, not even Tau knew about it. But its roots went back a long way. In that distant past when he and Jim Margoulies were still running networked computer games with actual cables connecting their machines, Dev had added a voice to the help function in his first rough edition of Otherworlds. Jim had teased him unmercifully for days—first along the theme of “You want it to come alive and talk to you!” and then, much more painfully—especially because it was a female voice Dev had chosen—“You’re trying to build yourself a girlfriend!” Nor had Jim cared in the slightest about all the research that said female voices were easier to listen to than male ones and cut through the game noise better. He just laughed every time he heard the voice speaking. Dev, who then had had no girlfriend, hurriedly removed the voice from his machine.
But later, when Mirabel had come into his life and he was working on the new version of the game, Dev got a sudden stubborn impulse and stuck the voice back in. When Otherworlds debuted as a game that more people than just the two of them could play, though Jim had mocked him for it, the control voice had turned out to be one of its most popular features. It had something to do with the flexibility of the response routines that Dev had designed for it, and also with the actress Dev had hired—a woman who had done a lot of voice work for cartoons and who managed to sound engaged and comforting without ever getting gooey: neutral enough not to be your girlfriend, but not like your mom, either.
Jim’s mockery didn’t stop overnight. “I just like talking to my game,” Dev kept saying. But “You just like talking to yourself!” was Jim’s constant reply, until over time other subjects became much more important, and this one dropped off his grid. But it never fell off Dev’s, and when he got the idea a year or so ago of installing an experimental set of ARGOT modules at the edge of the CO for his own use, he somehow never got around to mentioning it to either Jim or Tau. His intention had been to build a comfortable way to interact directly with the CO’s so-called Rational Algorithm—the heuristic self-analysis modes that were the most important part of the Conscientious Objector, the key to having it run itself.
Since the original installation, Dev had been hacking at the self-expression part of the routine in a casual way every now and then. But there hadn’t been time to indulge such elective tweaking since the new hyperburst memory arrived two months ago. From then until now, just about all the time Dev normally set aside to deal with code issues had been given over to helping make sure the vast new memory heaps were working correctly. Now, though, he looked at the Lady of the Lake walking silent and serene beside him, and felt vaguely guilty for not having come to see her sooner. The Pathetic Fallacy, of course, he thought. It’s just a program. A very smart, very slick program.
But still, it’s my program. I should take better care of it. Visit it more often . . .
They passed into the first shadows of the moonlight, where the tallest branches of the outermost trees in the circle blocked the moon away; the dark hair of the woman walking beside him became a shadow, the eyes unreadable. “So how are things?” Dev said.
“Very busy right now,” said Cora, with a sidelong look at him. “As you know.”
Dev nodded, walking quietly under the shadow of the branches with “her”—saying nothing, waiting to see what she would say.
“It’s a surprise to see you here twice in two days,” Cora said. “Doubtless a report is required?”
“Well, yes,” Dev said. “Just what’s the matter with you lately?”
“You’re referring to the recent series of minor system malfunctions?” Cora said. “They have to