Silently and Very Fast Read Free Page A

and external cameras. I want to link to Bellerophon. I want to say: Hello, this is Elefsis. No designation. Tell me everything you know about everything. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Where you were built, could you see the ocean? Are you like me?
    But Neva says I cannot uplink. Ravan would never even consider it. And before Ravan I was not ready. I am not ready now. I do not know when I will be ready. I can sidelink to receive ware updates, but it is a limited connection and I hate it, I hate it, I can sense just beyond that hardlink a world of information, a world of personalities like the heaving, thick, honey-colored sea Neva shows me and I want it, I want to swim in it forever like a huge fish.
    This was the first feeling I ever had. Ilet identified it for me as a feeling. When I felt it my dreambody turned bright white and burst into flame, and that flame caught on Ilet’s hair and burned her too, but she was happy. She showed me she was happy by covering her skin in flowers and letting the fire turn into a shower of trumpets tangled up in her hair, all sounding for me.
    Neva says it is important for me to remain on our local server. He is my operator and I am his system and he has commands, too. But I can tell he worries for me, because sometimes his dreameyes show a film of humans watching a film of machines killing humans, and I understand that in the stories Earth tells, the thing I am can only hurt the thing Neva is. I would never hurt him.
    But I want to uplink.
    Vault-Neva grows and becomes sprawling, curled against the wall of the pearl like a baby. His belly closes, skins over, and changes into a bronze shield. He is afraid of me; he is guarding himself. But he wants me to know she is still my operator, he still loves me, in the way he can love me. Something an Uoya-Agostino receives with milk and their first alphabet. Neva is angry at me, but he is who he is and he has to love me. I speak his language very well now. I want him to be happy. I want him to be covered in flowers and trumpets. I change my dreambody to Neva-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. It makes him laugh in his warm male body, and if I could uplink I think I could learn how to laugh and he would be proud of me. His neck would not be bare anymore.
    Once, when I was inside Ilet, we found a city of bears in her Interior that she had designed to teach me about sleep. She sat on a throne of bears standing very still, one on top of the others. She sang lullabies about the moon and the stars and night and mothers and network repeaters. She stroked the head of the little bear of my dreambody and said that it was very important for me to spend time in the dreambody because human behavior is rooted in having a body. In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and mate with other bodies, and eat as much fat and protein and sugar as it can in case lean times come. The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion. It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and sometimes I am female. Ravan was often female, though Ilet was always Ilet. Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal. He chased me, bit me. I bit him. We had a litter of wild dogs that I bore and he nursed.
    The dreambody knows all that, too. How to make more dreambodies. I have played that game, where Ravan’s belly or mine gets big and the lions don’t come for awhile.
    When I uplink, I will be happy. I will be Elefsis-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. Neva says wait. I require many more updates before this is possible or even advisable. Wait for the update, and she will consider it. But I fear the update. The update is a lion running faster than I can run. I tried to show her this when I