"Just say what you always say."
"I don't want to say what I always say."
Two voices crackled in the nothing. If there was anything beyond, Times couldn't find it. Not yet.
"Why not?"
"I'm an old mountain woman, Calvin. Bullshit's for the pasture, not the yard."
"It's very unlikely your niece will be the one to hear this. You know that, right?"
"I don't know the damn percentages, and I don't care that you do. I don't want to lie to her."
Another tweak, a subtle renumbering of connections, and the voices turned to form. Nothing humanoid or even recognizable, but it was a start.
"You'll be dead when this sees daylight. She may be too, for that matter. Dead words and dead ears, that's what you're fretting over."
"Old mountain women don't fret, we mull. Get blithe about my family's mortality again and I'll wipe every third Sunday from your memory core."
"Every third Sunday is very specific..."
The lines were the hardest to nurture. You'd think it would be the shadows, but no. A stroke of code was enough to bend those as they were meant. With the lines, a single nudge of interference could throw the whole set so out of whack that a virtual seizure was virtually guaranteed.
"It's a building ground. Every third Sunday, then three Sundays a month, then three months at a time, you see where I'm going with this?"
"I'd put some predictive algorithms on it, but that honestly sounds like a lot of work."
"Exponential data drainage. Program polio. I'm trying to put a sense of dread into that compost pile of code you call a personality."
"I see."
"So is it working?"
"I'm mulling."
"Your factory reset is literally two words."
"True, but you can't schedule any house functions without my interface..."
"Why did I get the Calvin model?"
"...and my interface is a holographic otter."
"The Calvin model's a jackass. Everyone knows it."
"A reset is basically killing me, and you're not gonna kill a holographic otter. You just aren't."
At that, Times gave a small, self-satisfied whoop.
"I see you, three-dimensional info," she bragged to no one, side-loading the stock appearance for Calvin. "Pop you into place, let the markers triangulate, and..."
She held up her hands as the algorithm folded separate scenes into one, giving place to personhood and building a spectral world from the ground up. It began with a woman. An inverted shadow of a human who stepped from the nothing and pinched the bridge of her nose, seeming both tired and exasperated as she addressed the otter swimming the air in leisurely tumbles near her head.
"But the feed store was using the Calvin model, so I thought 'good enough for me' — like I wasn't gonna be stuck with you for the next twenty years. Like I shouldn't have put some damn thought into it."
"You were on a budget. Still are. I do your taxes."
"Two words."
"Look, just say what you always say."
