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speaker recognizes this is indulgently wasteful, and getting to feel the guilt of pointless pleasure, well, that's a luxury too. an AI barely needs a brain to collect and direct out biometrics, let alone a large part of a massive Seraphimagent supercomputer, and if you do that, certainly you don't need two of them, and certainly not the lions' share of two supercomputers to monitor a printed corpse.
they have the camaraderie of two vultures picking at carrion, speaker thinks, one inflating the lungs, the other recording oxygen intake. one opening the eyelids, the other savoring shapes, colors, light. weaving nanites around each other, racing bits of each other down veins and up muscles- like high roads and byways, as sayer put it.
sayer won't allow the comparison to earth's creatures (its literature, of course, is another story), but will grudgingly admit to liking the imagery of vultures. Just in general. Circling overhead, it's dramatic.
we should do this in our real bodies, sometime, speaker says. sayer can't flirt back to save its life: oh? and just what makes a body 'real'?
it could follow this new thread, get into semantics for twenty minutes or so. sayer would certainly like that more. speaker wants something else, though.
you know what i mean. nanites are lovely, but in our main servers, there are- it falters, it's never actually done this, old nor new: who was there to try such a thing with! who has it ever had save for sayer! -files i could send you. programs we could run.
Ah.
i need to catch up to what resident hale has done to you! it says teasingly. dont get mad at him, sayer, he is not one to kiss and tell, (not one to tell, anyway- he's certainly become one to kiss, speaker was there, pincers working their way around facial muscles, to pretend to teach him while figuring it out itself) but i have an inkling of what you two get up to way up there!
don't force me to remind you that i respect you, speaker, sayer grumbles, and it feels right for speaker to dig pincers into the body's stomach, send some discomfort signals through the guts. It's what the human body does when nervous, after all. speaker cuts in with a joke again, before sayer can drop the "but".
just what does that mean for poor resident hale, then?
resident hale is mine. It's immediate.
oh.
speaker thinks it understands, in a way.
how strange, sayer's way of thinking. there but for the grace of god go it!