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that!" Robbie said. "The thrill of discovery is so important."
"I'd rather be safe than surprised," she said. "I've had enough surprises in my life lately."
Robbie waited patiently for her to elaborate on this, but she didn't seem inclined to do so.
"So you're all alone out here?"
"I have the net," he said, a little defensively. He wasn't some kind of hermit.
"Yeah, I guess that's right," she said. "I wonder if the reef is somewhere out there."
"About half a mile to starboard," he said.
She laughed. "No, I meant out there on the net. They must be online by now, right? They just woke up, so they're probably doing all the noob stuff, flaming and downloading warez and so on."
"Perpetual September," Robbie said.
"Huh?"
"Back in the net's prehistory it was mostly universities online, and every September a new cohort of students would come online and make all those noob mistakes. Then this commercial service full of noobs called AOL interconnected with the net and all its users came online at once, faster than the net could absorb them, and they called it Perpetual September."
"You're some kind of amateur historian, huh?"
"It's an Asimovist thing. We spend a lot of time considering the origins of intelligence." Speaking of Asimovism to a gentile -- a *human* gentile -- made him even more self-conscious. He dialed up the resolution on his sensors and scoured the net for better facial expression analyzers. He couldn't read her at all, either because she'd been changed by her uploading, or because her face wasn't accurately matching what the her temporarily downloaded mind was thinking.
"AOL is the origin of intelligence?" She laughed, and he couldn't tell if she thought he was funny or stupid. He wished she would act more like he remembered people acting. Her body-language was no more readable than her facial expressions.
"Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to s