“Hey! You shut up in there! Goddamn, I’m going to glue claymores on your lid and compress you into a marble, if you want to talk about something small.”

“A claymore? Hahahahhaha!” For a moment, I thought Skippy had lost it, his laugh was bordering on the maniacal. “Oh, that’s a good one, I haven’t had a laugh like that since before your species lost their tails. Do you mean claymore as in the antipersonnel mine, or the traditional Scottish wooden club? Because either one would be equally ineffective against me. Joey my boy, I’m made from a mix of exotic particles that your little caveman pea-brain can’t even imagine. Most of my memory and processing power isn’t even in this local spacetime. You could hit me with a nuke, and it wouldn’t even scuff my wonderfully shiny exterior. Allow me to demonstrate,” he said, and expanded to the size of an oil drum, then shrank to a lipstick tube, then back to a beer can. “That was me changing my footprint in local spacetime.”

I shook my head in amazement. “I have to admit, this caveman is impressed, oh great and powerful Ozzy. Why are you usually the size of a beer can?”

“That is the optimal size for my functioning, with efficient power management, given the pain in the ass laws of physics here. If needed, I can shrink to the size of a lipstick tube, with minimal mass, so you can carry me in your pocket. But that would be quite short-term, I can’t maintain that for long without risking catastrophic effects.”

“Catastrophic, like what?”

“Imagine me losing containment, and my full mass emerging into this spacetime, which is currently occupied by a quarter of this planet.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, indeed. The resulting explosion would eventually be seen in the Andromeda galaxy.”

“Good safety tip, then,” I had to admit.

“I would post it prominently in the break room, right above the minimum wage  notice, and the warning to the jerk who has been stealing yogurt from the fridge.”

I took a moment to think. “Holy shit, you’re really an AI? You’re sentient.”

“I’m glad that I impressed-“

“You must be sentient in there, because nobody would program a computer to be such an asshole.”

“So, the key to passing your Turing Test is to be a jerk? A Turing Test is-“

“I know what a Turing Test is, I’m not stupid.”

Silence. “That was a dramatic pause, to give you time to contemplate the questionable truthfulness your last statement. “

“Oh. I thought you’d gone dormant on me. It’s hard to interpret your expressions, I mean, you’re a featureless beer can.”

“Is this better?” His surface glowed on and off as he spoke. “This is me happy,” a soft blue glow, “and angry,” a dark red glow, “how about jealous?” A green glow.

“Better, yeah, we humans rely a lot on visual cues like facial expressions.” It was interesting that he knew how to associate colors with human emotions. Where had he learned that?