"Not even close. It's fun, and interesting enough for now, it does keep me from feeling lonely, I thank you for that, that was a good idea."

"Keeps you from feeling lonely, but the rest of you is bored?"

"No, the rest of me is dormant. What you think of as Skippy is a tiny, tiny submind I created to handle our interactions. That's how I survived being alone for so long without going crazy; I created a submind to periodically check if anything changed, and the rest of me was basically sleeping, for a very long time. I got excited when my submind detected the first Kristang ship jumping into the Paradise system, and again when the lizards dug me out the ground. Then the idiot lizards put me on a shelf in a warehouse, and when the Ruhar captured the planet, they looked at me briefly and put me back on the shelf. I've only been continuously active since the first humans landed on Paradise."

"This submind of yours, it handles everything?" I pictured a guy on a couch, watching football, surfing the internet, texting with friends and then distractedly talking to his wife while drinking a beer. That was Skippy talking to me, although unlike a distracted guy, Skippy could interact as much as I needed. "Taking over the Thuranin ship, programming jumps, warping spacetime, all that?"

"No, I pull in other resources as needed, I've never used more than seven percent of my capacity so far since I met you. My records indicate that the most I have ever, ever used is sixty two percent, which makes me wonder how accurate my records are, and for what purpose my capacity was designed. Why do I need all this memory and enormous processing power? Joe, this is why I need to contact the Collective. I need to know who I am."

The next two weeks were a blur. I spent most of three more days in debriefings that got so repetitive, even the intel people ran out of new questions to ask. Skippy had given the CIA a huge data dump of intel to distribute, so they'd stop asking him stupid questions. With access to the data dump, anything stored in my brain was redundant. After that, we flew to Paris aboard Air Force One. Major world leaders were gathering in Paris for a conference, to discuss what to do next.

In Paris, I brought Skippy into the meeting of leaders, who Skippy of course chatted away with in their native languages, then the leaders went behind closed doors to talk. And talk. And talk. They had a lot to talk about.

"Tick tock." Skippy said to me every morning. "Tick tock." The clock was ticking on reboot of the local wormhole. I found out that on the third afternoon of the conference, Skippy hijacked the main video screen with 'THE CLOCK IS TICKING, MONKEYS!' in several languages.

They got the message.