Much current opinion held that the supreme advantage of any artificial mind lay in its constant transparency, so this was a shock. What advantage could come to an Artificial that did not immediately know its own levels? That acted out of thinking patterns it could not consciously review? And a human couldn’t, either?

Since this was a property the Sagittarius Architecture shared, in a way, with humans, the discussion had grown heated over many decades.

And unresolved.

So Rachel went to her pod and entered. She told the staff to watch for any signs of trouble and put two different women on alert, eyes on screens.

“Hello again,” she said.

I wish you Good Day in English, Sat Shri Akaal in Punjabi, As-Salamu Alaikum in Arabic, Aloha in Hawaiian, Shalom in Hebrew, Namaste in Hindi, and Ciao in Italian. I cannot tip my hat, for I have no head. Nor can I kiss your hand, m’lady.

“Been studying up, then.”

Studying you, m’lady.

Now when Rachel engaged with it, she was acutely conscious of how the Artificial could change nature with quixotic speed. Swerves into irritation switched to mirth, then came fast upon long bouts of analytic serenity. She could make no sense of these jumps, or fathom the information she gained in these long episodes of engagement. The neurological impact upon her accumulated. Her immersion in the pod carried a jittery static. Her nerves were frayed.

“I wish to obtain the information on the hydrogen wall you—”

I fathom you. Very well—

Some fraction of the information the Sagittarius Architecture gave her bore upon the problem of heliospheric physics, but she could not follow this material at blinding speed. Pictures flashed, prickly sensations swept across her skin, muscles jumped. She conveyed the passages, many quite long, to Siloh.

The crisis over the Artificial’s demand seemed to have passed. She worked more deeply with it now, and so concentrating upon the exact nuances of the links, riding the flood of it, she did not at first react when she felt a sudden surge of unmistakable desire in herself. It shook her, yeasty and feverish, pressing her calves together and urging her thighs to ache with a sweet longing.

Somehow this merged with the passage currently under translation/discussion. She entered more fully into the difficult problem. Into extracting just the right subtlety from the slamming blocks of information that came flying through her. In the same intense moments she was fully focused, yet brimming with desire. An orgasm passed and fell away without her thinking of it at all. Then she did, and all at once she was not reasoning in one part of her mind but, it seemed, in all of them.

From there until only a few heartbeats later she ran the gamut of all previous passions. An ecstasy and union she had experienced only a few times—and only partially, she now saw—poured through her. Her body shook with gusts of raw red pleasure. Her Self sang its song, rapt. A constriction of herself seized this flood and rode it. Only furious joyful speed could grasp what this was, and in full passionate flow she felt herself hammered on a microsecond anvil—into the internal time frames of the Composite. Dizzy, blinding speed. It registered vast sheets of thought while a single human neuron was charging up to fire. Its cascades of inference and experience were like rapids in a river she could not see but only feel, a kinesthetic acceleration. Swerves that swept finally into a delightful blur.