"As with so many other scientific advances, the machines in your body were designed for one purpose, but turn out to have other, unforeseen applications as well.  Some of them are quite sinister.  I assure you, you have not experienced any of those."

"It seems sinister enough, if what you say is true."

"Oh, it's true.  And it was done for a good reason, which I'll get to in my own time."

"It seems that's something I now have an infinite supply of."

"You could, you could.  Where was I?  Oh, yes.  These devices, most of them originally designed and installed to monitor and control basic bodily functions at the cellular level, or to augment learning and memory, among other things, can be used to achieve some effects that were never envisioned by the designers."

"And those designers are . . .?"

"Well, me, in large part."

"I just wanted a reality check.  I do know a little about how you work, and just how important you've become to civilization.  I wanted to see what sort of fool you took me for."

"Not that sort, at any rate.  You're right.  Most technology long ago reached realms where new designs would be impossible without a great deal of involvement by me, or a being a lot like me.  Often the original impetus for a new technology comes from a human dreamer-I have not usurped that human function yet, though more and more of such advances as we see in our surroundings are coming from me.  But you've caused me to stray again from the main point.  And . . . do you have any more of that whiskey?"

I stared at him.  The charade that a "man" was actually "sitting" in a "chair" in my "treehouse" drinking my "whiskey" was getting a bit too much for me.  Or should it have been "me?"  No matter what other hocus-pocus the CC might have worked with my mind, I was completely aware that everything I was experiencing at that moment was being fed directly into my brain through that black magic known as Direct Interface.  Which was turning out to be even blacker than I, a notorious resister to D.I., could ever have guessed.  But for some reason of his own, the CC had decided to talk to me in this way, after a lifetime of being a disembodied voice.

Come to think of it, I could already see one effect of this new face of the CC.  I was now thinking of the CC as "him," where before I'd always used the neuter third person singular pronoun.

So I got up and re-filled his glass from a bottle nearly half-full.  And hadn't it been nearly empty the last time I'd poured?

"Quite right," the Admiral said.  "I can re-fill that bottle as often as I wish."

"Are you reading my mind?"