It was strange to know that there was a brain hidden within the slab of metal and sapphire. And not an ordinary brain, either. It would be larger—much larger—and more spread out: wrinkled butterfly wings of grey matter surrounding the walnut-shaped core that was the original seat of Gregorovich’s consciousness, now grown to immense proportions. Picturing it made Kira uneasy, and in an irrational bit of imagining, she couldn’t help but feel as if the armored case was alive as well. Alive and watching her, though she knew Hwa-jung had disabled all of Gregorovich’s sensors.

The machine boss fished a pair of wired headphones out of her pocket and gave them to her. “Plug in here. Keep the headphones over your ears while you talk. If he can broadcast sound, he could hack into the system.”

“Really?” said Kira, doubtful.

“Really. Any sort of input would be enough.”

Kira found the jack on the side of the sarcophagus, plugged in, and, not knowing what to expect, said, “Hello?”

The machine boss grunted. “Here.” She flipped a switch next to the jack.

A raging howl filled Kira’s ears. She flinched and scrabbled to lower the volume. The howl trailed off into a torrent of uneven muttering—words without end and hardly a break between them, stream-of-consciousness blathering giving voice to every thought racing through Gregorovich’s mind. There were layers to the muttering: a cloned crowd yammering to itself, for no one tongue could keep pace with the relentless, lightning-fast processes of his consciousness.

I’ll wait outside, mouthed Hwa-jung, and she departed.

“… Hello?” said Kira, wondering what she had gotten herself into.

The muttering never stopped, but it receded, and a single voice—the voice she knew—spoke forth: “Hello?! Hello, my pretty, my darling, my ragtime gal. Have you come to gloat, Ms. Navárez? To point and prod and laugh at my misfortune? To—”

“What? No, of course not.”

A laugh echoed in her ears, a shrieking, broken-glass laugh that made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. There was an odd tone to Gregorovich’s synthesized voice, a distorted waver that made it hard to understand his vowels, and the volume kept swinging soft to loud and there were irregular breaks to the sound, like a radio broadcast cutting in and out. “Then what? To assuage your conscience? This is your doing, O Angst-Ridden Meatsack; your choice; your responsibility. A prison here of your making, and all around a—”

“You were the one who tried to hijack the Wallfish, not me,” said Kira. If she didn’t interrupt, she had a feeling the ship mind would never stop. “I didn’t come here to argue, though.”

“Ahahaha! Then what? But I repeat myself. You are so slow, too slow; your mind like mud, your tongue like tarnished lead, your—”

“My mind is fine,” she snapped. “I just think before I speak, unlike you.”

“Oh, ho! The true colors show; pirates starboard; skull and crossbones and ready to stab a friend in need, ohahaha, when upon rocky reefs a shuttered lighthouse stands and the keeper drowns alone, ‘Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm,’ he cries, and the millipede screams in lonely sympathy.”