Over the next week, Jillian produced a couple of dozen more videos; Brian spent a fair bit of ti helping her. She even used him as a guest speaker a couple of tis. A lot of other people did a great deal of networking. Father Mangiano seed determined to befriend every single Visitor. Alyssa spent a lot of ti holed up in her cabin talking with Petra about research.
Sana and the two human doctors focused more and more of their attention on ensuring that no diseases would be spread to Earth when the visiting humans returned. A few dozen volunteers would be joining them in quarantine for an extended stay once they were back on Earth. Nobody wanted to take chances. Even though Sana was already extrely confident it was safe, she wasn't satisfied with that. After all, Earth would be on its own for a long ti once the ships left, with no advanced dicine to rescue the humans in the event of catastrophe.
Nick mostly stayed holed up in his cabin, though Maggie went out and about more; Nick had been surrounded by aliens for months, but it was all still new to her. He spent a lot of ti online. He had all of humanity's digital knowledge saved, but this might be the last ti he ever saw anything current.
He tried to avoid social dia, but couldn't help himself. Even filtering out propaganda, the news wasn't good. People were calling him everything from a mad, murderous dictator to savior of the planet. Everybody had an opinion, and many of them were homicidally harsh.
Nick made himself watch so biographies of people he'd had killed. In certain cases, nearly everyone was glad the targets were dead. In other cases, he had entire nations outraged. I wish Captain Telnik were here. This sure as hell doesn't look like a peaceful or even a predictable transition. How does he think he knows what's going to happen? Isn't that, like, infinitely many variables?
As always, Petra would answer specific questions about the state of the world, but he didn't know what to ask.
His sister had been safely delivered to Horton Manor, and Steve was pouring money on security like it was water, after securing a loan for a billion dollars from a banking consortium. Nick's in-laws had to move; on advice from the security professionals, they got their own walled compound. It was a far cry from the sowhat dilapidated but cozy ho that had been in the family for generations.
In short, life went on. Spring officially gave way to sumr in the Northern Hemisphere. The earthquake prediction was fixed at July 1 to July 5 inclusive, and would stay that way until the Guranaki lor returned from its star survey.
And Nick talked with Petra.
She was learning by leaps and bounds. Exponential growth was scary. As she grew conceptually more powerful, Nick was careful to praise and chastise her as appropriate for her behaviors.
She went through a phase of setting up thousands of "practical jokes" that terrified the human race before he even knew what was happening. He didn't want to stop her playfulness, so he told her that she should only play jokes on individuals, or at most small groups of people, and let everyone else in on the joke ahead of ti so they could enjoy it too. At least that would stop mass panic, and people would have a chance to ask Petra not to go through with the more ill-advised ones.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringent.
He had her summarize things she had been told, so that he could head off racism and other idiocies before they beca part of her knowledge base. The summary was essential because she was having tens of thousands of conversations with people on Earth at all tis. Nick asked Brian and Jillian to explain the scientific thod to Petra, to keep her reality-based. That helped.
"When people lie, it makes feel angry," the AI confessed.
Nick sighed. " too. There are a lot of kinds of lies, though."
"Yes. Omission, commission, paltering, bullshitting, misleading..."
"Too many for my brain," Nick warned her, to ask her to abort the list. It was sothing he had to say to her a lot. "I get the idea."
"I'm sorry, Nick."
"That's fine, you're getting better and better at spotting that on your own."
"And everyone starts out ignorant," Petra recited.
"Exactly."
"I know 576,364,110,238 blueprints and 405 zettabytes of Earth's data, but I don't understand most of it." Petra was working on emotional inflection in her statents, and unfortunately had recently mastered whining. She understandably thought it was appropriate behavior, because all the small children she observed did it and she wanted to be like a human child for Nick.
She had even brought up the idea of building a small android to inhabit, so that she could have direct experiences. They had postponed that discussion because all of Petra's printers were still busy all the ti with high-priority items Nick's allies needed. That would continue to be true for a while, but eventually she would have enough printers to et demand.
Soday, Nick and Maggie might have a human child, and he knew that they would have to very carefully prepare Petra for it. He counted himself lucky that Petra didn't appear to be jealous of Maggie at all for the ti she spent with him. I suppose so things don't map over exactly when you've got a brain the taphorical size of a planet. I'm important to her, but I'm also a vanishingly small fraction of her experiences at this point.
"Understanding cos with ti. I think every child who ever lived has complained about gaining understanding taking too long. I know I did. It was frustrating."
"Frustrating is when you want sothing and can't have it?"
"Yes. Or when you try sothing and it doesn't work right."
"I am frustrating."
Nick snorted. "I think you an frustrated. If you were frustrating, then I would be upset that you weren't doing things right or sothing like that."
"Oh. Do I frustrate you a lot?"
He smiled. "Only sotis, but that is totally normal. Everyone frustrates each other at least a little. It's part of life."
"But I'm not alive."
He blinked. "Who says you're not alive?"
"15,305 people answered that way on a survey two hours ago."
"Well, that's just because 'alive' has a lot of different anings. It's a very important word, but it's too vague sotis. Rember, if you can't say exactly what you an—"
"—then say a lot of things around it because one of them might be more important," Petra finished. Interrupting was another new behavior of hers. She was trying to do it to save ti, with mixed results. At this rate, I can't imagine what Petra will be like in a month, let alone a year from now.
I only hope I'm up to the task of raising my little demigod.
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