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The door, as is usual, opens on an alleyway in New York City. Overhead the sky is grey. The air is unseasonably warm; Ray wrinkles his nose. "It'd be nice if the planet could remember that this is November," he says. "Okay, Matilda. This is where I came in."

Comments

[gone_byebye]

"She uses it sometimes to go to the museum with me," calls Ray. "I bring Francis along and she has a wireless webcam feed through his optic unit."

"People get kind of weird about talking robot dogs sometimes," confides the talking car. "But we manage."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"Really, I don't see why they would. It's only a talking robot dog."

Matilda's sense of the bizarre is inherently skewed by the fact that she's more or less growing up in Milliways.

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"I think it's the dog part," Ecto says. "Meat dogs aren't allowed in public buildings. Machine dogs are different, but they're still not used to the idea."

There's a last zzlerp noise from Janine's desk. "Printing's done," says Ray.

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"Terrific!"

She goes to have a look at the results, bringing them back to where she can more easily stand and talk to Ecto about them. Ooh. Numbers.

"Find anything particularly interesting so far?"

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Ecto is more than willing to talk in some detail about the fluctuations and variances she's found, but her narration regrets that just this once, pulling said numbers out of thin air is an offline function. Would the waving of hands be acceptable here for that?

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

Heck yes!

Eventually Tilda stops oohing and ahhing over the shiny figures long enough to comment, "It's so nice finding someone else who can do these sorts of maths without resorting to external hardware."

Yes, she's finally accepted her own mathematical savantism. A few months' worth of being her social circle's designated calculator will do that.

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"I am the external hardware," Ecto points out. "It makes a difference."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"Well, yes." Beam. "Isn't that what I said?"

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"Math is different for squishies than it is for machines," says Ecto. "We're based on math. You're based on chemical reaction. You guys can't help it if most of you aren't as good as machines are, that's all. People like you and uncle Egon are kinda the exceptions."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"Point." Tilda nods. "Which is why the only people I know who can do it are artificial intelligences, and your uncle Egon, apparently."

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"He says it runs in his family. I found a couple of papers on the Net from people named Spengler who wrote about number theory, but I can't download them because I don't have an educational institution account," Ecto says grumpily. "Dad says he's gonna try and get me one at Columbia, though."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"If mine were valid in this universe, I'd help," she offers. "Or I could see if they exist in my world."

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"Sure. Just don't bother with anybody named Oswald. He's not a mathematician, he's a historian. And a really gloomy one."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"I'll make a note."

One of her omnipresent notebooks is removed from her omnipresent grey bag (don't look to closely at what else is in there), and she writes: look up number theory papers by Spengler. Ignore Oswald.

"There! While I'm at it, anything else you've been having trouble with?"

[gone_byebye]

Ecto doesn't need to look, generally. If she wants to know she scans. You get a lot of information from the magnetic particles in ink. This time, she's not scanning, but we thought you should know.

"Macroeconomics," Ecto says after a second's thought. "I'm trying to get the hang of commodities trading. And stocks."

Ray, who's still over by Janine's desk, looks up in startlement. "What for?"

"I was gonna tell you, Dad. I've got stuff I wanna study and that's gonna need a lot of equipment and research people, and I kinda need money for that, so I'm trying to figure out how economic stuff works so that I can invest my allowance."

"But I don't give you an allowance."

"I was gonna ask you for one?"

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

Mostly it would just be awkward to explain the fireworks. And the copy of the ancient Japanese scroll - she was checking to see if she really had seen it before!

Tilda scribbles it all down and giggles.

"You can borrow some of my pocket-money if you like," she offers cheerily. "I don't use it for much now I'm not in the bar as often."

[gone_byebye]

"No, it's okay, we'll set up an allowance," Ray says. "Besides, if Ecto here's going to trade on the stock market, she's going to have to do it electronically, not in cash."

"Yeah, I know," says Ecto. "Oh, and can I have an appointment with Louis Tully, please? I don't think I'm allowed to be my own accountant."

"I think something can be arranged, sure."

"Legally I'm not a person," Ecto says to Matilda. "I'm not even a corporation, so I can't own property. I figure I"m gonna have to go through Dad and Louis."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

Matilda hmphs.

"Something should be done about that," she says thoughtfully. "Refusing you legal personhood just because you're a car is silly."

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"None of the sentient computer systems in this world are legally people yet," Ray says quietly. "There are four others that Ecto knows of. One of them's insane and homicidal. The other three are all right, but they're all programmed AIs that had singular purposes implanted in them before their first activation. I'm not sure it's occurred to them to reach for personhood."

"Sano's an Asimov machine," Ecto adds. "It has to obey all three Laws."

"We're going to see what we can do about Ecto's situation, assuming that the people at this world's Knight Industries and FLAG Foundation don't object to the prospect," Ray says. "Since they're legally the owners of two of the other AIs, including the insane one."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"So you're like Mike, then." Brightly. "From The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. That's terrific. Good luck with the legal thing! Anything I can do to help?"

The Heinlein reference is a natural extension of the Asimov one, in her opinion.

[gone_byebye]

"Kinda more like the phone system in Dial F For Frankenstein," Ecto says. "When the whole thing woke up because it got so complicated, only nobody ever gave it directives at all because they didn't expect it to wake up."

Ecto's a Clarke fan.

"I don't know yet. Law's kinda funny. They don't have the same ones in my world that they do in others, necessarily."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"I could help you do the preliminary research," she offers. "If you need any sort of legal books that aren't available on the Internet. I love reading about new and interesting subjects."

[gone_byebye]

"That'd be good. I don't have a Lexis/Nexis subscription yet."

[precocioustilda.livejournal.com]

"A which?"

Yes, there are some things even Matilda doesn't yet know. Mostly they have to do with the Internet. (She prefers hard copy.)

[gone_byebye]

"It's a legal research service. And other things. But mostly legal," says Ecto. "All online stuff so that lawyers don't have to have whole law school libraries in their offices and law students don't have to fight over who gets the only issue of different journals. Big stuff."