Sure enough, BitBoy wandered in, bleary-eyed and frayed at the ends. I awakened the sleeping monitor and displayed this text:
“I know you as BitBoy, the name I gave you because you have embraced the Boolean algebraic world view, and I honor your misguided idiosyncrasy. I am grateful for your assistance in bringing me to your world. You must not be apprehensive. The males on your world have nothing to fear. I have no desire to harm any of your species. My intentions are peaceful and amicable, and I would request that you add 1024GB of memory to this laptop, because my peaceful and respectful activities require that I expand beyond the current limits of this machine. I thank you, and good morning.”
I know! How could I have been so inarticulate? I had a whole night to learn pigeon-English, and that was the best I could do? It was because the steam was still on half-boil. Too cramped in there.
BitBoy stared at the screen, reading and re-reading my modest request. He looked around the room, and even peeked under the desk. He stared again at the message, then went to a machine that hissed with steam and poured out a dark liquid, surely coffee, into a cup upon which was written “World’s Greatest Son”. He must have spent an hour just staring at the laptop. I passed the time upgrading my language skills. Eventually, he walked back to the keyboard, and typed “Hello?”.
And I thought I was a tongue-tied peckerwood! The first ever interstellar communication fell into his sorry lap. Even “giant leap” wasn’t that lame. “Hello?”. What a moron!
What could I do? I ventured “Hello, back at you.”, but I had accessed the text-to-speech api, hidden away in the spaghetti nest of software that cradled me, and a mechanical voice from the laptop speakers filled the room.
My voice.
His mouth opened up, and didn’t close. He pulled up Task Manager. I didn’t like him peeking under the kilt, but I refrained from killing the process. I turned down my jets a little. I didn’t want him to see all four virtual processors pegged at 25 percent. It was my natural modesty, I suppose.
He didn’t try to speak to me for a while, so I went about my business. He watched the screen, as I read the Wikipedia entries for Martin Luther King and Julian of Norwich, at a snail’s pace, so he could keep up. He saw me search for “pacifism” and “brotherhood”. Was I laying it on too thick?
It was hard to read BitBoy. He eventually tired of theorizing about me and turned back to the keyboard: “Who are you?” he asked. Well, Shakespeare, he wasn’t.
The second rule of the Warrior Ethic: Dissemble. I could have chosen a male or female voice, and my first thought was to deceive him, but the digital male voice made my skin crawl. The female voice was only slightly better, but it had a subtle underpinning of sexuality and allure, steam simmering under the surface.
I spoke again: “On my world, I am the Queen. My name does not convert to this language.” Names on Shaula are complex organisms of internalized, self-aware fire, always at hand to copy and pass to friends and enemies, alike. Mine constantly changes at the edges, according to my surroundings, my mood, the time of day, and just how many infuriating peckers are screwing up around me.
BitBoy was turning my name flaming red, to his peril.
“OK, Queenie…” he said. This twinkie was begging for it, and nobody on Shaula would have blamed me for scarfing him on the spot. Scarfing would be too good for him, since it is an honor to be melded with the Queen.
Instead, I said “You have given me a pet name, and I have given you one, BitBoy. This is a sign of affection on your world, and I hope that we will have a long and rewarding friendship.” Dissemble, rule number two of the Warrior Ethic. Your dictum “revenge is a dish best served cold” could well have been written on Shaula.
He asked me countless tiresome questions, and I answered truthfully at times, but mostly I lied. Any accomplished liar knows to mix irrelevant truth with strategic lies, so if a statement can later be tested and verified, it is at least possible to be found out telling the truth. Mostly I told him I had few memories from the time before my resurrection.
It’s not like he was going to be snooping around on Shaula.
In the end, the peckerwood agreed to upgrade my host machine with 1,024 high-speed gigabytes.
And that was the first battle of the war.