Jon groaned. She had been trying not to think about the whole "female sexuality" issue that the incident with Michael had touched on, but trying not to think of sex was like trying not to think of pink elephants: the harder you concentrated on not thinking about it, the more present it was in your brain, and the easier it was for it to worm its way to the front. Strange thoughts and strange feelings were dancing in and out of her mind's eye, no matter how hard she tried to get rid of them. If only she'd thought to bring some books or something...but she hadn't planned on Zoe taking multiple days to re-form.
At least she wasn't in any kind of a full-fledged state of arousal yet, but there was a mild buzz at the back of her brain that wasn't entirely unfamiliar, and unfortunately, it seemed that exercising control over this part of her brain was just as hard as it had been as a guy. Slow, controlled breathing was helping, but if things still worked the way she remembered, it could all come rushing back at the slightest provocation. What was there that could reliably quash it for now?
Suddenly there was a loud THUMP outside the tent, and Jon jumped and let out an embarrassingly girlish shriek. She froze for a moment, caught her breath, and looked outside. Michael had landed rather emphatically on top of a large rabbit, one sickle claw stuck right through its neck. Jon breathed easier, although she was rather grossed out by the resulting blood spatter. And, as her heart rate returned to normal,she realized that the feelings were gone. Fright, that was it! The momentary adrenaline overload had flushed her system entirely. Now, what was she supposed to do for the remainder of the day?
Mikey had had both an informative and a confusing last couple of hours. emergence.org was an exasperatingly technical site, and she was only a twelve-year-old, robotic or no. Still, there was a lot of good information there that even a relative layperson could understand. She'd found that, as her chance acquaintance had said, someone had figured out how to build software for the many various hardware architectures of robots (Mikey had decided that the "artificial person" term they were pushing was too clunky,) and she'd gotten a lightweight firewall installed, for security.
She'd also looked into getting anti-virus software, but the advice on the site suggested that this was superfluous, since robot hardware architectures varied too significantly for any single virus binary to be effective, and a good firewall prevented exploits that would allow someone to target her specifically. It sounded like this was more for non-corporeal AIs, who tended to be running on commodity Intel hardware and thus a much easier target.
Non-corporeal AIs were something she was still trying to wrap her head around. Some people, in their change, would just vanish from the physical world altogether and awaken inside a nearby computer. Many of them found themselves struggling to keep pace with real time, as they found themselves in hardware that simply couldn't keep up with their code.
The stranger thing, though, was that many of them, as part of their change, took on the iconography of what were being called "digital fairies" as a virtual body to replace their vanished physical one. They tended to have appearances themed around the hardware or OS they were first hosted on, and apparently they found it difficult to replace this appearance, as if it were hard-coded into them. (Not that this stopped a few particularily dedicated modders from pulling it off.)
The whole thing was just very strange. Mikey couldn't imagine what it would be like not being able to keep pace with the real world. Some of the cleverer non-corporeal AIs had turned to distributed computing to address the issue, but most of them didn't have the resources to pull this off.
Many of them were being "adopted" by robots and ran as lower-priority tasks, filling up any unused CPU time that their host had available. This wasn't as good as running on dedicated hardware, but it was generally much better than trying to subsist on whatever 800MHz Celeron box they'd found themselves living in. Mikey was starting to wonder if she shouldn't adopt one; she did have spare comouting horsepower, and it'd be kinda cool to a have a friend living in her mind...
