"Are you sure about this?" Mikey asked. The download from emergence.org had taken a while, since the wireless reception in the school was so bad, but the checksums matched, so everything was okay. She'd unpacked and compiled it as a native service; running a tracer/debugger for a virtual machine on that virtual machine would be needlessly complicated. All that remained was to install it and let Effie have access.
Effie nodded. "I'm sure. This is read-only, so there's no way it can screw anything up. Heck, I don't even think it can pause a process and step through! I just want to get a look, that's all."
Mikey nodded and completed the install, adding the appropriate permissions for Effie to use it. The ME fairy paused, took a deep breath, and opened the debugger, targeting it at her process ID.
A window materialized in front of her. Like most programmers' tools, it was spartan and not particularily pretty; just a group of controls for adjusting the view, and a box with a list of disassembled instructions.
Effie had done a little reading on the architecture recently, when she had time and wasn't too distracted. This was one advantage digital fairies had over other AIs; where a robot might have any kind of strange one-off machine architecture imaginable, and the few AIs who'd wound up running directly on existing hardware were closely bound to its instruction set, digital fairies ran in an identical and perfectly cross-compatible virtual machine, the architecture of which had already been dissected and documented.
Thus, after a couple afternoons of reading, she was able to understand, at least on a basic level, what the instructions in front of her meant - at least individually. It wasn't quite as low-level as assembly language, but the instructions were still pretty short and simple - which meant it took a number of them to do anything of any real complexity.
Effie knew that she didn't really have a chance of keeping up with program execution on this, because the very act of observing this was part of the program that comprised her, but maybe she could just look through one part and get some insight into how things worked. She picked a spot that seemed like a coherent sequence of instructions and began to follow it, trying to think through the flow of the program in her head.
She was just beginning to follow it through when whatever part of her was currently executing paved it over with entirely new information. Okay, maybe that was a data area that just looked like valid code. She picked a new spot and started again.
This time she managed to follow it until it came to a clearly loony point in which it read and stored the same value to and from the same location over and over again - another bad guess on her part?
No, she quickly realized that Bonzo hadn't been kidding when he'd said she was complex. She followed the logic of her own code for the better part of an hour and saw so many baffling things - code that picked up instructions and used them as constants in math calculations, seemingly endless loops that shifted bits this way and that until, almost by chance, they mutated the loop instruction into a branch to somewhere else, vast swaths of seemingly meaningful information that regularly got overwritten just before the instruction pointer passed through, things that she understood neither purpose nor the operation of...
Effie quickly began to grow irritated. Was there nothing in her code that could simply be followed without making her head explode? Was she really such a tangled mass of chaotic yarn-snarl? What did that say about her? And how could she ever hope to understand herself well enough to alter her form if she looked like this under the hood? She sat down, huffing in exasperation.
"Hey," Dennis said, walking over and sitting down next to her, "you okay?"
She growled, trying to fight back tears of frustration. "It's all so insane!" she said. "How am I supposed to understand this if it won't even stay in place long enough for me to make sense of it?"
He nodded. "No kidding," he said. "That was some serious 'Story of Mel' stuff there. I gave up after ten minutes."
She frowned. "Ugh, as if the rest of this wasn't bad enough now I find out that I'm a mass of crazy spaghetti code...argh!"
Dennis shrugged. "I dunno," he said, "I thought it was kinda cool."
She stared at him. "Well, I'd never want the job of maintaining code like that," he said, "but...it works, it's fast and compact, and as crazy as it is, it's still stable. You've kinda got to respect it just for that."
Effie looked at him, unsure what to make of this. "You really think so?"
He smiled. "Oh yeah. Maybe it's as crocky as you think, but it's some magnificent crockery."
Effie couldn't help but smile.
Jenny looked around the room, the one that was to be hers. It was kinda plain; she didn't quite know why, but it was Muriel's guest bedroom, and hadn't had much in the way of conversion yet. The bed was clearly made for a grown-up, but she hopped onto it and was delighted by how soft the mattress and pillow were; it was like a great big trampoline made of cushions, or something.
She almost felt like taking a nap right there, but she was hardly sleepy yet. She almost would have liked to jump on the bed, but she thought maybe Muriel would get mad. Instead, she just laid back on the bed, her still-damp hair under her, staring up at the ceiling.
When she'd gotten tired of that, she looked around the rest of the room. Muriel had hung up some of the other clothes they'd bought in the closet; there were some dresses and jumpers in different colors, and some shirts and skirts, and even some pants. Jenny wondered if she was really going to wear all these, but if Muriel thought they'd look pretty on her, she didn't think she'd mind much.
Jenny got a sense that someone was in the room, and turned to see Muriel. "Hi, Jenny," she said, smiling. "Hey, why didn't you brush your hair out? You don't want it to get all tangled, do you?"
Jenny frowned. She just hadn't thought that at all, really. Muriel led her back into the bathroom and sat her down on a stepstool she kept in the closet. "Honestly," she said, "didn't your mom ever teach you to-"
She caught herself, but she'd already said most of it, and Jenny was looking confused and sad. "I'm sorry," the policewoman said. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings." She began to brush the girl's snow-white hair, feeling miffed with herself for being so insensitive.
Jenny felt sad thinking of her mom and dad, and wondering why they had gone away and if it was something she'd done. She felt like she was going to cry...but for some reason the feeling of Muriel's hands on her helped her hold off the tears.
The older woman gently brushed her hair, trying to break the snarls without hurting her. Muriel's touch, just the simple physical contact, made her feel safe and secure, and she wanted to just snuggle up against her, hard parts and all, and forget all the things that confused and scared and saddened her.
They remained like that for some time, Muriel methodically brushing the child's hair, and Jenny leaning into her touch. Finally, Jenny broke the silence.
"M-Muriel?" she asked. "What're those bumps on you?"
Muriel was a bit taken aback by the question - how naive was this girl? She wasn't dumb, she seemed smart enough for a ten-year-old, but she was ignorant of the strangest things...still, she kept brushing.
"They're called breasts, Jenny," she said. "All grown-up ladies have them."
"Will I have them when I grow up?" Jenny wasn't sure why that seemed like such a strange idea, but it did.
"Of course. Yours will probably start to grow in another year or two."
Jenny frowned. So soon? She thought maybe she'd be all grown up before that happened! "D-does it hurt?" she asked.
"Mmm," Muriel said, focusing on a particularly stubborn knot. "It hurts a bit when they start to come in, and they can get kind of sore sometimes, but that's just part of getting older."
"Oh," Jenny said. She wasn't sure she wanted them if they'd hurt...but maybe it wouldn't be too bad. And they did look nice on Muriel...maybe they'd look nice on her?
"There!" Muriel said. "All brushed." Jenny looked in the mirror and was amazed; she couldn't remember ever seeing herself with her hair down before. There was so much of it...where did it all come from?
"Do you want it back in the braids?" Muriel asked. "It's getting kind of close to your bedtime anyway..."
Jenny thought for a moment. She kind of liked the braids; the four of them - the four-ness of them - just seemed right, somehow. But she did look forward to getting to sleep on her new bed, and the less waiting she had to do... "Tomorrow?" she asked.
Muriel smiled. "All right. We'll do your braids tomorrow."
