The girls continued to play for a while longer. As much as Lilly wanted to press the point, she had to admit she was having fun just playing with her friends...maybe it could wait, for a little bit. They talked and laughed about a bunch of things; Artemis was particularily amused by the squirrel-girl's twin tails, and the way the two of them moved.
Her aunt sat and watched, content to see that her niece seemed all right. She did feel a bit guilty for having brought up the topic of gender-changes around Lilly, though; she hadn't thought that through, and the girl had latched onto ancient mythology (or...was it myth? It was getting a bit difficult to tell, these days...still, there didn't seem to be a compelling case for treating it as anything more) for her hope of returning to her old form. Hopefully, being young, she'd be easily distracted, and not get too hung up on the idea.
"Um, so," Lilly said, when they'd worn themselves out a bit and were taking a rest, "do...d'ya think your...other mama would...um, would..."
Artemis giggled. "I dunno why you wanna be a boy so much," she said. "You're pretty as a girl, an' you seem like you're havin' fun... But...I guess I could ask her, next time I visit. I dunno if she even can, though."
"Next time you visit?" her aunt asked.
The moon-girl nodded. "Yeah! It's my Moon too now, isn't it? There's a lotta stuff I still wanna see...I didn't even get t' go to where the astr'nauts were this time..."
Lilly gasped. "You can go there?"
Artemis smiled. "Uh-huh! But it was a long ways from where we were. It kinda makes mama Selene sad 'cause she wasn't awake when they were there, so she never got to say 'hi.' But I wanna go there sometime."
Jenny frowned. "She was asleep? I thought you said she was watchin' people."
The moon-girl shrugged. "I dunno if it's like really bein' asleep," she said. "She talks like she could see things, but she couldn't move or nothin', not for a loooooong time. It took me four days just t' get her to wake up!"
They played for a little while longer, until Muriel appeared at the door to the playroom. "Jenny, Lilly, it's getting late," she said. "Time to get going. Lilly, I called your mom, you can ride with Jenny and I and we'll take you home."
"Aww, do they hafta go?" Artemis asked. "We were havin' fun..."
"Sorry, Harriet," the policewoman smiled. "They've got school in the morning. Maybe you girls could get together and play another time, though?"
"Okay, I guess," she said. "Um...can I go t' school with 'em?"
"Well, I think we'll have to have a talk about that, Harriet," Ms. Violet said. "Of course a kid your age ought to be in school, but we can't have students skipping class and running off to the Moon whenever they feel like it..."
"Aww," the girl said, looking a bit peeved. Her aunt patted her on the head. "We'll talk about that later, though," she said.
They said their goodbyes, and Muriel escorted Jenny and Lilly out, as Artemis stood on the front step and waved, her markings visible in the moonlight. Lilly looked up at the sky as they got in the car. She wondered, if there really was a lady in the Moon, were there other planets like that? She could see a bright star that she thought was Venus...she wondered if somebody lived there, or somewhere else? Were they waiting for someone to come wake 'em up?
Hiro picked through the daemon's code one piece at a time, trying to figure out what it did and how to fix it. There were points where something was obviously broken and it wasn't hard to figure out what it should've been, but so many other places where it seemed subtly wrong but not enough for him to tell what the original purpose was...gah! He wasn't really a programmer, though given how convoluted some of this seemed to be, he wasn't sure it would've helped if he was. And it was so confusing, and there was so much at stake, that he spent more time second-guessing himself than he did on repairs...
He glanced up at the clock and sighed. This was hopeless...he was making so little progress, and he was exhausted already...he was better than an ordinary human at keeping going when his physical stamina wore out, but when mental fatigue set in...it was no good. He'd have to sleep, have to come back in the morning with a refreshed mind...
As tired as he was, he was still jolted back into full consciousness when something clicked in his brain. He had to sleep...but that didn't mean the work had to stop. Brain activity didn't cease with consciousness; it would be active all through the night anyway...he recalled reading somewhere that that might be his mind sorting through the memories of the day and filing them...but that didn't take nearly its whole capacity, did it? That was it! He could leave this process going overnight! So much of what he was doing was guesswork anyway...and if he could do it subconsciously, that might prevent him from wasting so much time on second-guessing himself...
Okay, he had to admit, he had his reservations. The idea of letting his subconscious mind, the thing that occasionally gave him dreams like bad trips, at a complex process where a life hung in the balance...it seemed foolhardy. But then, why did this "Shi" character want him to do this, if not for the quirks and capabilities of a human brain? And anyway...if he attempted to bring a dead thing back to life and failed, he was right back where he started...right?
It took him probably another half-hour to get a program that he thought would do the job reliably. He made sure to seal it and the daemon's code in a protected environment as best he could...he hoped things didn't go haywire overnight. Something in him knew this was probably a stupid, risky thing to do, but what the hell - he was tired, it was late, his judgement wasn't the best. He set it going and collapsed into bed.
