Moonlight & Vines Read Online Free Page B

damaged they are.”
    Holly pops the lid from her coffee and takes an appreciative sip before starting in on the muffin. She no sooner unwraps it, than Snippet is on her lap, looking mournfully at every bite until I take a doggie bone out of my pocket and bribe her back onto the floor with it. I know enough to come prepared.
    Holly doesn’t ask what I’m doing here and for a long time I don’t get into it. We finish our muffins, we drink our coffee. Snippet finishes her bone then returns to Holly’s lap to look for muffin crumbs. Time goes by, a comfortable passage of minutes, silence that’s filled with companionship, a quiet space of time untouched by a need to braid words into a conversation. We’ve done this before. There’ve been times we’ve spent the whole afternoon together and not needed to talk or even react to each other’s presence. Sometimes just being with a friend is enough. I’ve never been able to tell Holly how much I appreciate her being a part of my life, but I think she knows all the same.
    After a while I tell her about finally meeting Saskia yesterday, how Geordie introduced us, how I’m going to be seeing her tonight.
    â€œSo you’re deliriously happy,” Holly says, “and you’ve come by to rub it in on a poor woman who hasn’t had a date in two months.”
    Holly smiles, but I don’t need to be told she’s teasing me.
    â€œSomething like that,” I say.
    She nods. “So what’s the real reason you’re here?”
    â€œI logged onto the Wordwood last night and something really weird happened to me,” I tell her. “I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing and started to type a question to myself—the way I do when I’m writing and I don’t want to stop and check a fact—and the program answered me.”
    Holly makes an encouraging noise in the back of her throat to let me know she’s paying attention, but that’s it. I can’t believe she’s being this blasé and figure she hasn’t really understood me.
    â€œHolly,” I say. “I didn’t type something like ‘Go Emily Carr’ and wait for the program to take me to whatever references it has on her. I entered a question—misspelled a couple of words, too—and before I had a chance to go on, the answer appeared on my screen.”
    She shrugs. “That kind of thing happens all the time in the Wordwood.”
    â€œWhat? There’s somebody sitting at their keyboard somewhere, scanning whoever else happens to be online and responding to their questions?”
    Holly shakes her head. “The program wasn’t set up for two-way dialogues between users. It’s just a database.”
    â€œSo who answered me?”
    â€œI don’t know.” I hear a nervousness in the laugh she offers me. “It just happens.”
    â€œAnd you’re not the least curious about it?”
    â€œIt’s hard to explain,” Holly says. “It’s like the program’s gone AI, kind of taken on a life of its own, and none of us quite knows how to deal with it, so we’ve sort of been ignoring it.”
    â€œBut this has got to be a real technological breakthrough.”
    â€œI suppose.”
    I can’t figure out why she’s not as excited about it as I am. I don’t keep up on all the scientific journals, but I’ve read enough to know that no one’s managed to produce a real artificial intelligence program yet—something indistinguishable from a real person, except it hasn’t got a body, it’s just living out there in the Net somewhere.
    â€œThere’s something you’re not telling me,” I say.
    Holly gives me a reluctant nod. “None of us has been entering data into the program for months,” she admits.
    â€œWhat are you saying?”
    â€œI’m saying it’s getting the information on its own.