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name to the scribbles. Dr. Fielding .
Chal would have to ask about him.
    Continuing through,
she began to be acutely aware of the feel of the paper rasping under
her fingertips. In the middle of a paragraph on rat intelligence she
lost track of the words, her fingers underlining the sentence but not
understanding it. A noise grew in her ears, an insistent buzz, and
her mind wandered far, far away from the present.
    Paper.
    Paper dolls.
    Paper dolls
blowing across the floor and under the bed –
    “Dr.
Davidson?”
    Chal was pulled back
into the present, where Lieutenant Johnner looked at her with
concern.
    “Yes?”
    “Thought we
had lost you for a moment there,” Johnner said. He smiled
impassively, and Chal gave him a terse nod.
    “Just wool
gathering,” she said. He didn’t need to worry about her.
Nobody needed to worry about her. She turned back to the paper
binder.
    Some of the material
was new, and she puzzled over the formulas for a while before
continuing her reading. Inserted in the middle was a copy of the
magazine article with her picture attached, the one with her in a red
skin-tight dress. She scowled and turned the page quickly.
    There was also a
printout of her speech on the emotional ramifications of
bio-substrate dig-int. She had delivered it on a second’s
notice at a neurobiology convention a couple of years back.
    She waved the paper
at Lieutenant Johnner. “Did they just put everything I’ve
ever said in here? Because this talk is about future emotional
possibilities for biological creations. Not machine-based digital.”
    “That’s
right.”
    Chal felt oddly
slighted by his tone. He hadn’t even answered her question.
    “So, this is
just a transcript of everything I’ve ever said?”
    “Everything in
that binder is relevant to the project at hand, Dr. Davidson,”
Lieutenant Johnner said.
    “I’m
sorry, you’re saying this is relevant?” She
laughed, and stopped when she saw that he did not join her.
    “You’re
saying you’ve done it?” Chal said. “Bio-substrate
intelligences? With emotional sentience ? ”
    Lieutenant Johnner
shrugged lightly.
    “Bull shit ,”
Chal said. “You’re bluffing.”
    “Bluffing?”
    “Just like you
were bluffing with Dr. Abboud,” she continued, flipping through
the binder. “This tech is decades away.”
    “The M.I.D.
has been working on this for decades, Dr. Davidson.” The
lieutenant’s blue eyes shone in the dim light of the road as
they turned off of the highway.
    “What does
this–any of this–have to do with the military?” She
flipped ahead in the binder. Emotional induction studies, including
the recent Lidder paper. Child development research. One of her
articles on conscious feeling and qualia. “You can’t weaponize emotions.”
    “You work in a
field with some very important implications, Dr. Davidson. You’ll
understand more once we reach Phoenix.”
    He said something
else, but she was distracted by the sudden idea that something
interesting–very interesting–might be right around the
corner. Distracted enough that she didn’t hear the coolness
that had entered his voice. “Say again?” She flipped back
to the formulas. How had they gotten it to work?
    “You talked
about chipping away at a problem,” Lieutenant Johnner said.
    “Yes?”
Chal was eager, impatient. A million possibilities raced through her
head.
    “Don’t
be too hasty to break through the ice,” Johnner said as they
pulled onto a deserted dirt road. “We’re standing on it.”
    ***

CHAPTER THREE
    The progress of
digital intelligence in the world scientific community had been set
back by a number of factors since its inception. Apart from the
religious objections over the creation of intelligent life, society
believed that thinking machines were useful for only the most
technical of tasks. It was seen as silly to even try to work on the
more nebulous and impractical aspects of intelligent life such as
sentience and emotion. This attitude