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The silent clamor of thousands of minds counting the milliseconds in anticipation thundered faintly just below Dairine’s awareness.
“The moment we’ve been waiting for approaches!” Gigo said out loud, ever so slowly compared to his usual bright trinary chatter.
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- Are you sure she’ll like it? -
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- Of course she will. -
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“Uh-oh,” Spot said. “Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh uh-ah uh-ha-uh-haha-HAHAHA!”
“What?!” Dairine said aloud. Whatever the mobiles were so excited about, Spot had fully connected to the Motherboard and discovered it faster than she, with her organic data processor languishing at its traditional speed. But she wasn’t just slowlife anymore.
She felt the metaphysical electric spark of Connection! as her mind leapt into the surging stream of mobile thoughtspeed and was inundated with a barrage of imagesemotionscalculationsDAIRINE-19,248ms-soundsimpressionsanglesMOTHER-19,206ms-colorsmemoriesfeelingsWELCOMEBACK-19,195ms-starsspelldiagramsrecollectionsHEREHEREHERE-19,181ms- and then -
“Oh, holy…” Dairine whispered out loud.
“What is it?” Nita said.
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- Oh no, she hates it! -
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- No she doesn’t! -
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- Just because you’ve got a larger emotional processor than most of us -
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- IT’LL BE FINE! -
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“The moment when, 662,695,446,000ms ago, a culturally significant amount of time in certain Terran hominid cultures…” Logo continued from where Gigo had left off.
“Oh my god, is this about -” Nita said.
“Yeees,” Dairine moaned through her hands covering her face, but she was grinning.
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- Oh, she’s happy! -
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- See? I told you it would be fine :) -
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“…our Mother’s program was first launched and her life began!” Gigo said gaily.
“In honor of which, we have declared a planetwide holiday!” said Logo. Somehow his domed, glassy body gave the impression of grinning ear to ear.
“You guys…” Dairine said, for once in her life understanding the concept of bashful.
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“Countdown in seconds, for the slowlife!” Logo said teasingly.
“Nuh-uh, no way,” Nita said.
“Three!” said Gigo.
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“Two!”
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“One!”
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A great cheer went up, and brilliant fireworks made of wizardlight streaked across the starry sky, as well as under their feet between the myriad semi-translucent layers of the Motherboard. Dairine suddenly went down under a mob of the nearest mobiles in the crowd, who were determined to express their affection physically, as well as visually and audibly.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Nita said. “My sister turns 21 and she gets a freaking holiday on an alien planet declared in her honor.”
“Well, you’re not the sovereign mother-creator of an alien civilization, now are you?” Kit said, throwing an arm around her shoulder.
“You’re one to talk, the only alien civilization you’re the sovereign of is that patch of sludge next to the bathtub.”
“And I’m sure I’m a very big deal in those two square inches of the universe,” he replied with a grin. “Hey, who knows, maybe we’ll get to see the computer equivalent of getting totally hammered on a mass scale.”
“Oh, that would be hilarious. Hey Dair! If you get drunk, can they read your brainwaves or whatever and get drunk with you?”
“Don’t even, Neets,” Dairine called from where she was buried under a pile of glassy geometric shapes, made of layer after layer of a hundred shades of pink, gold, purple, and rust.
“You might not remember, but I was there for your twenty-first, and if you think I’m gonna make a spectacle of myself like that anywhere in this universe where these guys can put it into their database, you’ve got another think coming.”
“What are you gonna do, hole up in a pocket universe with a bottle of scotch? That’s taking drinking alone to a whole new level, Dair.”
“Get a life, Neets.”
The golden light of the old galaxy that filled the sky of the mobiles’ homeworld glinted off glass bodies and shone faintly through the many translucent limbs that arced over Dairine’s head like trees. She wriggled closer to Gigo and Logo on the ground - her two eldest, as it were.
I can’t believe you guys did this, she said in trinary.
We just wanted an opportunity to celebrate you, Gigo said, echoed by a thousand mental gestures of assent routed through the Motherboard straight to Dairine.
We know it’s really just an arbitrary number, said Logo. But it means something to you, so it means something to us. Besides, 662,695,446,000 milliseconds is a long time, nearly twice as long as our lifetimes so far.
Dairine pulled the two of them close with her arms, and pulled all the rest closer through her link to them, that unbreakable umbilical cord made of thoughts and emotions wrapped in wizardry and transferred in numbers, numbers, numbers…
You’re once in a million lifetimes.