Lyth glanced at the display beyond the windows of the diner, smiled, and settled on the end of the long bench at the table, where he had always sat, when he had been a part of the ship’s crew, and before that, the shipmind itself. At the time, that seat had put him directly opposite Juliyana, my granddaughter. But Fiori was where Juliyana had once sat.
Lyssa joined us, too. I didn’t ask her to. She didn’t ask me if she could. She simply settled on the bench next to her brother and accepted a drink, too.
The long-haired waitress teased everyone at the table while deftly pouring drinks from a glittering decanter and pushing them across the table, while we all talked over the top of each other. Everyone knew everyone, except Fiori. After meeting Lyssa, Lyth was just another small step for her. She didn’t look uncomfortable…but then Lyth looked perfectly human. I wondered if Dalton had primed her about Lyth.
It occurred to me that she had watched a parawolf crunch through his enemy’s face with aplomb. Had she seen Darb do the same, before? I would have to ask her sometime. Fiori had odd inconsistencies about her that made me think her life as a medic wasn’t just melding broken bones and delivering babies.
I turned to Lyth and watched with my usual fascination as he knocked back his drink and swallowed. I’d seen him eat and drink many times, but each time I saw him after a long absence, it struck me all over again how surreal it was that he could do that.
“Is Juliyana home?” I asked him.
Lyth’s expression didn’t change. “Not at the moment.”
Nearly fifteen years ago, after Lyssa had fired Juliyana as captain of her ship, Juliyana had bought a converted crescent ship and got into the freight game.
“Where is she now?” Jai asked, for he liked Juliyana.
“I have no idea,” Lyth replied evenly.
I wondered about the lack of reaction from him. Either not knowing where Juliyana was truly didn’t bother him, or else he was hiding his feelings very well indeed.
I suspected the latter, and deliberately turned the conversation away from Juliyana and her mulish ways. “How long have you been moving in public with a security detail?”
“Since the threats stepped up,” Lyth answered easily. “I handled them myself before that, thanks to your Ranger training—”
Dalton smiled. We’d all trained Lyth in the early years, imparting the best of the self-defense and offensive in-fighting we’d learned ourselves.
“—but it became a time drain,” Lyth continued. “A security detail discourages most idiots, saving me from having to go through all the formalities every time one of them decided to have a run at me.”
“Serves you right for being the most famous digital person in the galaxy,” Marlow shot back.
I glanced at Fiori, to catch her reaction. She didn’t look shocked.
“At least I’m not the only one, anymore,” Lyth replied calmly.
Jai raised his glass toward Lyth. “How many digitals are there, now?”
“We have three new people at the Institute right now, going through adaptation and reorientation,” Lyth said. “That makes…ninety-seven.”
“In thirty years, barely a hundred sentients have emerged and made the transition?” Fiori asked. “There are twenty billion bio people in the galaxy—at least, we think there is, although no one is really sure. I don’t understand why Humanists think one hundred digital people are such a dire threat to the universe as we know it.”
“It’s the principle, not the numbers,” Jai said, his tone grave.
“It’s also the expense and the uncertainty,” Lyth replied. “Most AIs who become self-aware aren’t in a position where they can make money. Not straight away. They have to figure out how to earn their living, first. Then how to save cash. Then save enough to pay for their clones and implants. Colton isn’t the first to put herself into debt.”
Colton was a digital, too. I should have expected that. From the blinks and pauses around the table, everyone else was adjusting to that fact, too.
“But even the price is not the real choke on our numbers,” Lyth added.
“What’s the limiting factor?” Marlow asked.
Fiori was listening with close attention. So was everyone else.
“Fear?” Dalton suggested.
Lyth shook his head. “Donor DNA.”
We stared at him.
“DNA isn’t hard to find,” Marlow pointed out.
“Ethically sourced DNA is hard to find,” Lyth replied. “We could scrape DNA from all over the galaxy if we didn’t bother asking for it. But we want humans who provide the DNA to know what it is being used for.”
“And people baulk over that?” Fiori asked curiously.
“Most humans have no issue with the idea of digital people, but if you were to ask them to hand over their DNA to create a clone just like them, which would become an entirely different, digital person, they would have to think about it.”
“Can’t you use the DNA of the people who say yes?” I asked. “I’ve given you mine.”
“We have yet to use it,” Lyth told me.
“No one wants a second Danny in the galaxy,” Marlow said.
Everyone laughed.
“Technically, I am the second Danny,” I reminded him, for like Dalton, I was using a cloned body, these days.
“Which proves my point,” Marlow shot back, and blew me a kiss.
Even I had to laugh at that.
“Why haven’t you used Danny’s clone?” Dalton asked Lyth.
Lyth pulled his newly refilled glass across the table from where the waitress had placed it. “Because no sentient has yet considered Danny a match for what they think their appearance should be.”
“Excuse me?” Marlow said. “You come to self awareness knowing what you should look like?”
“I knew what I looked like, because I had an avatar long before I reached sentience. Lyssa knows what she looks like, too.”
“I look like this,” Lyssa said.
“This has changed radically in the last few years,” Dalton pointed out.
“Just in the fine details,” I shot back. “Fiori has probably changed the details about her appearance over the last twenty-five years, too.”
“Not that Gabriel
