The real beach reminded Timofeya Phin of their virtual home in orbit.  The seawater dripping off of her was colder, though, and only she and her husband and wife had come down here.  She turned to watch the others wade in through the shallows, steering small rafts formed from pieces of the lander.  Doe’s and Thad’s bodies were whiter than she was used to, and their features were unfamiliar–but the sardonic smile Thad gave Phin as she shoved her plastic hull shards up onto the wet sand was the same as ever.  And Doe, bless her heart, had ridged her new body’s forehead with worry wrinkles identical to the wrinkles she used to raise on her avatar.

Dr. Ops, however, was nowhere: not in the cloud-silvered sky, not in the water’s short, surging waves, not in the pebble-strewn, brown-and-black sand beneath Phin’s new tiger-toed feet.  Only the slick band of memory carbon around each of their wrists contained any trace of Dr. Ops, the artificial intelligence responsible for piloting their prison ship, the Psyche Moth, here.  Responsible for their well-being on the decades-long voyage through interstellar emptiness, responsible for their downloading into prepared clones and their transfer groundside, responsible for Phin’s memories of the special home he had created for her and Doe and Thad, Dr. Ops’ husband and wive.  Precious now, those moments they had spent together.

Because that was all they had: memories.  And traces: auto-initiating algorithms, sub-routines copied from the architecture of the AI who had once ruled their lives.  Who’d brought them as prisoners from Earth to this penal colony planet called Amends.  And who had then, he said, succumbed to the madness of love.

If you love someone you let them go.  If they love you back, they go the way you want them to.  Onward.  Without you.

Still wet, Phin plunged back in the sea to join Thad in hauling the remaining rafts/lander segments ashore.  Doe had strung three of the largest of them together with her share of the lander’s insulated hardwires.  Typical.  Always worrying about which way things were supposed to get done.  Always claiming more than her share of work.  That was her role; Phin’s role was checking her, holding her back, restricting her load.  When she could.

The sun broke apart the overcast.  They lay among the sparse plants growing in a hollow sheltered by dunes, resting and drying out.  “How far to what we callin civilization?” Thad asked.

“You know as well as I do,” Phin replied.  “You saw the same maps I saw, and you’re wearing the same algorithms I’m wearing–”

“Shh!”  Doe’s urgent warning cut her off.  A passing flock of “prettybirds” spiraled back toward them, coming nearer, fluttering slower, lower, losing altitude and settling on the limbs and leaves, surrounding them like living light.  Then one flew up to perch on Phin’s right knee.  Another, bright-feathered, perched on her left.  She held her breath, then let it out softly so as not to scare the creature away.

They were not really birds, despite the name which trustees had reported the prisoners using.  Their eyes faced forward, fusing rather than splitting their views of the world.  Their faces looked semi-flat, the bottoms of inverted saucers.  Birdlike beaks protruded from their faces’ lower halves, and this close, Phin saw that long segments of the beaks’ edges were serrated and sharp.

In her peripheral vision she caught sight of her wife Doe’s sprawled-out legs graced with similar visitors.  A slight shift and she could make out three more prettybirds on her husband’s soft belly and breasts.  The flaring wings of her own pair of prettybirds pulled her attention back to them, back to her own new body, where they sat waiting for it.  “Waiting for it?”  What made her attribute human motivations to nonhuman creatures?

The two prettybirds blinked at her.  Deliberately.  In unison.  Twice.  A pause.  Four blinks–again in unison.  Another pause.  Eight blinks.

In unison.

“Tha-a-a-ad?  Phi-i-i-in?”  Doe’s new voice sounded thinner than Phin remembered from virtuality.  Plus it trembled at its margins.  “These things spozed to act this smart?”

As one, the flock took to the air.  “Smart how?  Like they figure to fly off cause we was about to eat em?”

“But we weren’t–were we?” Phin asked.

“Smart enough so they can double up the numbers they blinkin at me?”

It had happened to Doe too?  A geometric sequence, that doubling was called.  Had they all experienced the same thing at the same time?  Great!  But how?  Phin turned to check with Thad and saw that her husband was already talking, already standing, brushing the clinging sand off the seat of her trousers, prepping to leave.

“Last transmission we got from them remainin trustees say prisoners not eatin prettybirds no more.  Thinkin they could be intelligent some way the survey missed, so no, we ain’t eatin none of em neither.”

“Gotta blend in.”  Thad nodded her head, agreeing.  “So no we ain’t.  Sides, we ain’t got time to hunt em down; we wanna get set up.  Drag these hull parts down nearer Unrest.”  She shot a look at Phin.  “Okay, not too near.  But come on.”  She grabbed up the hardwire she’d been using, kicked at Doe’s and Phin’s, then started off.

Of course Doe quick-marched to catch up.  Phin cheated and piled her load on top of her wife’s so she could walk right behind her without tangling their lines.  “The prettybirds were blinking numbers at me just like they did you!” she declared.

“Yeah?”

“I think?  Did they go 1, 2, 4, 8?”

“Yeah!  Exactly!  Ain’t that indicative a some kinda intelligence?”

Probably.  Maybe.

Traversing the long beach’s flat, damp sand, they headed in the direction of Jubilee’s newest offshoot, Unrest.  They reached their target site while the sky still shone: an inlet within the larger inlet of Unrest Bay, a small scoop in the eastern side of the peninsula arching out protectively to the mainland’s west.  An outlier to Unrest.  One empty circular house nestled in a hollow in the first rank of dunes, untrimmed leaves around its window openings whispering in the day end’s gentle breezes.

“Here we go.”  Thad held up her wrist.  Part of the algorithm wrapped around it glowed turquoise blue.

“Do we wanna use the lander shells?  Or we all right sleepin in this house?”

“Take too long to set up everything right.  Let’s jus call it a night an get to work on erectin our lab an all that in the morning.  Train ourselves to local time.”

Doe must have given their husband a look of doubt.

“Dr. Ops ain’t warnin a nothin wrong here.  This place cool, see?”  Up came Thad’s wrist again.  “You wanna take turns watchin anyway, in case somethin come durin the night?”

Phin took the first shift.  Doe and Thad talked to her through the house’s window holes for a while.  Gradually their voices sank.  Contented giggles lapsed into silence.

She sat for a while on the crest of a high dune, then stood up to walk around so she wouldn’t drowse off.  Low-luminosity plants covered the sandy hummocks that rose and fell to her right, landward.  In the middle distance taller, brighter vegetation marked the start of the forest-like clumps that Dr. Ops had drawn on the maps he gave them.  And much further off, the scattered glow of dying foliage lighting Unrest’s five streets.  Probably Hannakka bushes tied to poles put up in the streets’ intersections.

Obviously thriving.  The clients didn’t need them to be there.  Maybe Dr. Ops did?  Just to carry his algorithms in their wristbands?  Phin wasn’t happy looking at the situation so cynically.  And when they were together, she knew the AI’s love was real.  This was the most apart from him she’d been since giving her consent.  Somehow it made the connections with Thad and Doe thinner too.  Or something did–perhaps being in the meat.  Perhaps that was the source of her aloneness.

Phin walked in widening circles around the house where the rest of her family slept.  She’d gone three circuits when Dr. Ops’ alarm routine engaged, sending delicate waves of sensation along her forearm.  Time to wake Doe.  But when she got back to the house, only Thad lay on their shared mat.  No.  Only one left.

“Hey!”  She squatted to nudge her sleeping husband’s soft shoulders.  “Where is she?”

“What?  Doe gone?”  Thad whipped her wristband up to check: it still shone turquoise.  That was supposed to indicate their surroundings were safe and secure.  “Maybe she hadda pee?”  Thad rubbed her eyelids with the heels of her hands.

“Didn’t see her anywhere on my patrol.”  Hadn’t heard her either, or smelt her or sensed her in any way.  Her skin felt suddenly cold.

“She shy.  Don’t hafta be no big deal if she went off lookin for privacy.  Leave her be is likely our best plan.”  Thad stood up, belying her words.

“Can’t you just–”

“Yeah yeah.  Lemme home in on her, fine out what she up to.”  Fingers stroking shadows along her wristband, Thad went outside.  Phin followed her.  By the weak illumination of the plant-covered slopes sheltering them, she saw her husband’s fast-dimming wristband change from turquoise to charcoal.  The charcoal was threaded with a squiggle of bright pink.

“Hunh.  This bit a Dr. Ops tellin me Doe went on up toward Unrest on her own.”  Thad plucked the curl of memory carbon free and swept it before her like a sparkler.  “Yes it is.  Also?  She not alone.”

#

Doe must have waded or swum.  Or more likely floated off on rafted lander sections, like Phin and Thad ended up doing.  Because the beach dissolved into marsh a little ways past their overnight site–just beyond the circumference of Phin’s last patrolling pass.  Dr. Ops had marked the marshy ground on the map he gave them, but without noting its lack of solid pathways.  Which made sense if you weren’t used to walking on an actual surface of an actual world.

There were some disadvantages to coming down to Amends under an AI’s care.  Phin felt certain the positives–bodies modified to wristband-integrated specs meant for emergency trustee deployment–outweighed that sort of negative.

The wristbands’ beacons, for instance.  They tracked Doe’s beacon to the foot of a vine-draped bluff face, as the day’s first blooms burst into multicolored light.  “Heyyyy!  Hey there, my honeys!”  Their wife shot up from the rock where she’d been resting and waved her arms as if she’d been waiting for them, as if they might have missed spotting her.  Or the two women with her.

According to Dr. Ops, trustees had been dying at disproportionately high rates here on Amends.  So the plan was that they would approach clients under the guise of seasonal wanderers, aka rogues.  They were supposed to be setting up their temporary quarters on Unrest’s outskirts.  Supposed to be waiting till clients came to them there.  They were not supposed to be rushing off and communing with clients haphazardly in the wild.  Who knew what story Doe had told these two?  Did it fit the cover they’d decided on?

The names she introduced them by were right, anyway.  That was easy, though; they’d agreed to stick with their real ones.  The older client’s reaction to meeting them seemed off, somehow: her faint smile stayed the same size, but emptied itself of feeling, and her gaze lost its focus.

“Trill and Dola come here to learn about prettybirds,” Doe explained.  “Say they thinkin prettybirds is pretty smart.  We was right about them things countin at us!  Say they done it before–say it could be how prettybirds an people can communicate!  They wanna study em more an figure out the way it works.”

“So why come you studyin em here?” Thad asked.  “Ain’t none around I can see.”

“This is their feeding ground.  Their killing ground, I should say.”  Dola, the younger woman, waved at a pile of driftwood behind her–driftwood covered patchily with odd, crumpled–cloths?  Skins?  Abruptly the driftwood became bones, dismembered skeletons heaped along the bluff’s base.

“Prettybirds is carnivores?”  Thad leapt heroically to the rock’s surface, a good deal higher than their raft.  “What else you know about em?” She held out one hand and Phin tossed her the braided hardwires, then looked for footholds and climbed up beside her.

“Omnivores, more likely.  We put out a big basket of rosetoohip porridge for them.  First there was only one group of five sampling it.  They weren’t eating lots–we thought we’d have to bring most of what we’d made back to Unrest.  But once that group split a whole flock showed up and cleaned our basket out.  Took most of a morning.”

Thad raised her eyebrows.  “Really?  Was you there the whole time?  You could tell it wasn’t some other animals?”

The older client, Trill, dropped her semblance of a smile.  “What makes you think we don’t know what we’re doing?”

“Sorry!”  Phin put her hands in her tunic’s pockets and looked down.  “Sorry,” she repeated.  The flat-topped rock was stippled with irregular streaks of a bluish, hair-like growth.  She shuffled carefully to the edge nearest the bone piles.

“Why apologize?  You’re not the one who said any–”

“We both feelin it.  Sorry, like my wife say.  Lissen, we all three innerested in prettybirds too.  What you know?  Don’t got em where we from.”

“Where’s that?”

A brief, awkward silence.  “Up by Panonica, didn I say?” Doe answered.

Phin winced to herself.  This was a serious change in their strategy–they were supposed to deflect questions like that: origins, why they’d gone rogue, what they wanted from the locals….She turned her eyes to the sky, searching for something to distract the clients, and there–“Is that–what do we call it when they all fly together?  A ‘flock’?”  She waved a hand at a stippling of darkness against the brightening dawn.

“Flock is one of our usual words, but Trill and I have started using a few special terms depending on the prettybirds’ activities.  We should come up with a name those groups of four or five or six.  They’re common enough.  Meanwhile–”  Dola pulled open the woven bag slung crosswise from her sturdy shoulders and took out a complicated looking instrument of wood and–could that be transparent plastic?  Glass?

She held it to her face.  Some sort of lotech visual prosthesis.  Phin ran one finger over her left brow, then her right, repeating this trigger to her internal lenses till the individual components of the flock were revealed.  Then she smoothed things back out so she would see it as a whole again.  Glowing golden in a rare shaft of sunrise, they wheeled and swirled in patterns reminiscent of mud drifting up from underwater footsteps.  Or rippling grasses stroked by the wind’s many hands, or–

“When they do like that we call them a murmur, after the name of starling birds on Earth acting the same way.”  Dola lowered the contraption from her eyes and offered it to Phin.  “Want to see?”

“Wait!  Here comes another murmur!  They might be about to mix!”  Trill was talking fast and pointing.  “We’ve watched this happen five mornings in a row now–before that they only did it once–twice if you count that time we came in the middle of things–”

Phin saw a second murmur coalescing over the mainland to the peninsula’s south, seeming to detach itself from the low, dark smudge of the forested horizon.  Larger and larger, nearer and nearer.  Now both murmurs flew toward them.  An arm curled around Phin’s waist–Thad’s arm, and she responded by pressing into it and reaching for Doe, wrapping a hand around her wife’s wrist.  In moments more the murmurs would converge–

And the two tightly-spaced groups of prettybirds exploded in the air, loosened like unbraided hair to spring wide and high and so low they almost touched the waves.  They expanded so swiftly, so hugely, that many hovered right in front of her, near enough that Phin felt the air move with the massed beating of their wings.

“How do they keep from crashing into each other?  They aren’t even facing all the same way!”  Dola crouched to set down her bag, swapping the visual prosthesis for a tablet and stylus.  She began scribbling furiously as the murmurs merged.  The older woman, Trill, was shouting what sounded like nonsense: “Scoo pups!  Deedly-doo!  Fiyah free Anna yogotta plizter!”  Arcs of prettybirds knit living chains between the murmurs’ different parts–or did they?  Phin lost track of individual prettybirds in the billowing rainbows filling the sky.  They fell in and out of focus as they darted up, over, and around one another, intricate patterns impossible to follow, overwhelming her eyes for what felt like hours.

And then the murmurs separated.  The display was over; the prettybirds dispersed, flying in fives and sixes in all directions.  A few flew above their heads, disappearing as they crested the bluff.

At Phin’s feet, Dola was still marking up her tablet with alphanumerics, though less frantically.  Trill leaned forward and blocked the view.  “No, no–it was ‘Fiyah free’ first, then ‘yogotta’!”

Thad tapped on Trill’s upper arm.  “Scuse me, but you wanna tell us what you talkin bout?  What you doin?”

“Excuse you!”  Trill shoved her face toward Thad’s.  “What makes you think you have any right to ask?”

“We’re Jubilee’s Prettybird Dopkwe,” Dola explained, her voice a mixture of apology and boast.  “We’ve been studying the prettybirds for over a year–almost two years.  Right now we’re looking at these periodic–um, we call them conferences.  Which–”

“Which you would already have heard about–already seen–if you actually did come from anywhere around Panonica.”  Trill picked up the bag and held it open.  “Come on, Dola.  Pack it up and let’s get home.”

“You sayin we a lie?”

“Yeah.  You’re a lie.  You’re not from Panonica.  How long’ve you been on Amends?  Not long–six nights?  Seven?  You came down here straight from Psyche Moth.”

“How you know that?”

“Apart from the way you pretend you’re familiar with the tech advances we keep hidden from the last couple of trustees and Dr. Ops?  And the way you claim prettybirds don’t exist where you’re from?”  Closing the bag and grabbing Dola by the arm, Trill hopped off the rock’s wide top.

“Mainly it’s the fact that two of you were married to Wayna.  My dead mother.  Yeah.  Who told my dad and my other mother your names, and a whole lot more.  All about you guys.”

Disaster.  Cover blown.  Phin’s head hurt like she’d hit it hard. “Wait!” she shouted.  Clenching fingers dug into her hip, Thad restraining her, preventing her from chasing their client contacts down.  Or chasing them up; as she watched them walk away, the clients’ backs, clad in dun-colored spun fibers, slowly rose along some half-concealed footpath climbing the bluff’s steep, green-clad sides.

Alone, they sank to sit facing each other.  The hair-like patches growing on the rock were softer than they looked.  Thad spoke first: “Why, Doe?  Why you run off an do like that?”

“You think we should just play things the way Dr. Ops wants us to?”  Doe twisted to appeal to Phin.  “Don’t you think he might be wrong?  About sumpn?  At least a little?”

Phin wasn’t sure how to stop the fight.  “I–”

“Din you hear what the woman just said?  Wayna dead.  Ain’t nothin bringin her back.”

“I get it.  I got it back when Dr. Ops told us himself, back when we was in orbit.”  Doe’s words were for Thad, though she stayed turned toward Phin.  “But what I don’t get is what’s the reason we aren’t supposed to tell anybody who sent us and where we’re from and why we’re here.”

Waiting.  Waiting.  As if Phin could explain what Dr. Ops meant.  Thad had studied the rules the AI followed, studied them hard.  But Phin was the one he had first fallen for.  Phin was who Dr. Ops had explained himself to.

She attempted to put herself in his place.  In the place of his wholeness, not the scattered sites of the purpose-limited fragments he’d given them.   “Guess he thought it could contaminate the data we collect.”

“If we tell the truth?  Which people are gonna find out anyways–they ain’t stupid!”  Now Doe whipped her head around, away from Phin and Thad.  Too late.  The tears had already spilled from her eyes.  Suppressed sobs vibrated her shoulders.  Phin felt her throat phlegm up in sympathy.  She stretched one hand out to caress her wife’s back.

“What?” Doe snarled, twitching away.

“You ain’t even cried when we foun out Wayna died.”  Thad put her hand on Phin’s hand to stop her from reaching out again.  “I’ma ask you a second time: Why?”

“Okay.”  Wiping at her face with her shirt’s short sleeves, Doe snuffed in a wet breath.  “This is where she lived.  When she lef us an come down onto Amends it was cause she wanted to be part of what was happenin here.  What still happenin.  An Dr. Ops part of what these clients tryna get rid of, an I just hafta tell em we his family.  So maybe they gonna kick us out?  That’s they right!  Or maybe they gonna realize we useful to em in some way, him too, and extend everybody some courtesy.  Either way, this the best path to take.  This the way we honor Wayna.  This the way we oughta remember her.”

“Well.  You done?”

“Yeah.”  Doe laughed a short laugh.  “I kinda went on and on a lil, din I?  Sorry you asked?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” said Phin.  “We need to understand.”  A breeze kicked up, coming in off the water.  The bluff’s vines swished against each other in the sudden quiet.  “We need to understand.  And now we do.  I do.  And I agree.”

Another susurrus-filled pause.  “Yeah.  Awright, so what we do nex?” asked Thad.  “Now we broke Dr. Ops’ rules?”

“You know they wasn’t rules.  Just what he thought would help.”

Phin stood up, loose blue “hairs” drifting off her in the light breeze.  “Tell him what happened.  See what he suggests.”

#

In addition to exploring into Dr. Ops’s parameters, Thad had the most experience with wave comms, though that had been in WestHem, back on Earth.  She had been a pirate narrowcaster before her arrest.  That was why they were supposed to get her to feed Dr. Ops their wristbands’ findings safely capture whatever updates he sent to his algorithms.

Escorted by a smattering of prettybirds–smaller than a flock but larger than the group who’d originally counted at them–they returned to stay another night at the Unrest outlier site, sleeping again in the abandoned house.  No use setting up their lab here if they decided to move or go mobile after consulting Dr. Ops.

The prettybirds settled for the night on the house’s roof and the crown of a stunted Hannakka bush nearby.  Their jewel-like brightness dulled as the bush’s illumination began fading.  As Phin watched, they blinked in sequence again–the same sequence?  She wanted to try counting, but where should she start?  Arbitrarily picking a green-plumed individual perched on the house’s overhanging eave, she recorded its two blinks on her wristband.  Lucky choice, she thought; this was the way the first run had begun.  But then things deviated.  To that prettybird’s right another gave her two blinks, too.  And two blinks came from each of the other four prettybirds on the roof.  The order didn’t matter.  It was all twos.

Switching to the Hannakka bush, Phin recorded the blinks of the five prettybirds there.  Four each.  A totally different sequence.  What did it mean?

This time Phin took the middle watch, which in practice meant she stayed up sexing with Doe while Thad looped through the area around them like a nosy incel, stopping in occasionally but heading off before becoming too involved.  Finally trading places with her was a relief.

Nothing noteworthy happened during Phin’s watch.  Toward the start of it Phin was sure she spotted Psyche Moth’s steady light setting in the peninsula’s south and west.  Correctly calculating when and where it would reappear distracted her a short while.  She could have used the calculator algorithm embedded in her wristband.  Should have.  If they ever met his whole self again–when they met his whole self again–Dr. Ops was going to know how much she missed him whether she had tracked his position with the calculator or not.  He wouldn’t have to read the wristband.  He’d read her.

Denial did nobody any good.  Too bad she couldn’t just shed certain segments of her being.  Though to be fair, Dr. Ops hadn’t truly gotten rid of the segments of himself where his love for her lived.  The algorithms he’d sent down here with them were only copies.  Besides not being that broad.  Still, Phin spent a long, wistful time wishing for conveniently detachable personality fragments.  Or drugs, or some other way to forget she was part of a whole.  A mere member of her family.

When Doe took over from her, Phin went inside to bed down with Thad.  Who hardly stirred as Phin snuggled her bedroll up to Thad’s side.  Shouldn’t her husband be awake and worried?  Wondering whether Doe would sneak off on her own again despite promises to the contrary?  Planning what to tell Dr. Ops?  And how?  Frustrated by Thad’s deep sleep, Phin rolled to the mat’s far side and dropped into her own dreams.

She woke to curses.  The house walls filtered most of what Thad was saying, but her shouts of “Fuck me!  Fuck me limp and dry!” broke through.  Doe occupied Thad’s former spot on the mat, and Phin had snuggled close to her during the night.  Cautiously, she inched out from under her wife’s cradling arm and went to the house’s entrance.

Drag marks creasing the side of the dune to Phin’s right led up to the wave dish her husband had assembled from lander segments.  Thad stood near the dish, fists pounding bent knees, silent mouth open wide, sucking in a big breath for more shouting.  Phin scrambled forward and ran to hug her.  “What’s wrong?  Stop!  What if a client hears you?”

Thad unclenched her fists and stepped out of the hug, tugging off her wristband.  “Here!  Take it!  Or throw it away–he don’t care!  Forget Dr. Ops!  He don’t want us comin back up, and he not comin down, neither.”  The stretchy carbon loop waggled on her fingertips.  Streaks of apricot and baby blue marked active algorithms.

“What do you mean?  You asked for us to be sent back to Psyche Moth?  How?  Why?  There’s not enough room for us to live there–not in the meat–”

“Think I’m stupid?  Tole good ole Dr. Ops we’d give up our bodies.”  Thad had been suspicious of downloading ever since Psyche Moth arrived at Amends.  Phin felt guilty for convincing her to try it.  But this was too much.

“You can’t say that!  No I won’t!  You never asked if I would–or Doe, either, I bet–and besides, what’s that got to do with our problems?  Why even bring it–”

“So we could stay together, right?”  Doe’s new voice, reedier, higher, but carrying the same weight it always had.  Phin’s wife stood at the bottom of the dune’s slope, looking somehow safe and comforting in her still-unfamiliar white body.  “We family.  Les ack like it.”  Doe climbed up to them faster than Phin would have expected, gathering them both in her arms.

Thad stiffened, then relaxed.  “Yeah, that’s what I want.  Yeah.  Maybe…maybe that’s what Dr. Ops is aimin at too?  In his peculiar way?  Cause his only family before us was his mama, WestHem.  Who gave him birth by givin him part a her own self….”  Thad’s softened stance sank to a crouch.  She pulled Doe down to squat beside her.  Phin joined them.  “An ain’t that kinda what he gave us fore he landed us here on Amends?”

“You squirted him the playback from your wristband?” Doe asked.

Thad nodded, absentmindedly squeezing his wristband, scrunching it together in the palm of his hand.  “Includin what I copied off yours and Phin’s.  Then I ast him what to do now summa these clients figured out who we really is, where we really from.  An he answer me like everything already fixed up fine–like he been here!  Like Trill an Dola already took us under their wing an sponsored us, an we already plugged in to Jubilee an Unrest and everthing!  Like them pieces a himself he give us is all its gonna take, and he ain’t hafta do nothing more!”

“What exactly he did he say?  Not what you decided he meant.  Did you make a recording?”

“Wanna hear it?”  Thad lifted wrist and band to her mouth without waiting for a reply.  With an exaggerated slurping sound she licked at a glowing speck of neon green, then smiled and spoke Dr. Ops’ words in her own voice: 

“‘At this moment, you have almost all of me you need.  You can solve your clients’ difficulties instantly–yours too.  As soon as you realize these prettybirds aren’t a new problem but an old solution, you’ll figure out exactly what to do!’”

“That’s it?”

“They’s more, but nothin to do with nothin.”

“Because he wants us to figure things out for ourselves.  He’s the complete opposite of what that trustee who met your wife–”

“An died right after, remember?”

“–what that trustee, that Carpenter Marie, claimed clients said they hated about Dr. Ops: him making everybody’s decisions for them, keeping everybody dependent.  He’s not like that!”  Phin thrust out her chin as if she could force acceptance of her opinion.

“We know.  We know that–firsthand.  We on a whole world thinkin otherwise, though.”

“Gotta show em.”

“Show em what?”  Doe rotated her arm back and forth so her wristband twirled in place.  She slid it off and let it dangle from one finger.  “Show em how we–”

SWOOP!  A blur of pink and blue snatched the band away.  “Hey!”  Doe’s yell scared the thieving prettybird off–but not far.  Phin saw it land on the roof of the abandoned house below them, alongside others–four others?  Had the prettybirds who’d perched there last night stayed the whole time?  As she watched, the thief dropped the wristband and blinked at her twice.  Slowly.  Deliberately.  A pause heartbeats long and two more blinks.

In unison with its companions.

Would the prettybirds repeat themselves?  Concentrating on the rooftop contingent, Phin almost missed the second steal: a different prettybird was flying off with Thad’s wristband clutched beneath its amber and violet belly.

She jumped to her feet.  “Stop it!  Drop it!  You!  Stop!”

“What?”  Thad noticed her hand was empty.  “Wait–what’s goin on?”

This prettybird went straight to the scrubby little Hannakka bush.  It hung the wristband on the branch where it perched and blinked at her four times.  Pause.  Four more times.  And yes, the others with it did the same.

“Don’t know for sure.  But I think–”  Phin tugged off her own wristband and ran down the dune to place it on the sand at the slope’s bottom.  She ran back up and continued, “–I think they’re talking to us.  Or actually it’s more like they’re getting us to understand how to talk to them.”

“We spozed to blink, that it?” asked Doe.  She stood too, now.  “Together?”

“No.  Not quite–Yes!  Here we go!”  Over the treetops massed beyond the dunes came a murmur of prettybirds: black specks diving, swirling, wheeling through the air, a vast cloud quickly covering their sky, sinking low to fill her sight with color upon color, wine and rose and ivory, teal and mauve and all the spectrum, all the glories, all the shades and all the light.  Hovering within reach.

Like a stream of rain, the cloud released a line of twittering prettybirds.  Five of them.  They dropped to the ground and formed a semicircle behind the wristband, facing Phin and Doe and Thad.

They blinked in unison.  Eight times.

She waited patiently.

Eight times more.  Her theory was correct!  She kissed her husband hard, reached for her wife and kissed her too.  “I’m right!  I’m right!”  She laughed for joy.  

“Now we blink?”

“You want them to think we’re like the wristbands?  That we’re algorithms, tasks, like the dedicated pieces of himself Dr. Ops sent down with us?  Look!  They’re taking them in, parts to the whole.”  She pointed.  The three groups of visiting prettybirds had taken off.  Beneath the airborne belly of one prettybird in every group hung a wristband.  In an instant the individual prettybirds merged into the murmur.

“What they gonna do with Dr. Ops’s algorithms?” asked Thad.  “Cain’t download em I bet.”

“Not these.  Although–”  She gazed measuringly at the throbbing mass of hues blending, bending, shaping, changing, reaching, bringing its outside in and its inside out.  Touching itself.  “–although maybe I’m amazed how quickly it’s managing to adapt.”

“Yeah?  You think they gettin the trick a–”

“Not ‘they.’  ‘It.’ Single prettybirds aren’t intelligent.  Not on their own.  It’s–”

Doe gasped.  “The murmur!  It’s like a family–like us!”

Phin frowned.  “Not like us: like him.  It’s not a family; it’s the equivalent of Dr. Ops.”

“You mean–you tellin us you got a theory…”  Thad gestured at the murmur’s kaleidoscopic churn.  “…tellin us prettybirds built themselves a AI?”

“I’m telling you they made themselves into an AI.”

“Natural artificial intelligence?”

Phin remembered Dr. Ops telling her back on Psyche Moth, so long ago, that all intelligence was artificial.  Or natural.  Or both.

And he was her love.  More.  Her heart, like they all were.  And he was right.  “The only kind there is.”