"We're not having any of that, Amy," I responded.
"Of course, we are; that's why we came into the kitchen."
"Nope, the thought never crossed my mind."
"Cowboy, you do realize that I know every thought you have."
"The crumble is for the ancestors," I explained.
"I am an ancestor," she declared. "I've been around for four million years, Genome! I was rockin' with the dinosaurs. Now there was a fun bunch of yahoos. Talk about getting manic."
A look of pure joy crossed her face as she thought about what it was like to sit in the captain's chair in the Jurassic Era. I felt a little mean having to break her out of that reverie.
"You haven't been here that long. Limbic systems may have developed that long ago, though I doubt they were fully formed with amygdalas, hypo-Ts, hippocampi, and such."
"I have too been here that long! I thought you were a student of consciousness and all that rot. You don't know very much about my history. Limbic systems have been around for 300 million years. If you don't believe me, Google it, bonehead. I and my best friends, Hippocampus and Hypothalamus, are crucial for survival. Chew on that for a while, doofus."
I opened my mouth to respond to her insistence on using all those labels--cowboy, bonehead, doofus. It wasn't like her, and I didn't like it. But she didn't give me a chance to shove in my two cents' worth.
"I've been around from the very beginning, baby. I remember it all too. That's why I'm not just another pretty face; I'm a creative problem solver and a systems designer."
"I'm the systems designer," I countered. "That's your problem, Amy, you think we're the same. You have trouble separating meum from tuum."
"That's because we're not separate, Dummy. We are the same, you and I. You're the fleshy bag of mostly water part, and I'm the brains."
"You have a talking point, I suppose, in some sense we really are the same."
"Exactly, so there's no reason for you to refuse a bit of apple crumble."
"We're not eating apple crumble. Ms. Wonder puts that out every Samhain evening for the ancestors, so put it out of your mind, if you have one. Do you have a mind of your own, or do we share that too?"
"What do you think, Sherlock? If you don't eat it now, I'll make you think about it all night long. You'll dream about it. You'll wake up thinking about it. It's going to be a lot of fun for me."
"I'll play ELO on the radio all night."
"You and your Electric Light Orchestra.” She breathed hard during a momentary silence. “When are you going to put that out of your mind? That disk jockey is smoking joy weed, there’s no intelligent life anywhere in the universe; at least not anymore.”
"Oh, shut up, Amy."
"Oh, do you want me to stop talking? Well, think about this: if I didn't talk to you, where would you be now?"
"Probably still working for the Space Shuttle Program at NASA Johnson Space Center."
"The Space Shuttle Program is defunct, Genome. Has been for decades."
"Right, that's true,” I admitted with no small difficulty. "Nothing stays the same," I mused. "Everything changes."
"Exactly as it should be,” said the princess.
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