Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [69]
'We can talk next door,' said the drone.
AM!xitsa watched Roz carefully as she tied the cord on the silk dressing gown. There was a singular lack of grace about her movements, an impatience that the drone found peculiarly fascinating. It was as if she treated everything as a series of irritating obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. AM!xitsa let its vision drift inside her, noting the healed breaks in her right tibia, the tell-tale discoloration of repaired subcutaneous tissue at no less than twenty-six separate sites on her body. More telling still was the slight enlargement of the medulla sections of both her adrenal glands and her elevated blood pressure, both indications of prolonged stress.
If Roz was a machine, decided aM!xitsa, she was a machine that had been running way over its design parameters for way too long.
There was a microscopic tear in the superior vena cava of her heart that might cause problems during the next ten years – aM!xitsa fixed it with an imperceptible twist of his ancillary manipulator field. The action gave the drone that little thrill of pleasure that always came from doing something benevolently unethical.
'You must be aM!xitsa,' said Roz. 'Make yourself useful and get some coffee, will you?'
AM!xitsa had a long nanosecond argument with House about protocol which resulted in a compromise where aM!xitsa provided the coffee template while House actually boiled water and ground beans. Why House felt it necessary to first synthesize whole beans and then grind them up aM!xitsa was too polite to ask. House had obviously picked up some eccentricities from associating with such extreme characters as the Doctor and his companions. Organic people rarely understood these little machine/machine compromises that were essential to the smooth running of the worldsphere. Nor did organics really appreciate just how blurred the line between sentience and non-sentience was. It was all part of their charm, aM!xitsa supposed.
'And you must be Roz,' said aM!xitsa.
AM!xitsa did another scan of the sleeping woman, noting the elevated activity in the high cognitive sub-structures. It traced the patterns in the steam that rose over the coffee pot in the house food preparation area and thought that they would make a good subject for a mathematical poem. It had a longish conversation with a friend in the Xenobiology Interest Group. Ran another scan on the sleeping woman and this time made a comparative match with Roz's physiology, surprised by the areas of commonality given that one was designed and the other wasn't. It used the scans as the basis for one of its famous unpublished theses: Evolution vs Design in Hominid Bipeds. Wrote it, filed it, unfiled it and changed the title to Whose Life Is It Anyway? Made another, slightly shorter, call to another friend, this time in the Weird Cuisine Interest Group, and got some interesting recipes to try out on Roz. Which led to another long argument with House about whose area of responsibility cooking was in the villa. Reread the thesis, decided that most of it was rubbish and filed it in its internal datavore trap that had so far claimed 6,546 similar unpublished theses.
'That's right,' said Roz.
AM!xitsa shunted off the culinary template to House. It was curious to find out how efficient Roz's digestion was.
As far as she could understand the woman in her bed was some sort of mental patient that aM!xitsa was looking after. The drone explained that the woman had got away from it and climbed into Roz's bed while it was thinking about something else. Roz didn't believe a word of it. She had her own suspicions about who, or rather, what the woman was. The whole thing practically stank of the Doctor. No doubt he'd tell her about it in his own good time.
The coffee was rich, aromatic and very bitter, much better than the stuff House normally came up with. Roz