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she has. Humans, and Jenlay, do not have prehensile tongues.’
    ‘Huh. You might have a point. So, how was it for you? Did the extra bandwidth help?’
    ‘I believe,’ Al said, sounding rather satisfied, ‘that I detected nuances in the sensory feeds which I have never noticed before. Right up until the point where it just became a wash of bright colours. I got the impression that your new body passed this test with flying colours?’
    ‘ Our new body,’ Aneka replied, ‘is just as responsive as the old one, maybe more so. Also, I never used to be able to put my ankles behind my neck.’
    ‘I am still not sure why you would want to.’
    ‘Honestly, neither am I, but it’s supposed to be a good thing.’
    ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever understand organics,’ Al replied with a digital sigh.
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    The sun had dipped below the horizon and the long dusk had begun by the time Aneka emerged from the university building on the second day of her psychological evaluation. Not that the light seemed dim to her, her eyes were quite capable of operating very well in total darkness, but it did mean that further sunbathing was out for about fifteen days.
    The final phase of testing had been a thorough scan of her memory which had taken a couple of hours. Ella, Cassandra, Winter, and Speaker had all pronounced her fit before that, but checking there were no issues with recall had been an important additional test.
    ‘Oh well,’ Ella said, looking up at the sky, ‘there’s still the solarium.’ Her eyes were not as efficient in the dark as Aneka’s, but they worked better in low light than normal ones.
    ‘True,’ Aneka replied. ‘People are going to take some time to get used to a day–night pattern like this, even with the artificial lights maintaining a standard day.’
    ‘Shadataga isn’t the only world with weird day lengths. Some people might find this sequence a bit short. I didn’t see natural daylight until I moved to New Earth. But, yes, most will see it as weird. So, what do we do now?’
    ‘We wait. In six or so days the fleet will reach Lonar.’
    ‘Oh,’ Ella replied.
    ‘Actually,’ Cassandra said from behind them, ‘now that Aneka’s situation is settled, there’s something else we can see about activating.’
    Both Cassandra and Winter were standing behind them, just outside the main doors. And both of them were now wearing suspiciously mischievous grins.
    ~~~
    There was another pod, but this one contained a man. He was tall, with firm muscle definition, hair on his chest as well as a smoothly combed-back head of thick, black hair. His eyes were closed, so their colour was undetermined, but he had strong features, a high bridge to the nose giving it a Roman look, and a firm, cleft chin. His skin was tanned and smooth, and he was naked just as Aneka had been.
    ‘What do you think?’ Cassandra asked, beaming at the figure behind the glass.
    ‘He’s… handsome,’ Aneka said. ‘Got a bit of a “Latin lover” look to him.’
    ‘He’s big!’ Ella commented, her eyes on his crotch.
    ‘He’s me,’ Al said inside Aneka’s mind. He sounded surprised.
    ‘You what?’ Aneka asked.
    ‘It was a game we played once. What would I look like if I had a body? This is what we came up with. Well, it was mostly Cassandra who came up with it, but… That is pretty much what we decided I would look like.’
    ‘You built a body for Al?’ Aneka asked aloud.
    ‘It’s a drone,’ Winter explained. ‘It is, essentially, the same as one of the avatars the other AIs use, customised to Cassandra’s specification. With the additional bandwidth and processing power Al has, he should have no difficulty in operating that body from where he is. Obviously, it needs to be within range of you, or connected through the campus network.’
    ‘Okay,’ Ella said. She had her professional face on; she was being the dispassionate psychologist. ‘So Al gets a body to walk around in, which is kind of neat, but