I wanted to ask her if I could eat her but I did not feel good about asking her. I also wanted Mom to do it to me but again I did not ask. Somehow I f...lt it was wrong. I was 11 before I realized that I was supposed to wear underwear under my dresses. Mother always wore a dress and so did I, but she never wore panties and I never gave it any thought. I never wore them, either. It wasn't until I was at the playground with a neighbor friend and I saw that she was wearing something under her dress. Then he noticed that the door of ward 8 is ajar. Nurses' carelessness maybe. He knew who lay in ward 8 – a girl in her early twenties who had the misfortune to be run over by a pickup truck. Simon hesitated for a moment. Deep in the recesses of his mind a strong impetus was urging him to peep in. He had seen her once but desperately wanted to see her again, a fact that he found quite disturbing.Simon peeped in. She was lying motionless on her bed, as could be expected of comatose patient. Her. That last note to himself made Oliver shudder a bit. Because it forced him to confront a very uncomfortable reality.He could see traces of little Speedy in her, sure. But for the most part, this was a new person he didn't recognize. A new, fully grown, beautiful young woman that he hadn't seen before.And to his personal horror, his reaction when he was looking at her was very much the same as any red-blooded heterosexual male's reaction would be to looking at a beautiful grown woman for the. . something like a surfboard from orbit. He wasn’t a host for long, but the memory of the experience had stayed with Al for eons. The surfboard was nothing more than a mass of super efficient solar cells collecting photons. The charged photons energized a reactor that powered a jet.That ‘surfboard’ wouldn’t do what he needed, but the concept added to bits and pieces of other technology from a myriad other memories, both experienced with hosts, and learned from other Companions. The data.