Vincentpassing into his Friday routine as his frustration eased a bit. A longshower and dinner found him a little better, though a long way fromanythi...g like his usual mood come the weekend. Dressing casually inshirt, khaki pants and keds, worn sockless, he had little appetite fornight life and chose a lazy evening in. Sorting through his bag, and thevarious files, he had a chance to put the past week and particularlythis Friday into perspective. The reasons for his resentment andfrustrated. Neither of us spoke for a bit, just sat there listening to each other breathe. My thoughts spun, through all the same reasoning and arguments, without providing anything new.Finally I broke the silence, starting mid-sentence as though he’d been present for most of the argument in my head. Which to be honest he might as well have – I had to admit that half the time he knew what I was thinking better than I did.“ ... and in my defense, I did sort of have a terror demon rampaging through my head.”. She'd kept pets for many decades, including an iguana whose eventual demise upset her much more than she'd anticipated. Although she was comfortable in her human form—as she was programmed to be—like all androids she was burdened with a range of emotional responses that most robots in her solar system were spared, so she was genuinely sad when the life of a biological entity came to an abrupt end.Sometimes she envied the majority of her fellow Proxima Centaurans who, by virtue of having been. Both had a good chance for success but one carried considerable risk and the other had minimal risk. The trouble with the minimal risk plan was that Jim had some unknown factors in the equation. He had never met JJ's father or uncle other than vicariously through JJ and her mother. His meeting with JJ's mother left no doubt in his mind that Collette would accept JJ's advances willingly. Jim didn't know if JJ's father and uncle would accept her advances as eagerly as he was sure her mother.