"Not necessarily in that order, though."She reached up and put her palm on my chest, then leaned in and snuggled the side of her face into my shoulder... "I'm really nervous. But I knew it was coming. You programmed me to accept it."I let the arm along the back of the swing fall, and I began idly running my fingers through her hair. "I didn't program you, Dawn."I felt her shrug. "You suggested it, then. You made the hypnotic suggestion; and now, I can't stop thinking about it. I've been obsessed. In the main room I was greeted by Janice, who was sitting at a table eating some cereal. Bethany was sitting up on the couch with a couple of babies in her arms."Meiko, you're awake!" Janice called out. "How are you feeling?" Confused," I said. "Last night it seemed like everyone was pushing for me to be a constant companion to James while the scientist is here."Bethany smiled and shook her head. "Well, we'll probably have Brittany and Kitty around him almost as much. The key is to have him. Zoraster watched Danica at the Scrying Pool through his own scrying mirror. He again stood in the coffin room where Danica's 'sisters' had been created. Two of the crèches had their lids closed, and Zoraster absently stroked one as he watched."Yes, you grow stronger in your Art, my little rose. Perhaps the time has come to test your mastery of the Art in my service. What do you think little one?" he said to the coffin beneath his hand.A faint rustling caused him to smile, "Yes, I agree. It. Whenever the programmers at Chaing-central modified the program, the changes were to a disk-version. The disk version would be loaded into memory, but never activated.Io would spend the next week and a half looking closely at the code of Chaing. Do you have any idea how much time that is for a machine that thinks a pico-second is a long time? A pico-second is 1,000,000,000,000th of a second – one trillionth of a second.Chaing was built to destroy. In addition to hiding himself on computers and.