How about doing something else for me? What do you know that would be only you playing? The bass and rhythm can come in later."I was smiling. "How abo...t something from Duane Allman? He called it 'Little Martha'. It isn't very long, but it is gentle and almost happy."Everyone was smiling when I finished that, and Lisa asked, "How about another voice from the grave? Pops, do 'Try a little Tenderness' the way Etta always did it." Pops and Rags followed Lisa's guitar lead in and Lisa sang the old. Am I really talking to a machine?" You're talking to a living thing, an intelligent awareness that lives in a machine," I corrected her. "A spirit, sort of. I call him Spook." But how can that be? How can a machine come alive?" How can a collection of protein molecules come alive?" I asked rhetorically. "Isn't that the greater miracle? We programmed Spook, or the computer where he was born, to think, sort of. He just woke up and started thinking for himself." My God! Is it— is he the only one?". I will check with our director, but I think she will agree with me, that there should be no problems with you adopting those two children."After getting the state of Michigan to agree to let me adopt Jillian and JJ, I gave Ms. Parker the ok to get the kids out of Texas and home to me. I did not tell her that I would have taken the kids, whether I could adopt them or not.A week before Christmas, Jolene and Jason were standing with me at the airport. We were waiting for the Jillian and JJ to. “Of course you can. You’re free, so am I.” A scholar’s logic would be irrefutable, were it not their difference in stations.“You’re the heir to a powerful clan and will need to make a match that reflects it,” she reasoned.His arms straightened to brace by her sides. “True, but I choose not to do it.”“It’s not about us, there’s more involved in it, I’m sure you realise that.” Alliances that joined fortunes and reaffirmed networks. His own story made it very clear—an arranged marriage made by his.