Their interest is the snake, and they have a real talent at making a pain in the ass of themselves. I asked around." She seemed real helpful." She did... indeed. She gave us a straw to grasp at. But, you ever hear of the snail darter?" That was ten years ago," Musgrave said, "But Carter really looked like an idiot on that." Wasn't real difficult for him," Don said. "I can give lectures on that subject, but that's beside the point. Assume we can't touch the system. How do we keep the plant in. Of course I was a little apprehensive that the signal would travel the full ten miles, but I was pleasantly surprised by the results.The first dozen or so calls I monitored were nothing more than her talking with friends, or the old man doing some business. Finally she received a call from her boyfriend, who I learned was named Jimmy, and her name was Suzanne. The call revealed that her husband would be out of town for a few days, and she invited him to spend the night on Wednesday.That evening. They were earlier models, earlier experiments. Failures. And I realized that the computer graphic was not a game, not a silly exaggeration. It was the template he was using to rebuild me. I was slowly being erased and in my place would be a flesh and blood sex doll, a cartoonish caricature of womanhood dressed in latex and leather, like the John Willie drawings but alive and responsive."Let's give her a try, shall we?" Thomas said. There was no mistake in his voice, it was a command. "Let's get. One of the first things I had to take care of for Su Lin was to get her presence in this country legalized. Of course, Jeremy was the one to take care of that. Henri had scheduled us for our tandem shoot late in the afternoon and I knew that Jeremy would be working late as he always did when either Jenifer or I couldn’t drag him off to be a bad influence on him. I figured to stop by his office when we were done at Henri’s. Henri did a series of test shots of Su Lin before we got into ‘costume’.