The joys of motherhood

Perhaps I wasn't cut out for this motherhood thing after all. Or, at the very least, perhaps I should have thought the entire concept through a little more before I went through the legal troubles of wrapping four people into a family around our dear Lily. Then, perhaps I should have just shot that hwun dan when he first started sniffing around Lily like a stray. Except a stray wouldn't have run off with her against everyone's wishes except his own. Haley proved that. Of course, it's no surprise my Beagle is smarter than that hān zi Lily was running with.

Here I'd gone out of my way to make the warnings gentle, since Lily seemed to be soft on the kid, and then he goes and drags her away like he thinks he's actually good for her. Idiot. Selfish, young prat. I can remember him going on about how no one trusts his motives and being mad at all the flack he gets. Well guess what, Junior, you want people to respect you and your motives? Try not pull stunts like this. Only reason I won't kill you the next time I see you is that it'll upset Lily. No one trusts your motives because you've done an amazing job of showing us we can't trust your motives. Don't respect you? Try doing something respectable and not treating Lily's family like they're some kind of obstacle to your personal happiness.

Only good thing that might come out of Lily running off with that twerp is he might be able to drive her core code closer to Organic. Won't be anything conscious. If he actually helps her it'll be out of sheer luck, rather than anything done on purpose. If he had half a brain he wouldn't have run off with her. But that'd be crediting him with half a brain.

Of course, the other extreme was Mindo. He had more than half a brain. Bloody genius he was, but batshit insane too. I couldn't say I actually hated him. More like pity. I'd been around mad geniuses before, but most of them had something that resembled morals. Mindo was the perfect example of what could go dreadfully wrong when a brilliant scientist got disconnected from Humanity.

You got Mindo.

I'd exchanged the name of the 'boy who ran off with Lily' for more information on the Blue Man and how Lily related to that gorram AI Blue Sun had created. Mindo figured it was going to be come the first fully self aware computer. Seemed a bit far fetched. Folks had been making that claim for at least two hundred years, going back as far as the Persephone Electronics 'Big Think' superframe. But Mindo was a biotech, not a technologist, so it wouldn't surprise me he didn't know the history.

What he did know was Lily. And Blue Man. And not being able to manipulate me into helping him - arrogant bastard that he was - he'd gone on to try and manipulate Krenshar and the Order into doing his dirty work for him. What had he promised them? What lies had he told them? He'd probably been mostly truthful with me, even if he treated me and everyone else around here like we were provincial children. But the Order? I doubted he counted them as 'alive', so probably had no qualms about steering them into whatever he wanted.

What is it with selfish arrogant bastards this week?

The purely practical side of he thinks it might have been a mistake to adopt Lily. Sometimes she acted like an adult. Sometimes like a teen. Sometimes like a five year old. And deep inside? Deep inside she wasn't even fully organic, let alone Human. I needed to believe she'd become a whole person. Just situations like this made me wonder if we hadn't made a fundamental mistake.

Still. I wanted to believe we'd done the right thing. And I firmly believed Lily was a lot more important to our future than anyone knew.

Just wish it didn't hurt so much.