Good news:  second biopsy on dog came back as a polyp.  No cancer.  Bad news:  second biopsy on dog came back as a polyp; so it might regrow like some tanjed weed if the surgeon didn’t get it all, branch-and-root.  *sigh* Time will tell.  Otherwise, Lucky Star is doing fine.

Accepting the fail of another NNWM is relaxing:  my pacing of writing is much more like what I was doing over the summer with Defiant… about 500 words a night with the occasional ~1200 word burst.  The story is much less forced and much more like my usual pedestrian* style.  I’m happier about that.  Not that I don’t have an hard deadline:  I finally got round to seeing the longer trailer for Ghost in the Shell.  Never read the manga, never saw any of the animated movies.  So, a show about machines and what it means to be a person.  Nope, I got nothing on that.  Better have Cursed Hearts published before that comes out!

*No, really.  I actually have Chris and Cat wandering around UCSD campus…

To an external observer, their motion would have been described as ‘Brownian;’ with only the smallest tugs, whether she had something to show him, or he noticed something to observe, they made their way randomly about campus. He did most of the talking; it only hurt once.

“As I said yesterday, she has a machine for a brain, a proprietary quantum computer, developed by Neuroi, meant to ride in a human body.” Just like me, he couldn’t say.

“But, the rest of her is… normal?” Cat hesitantly asked.

“No.” With a tiny motion, he let her drift them into some shade whenever the sun broke through the clouds. “There are some minor neuro-muscular changes, too. Those, with her brain, make her faster than humans, but no stronger than a large, healthy man.”

Just like me.

Cat slowed. Stopped. She asked her question without looking at him.

“Chris? What happened to the brain of the girl…” she choked a little, “that was in the body that your sister’s brain is now in?”

Come, I will conceal nothing from you…

“I do not know.” Come…. “But I do suspect.”

“What?”

“Neuroi would take shipment of bodies from some hospitals in Sapporo, to the south of the research complex. I ran across some invoices once, that, most likely, I was not supposed to see.”

Another small choke. She tightened her arm about his.

“Chris? Those bodies? Alive or dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ!” Cat breathed. He saw her cross herself with her free right hand. “God save me: terminators and grave-robbers! This is not the 21^st Century I was expecting!”