"...I mean, I guess I can see that, and frankly if it neither causes nor signals any substance beyond the thing itself on your end, the thing itself is beside the point - but the fact that it neither causes nor signals blah blah might be important? Does that make sense?"

"Oh, sure! Yeah, I just- I don't think I have all the same parts in my head that normal people might, y'know? Might be because of Mom, might just be how I work, but some things just don't make sense. Like this idea I love somebody less because I'm screwing other people too - what, do I just not generate enough love? Am I on rationing? 'Cause from my point of view, loving a bunch of people just means I'm loving a bunch of people."

"I don't think we've even begun to approach that vocabulary," Bella points out. "I could try to explain the missing architecture but I'm not really drawing on a wealth of experience and I'm not sure you'd find it more than theoretically interesting."

"I'm not having any trouble following you. And, like, I feel like I could comfortably mono at somebody's poly. It would not be my first choice, so if I am ever presented with a girlfriend-o-mat I will not be checking that checkbox, but it's not the worst thing, but it's also not one thing? There's probably a jillion ways for someone to poly at my mono and some of them would really bother me."

"Oh, cool! So, you want- rules? Because I can totally do rules. Speak to me of rules. If that's what you're saying."

"I don't have a list yet! I dunno. If I told you 'go nuts, be free' what would you in fact do?"

"Uh... Well, basically what I do now. Sleep with people who I think are cute or hot or funny or whatever, routinely sleep with a lot of the same people... I'd keep you posted on it, obviously, that's just sensible... I probably wouldn't, like, enter other romantic relationships? One is basically enough for me. And I'm pretty sure I'd usually spend more time with you than other folks, because that's a girlfriend thing, though I wouldn't be totally shocked if that turned out not to be true. Does that sound like the right kind of info?"

"That is more or less what I was asking, yes. Okay, for purposes of my contemplations should I assume that this universe or at least the immediate environment is free of STDs...?"

"The environment of me certainly is! I mean, it's always possible somebody could come up with some Exemplar-proof hellbug of a social disease, but like, we're in the highest concentration of healers and wizards and medical Devisors in possibly the world, so it's pretty implausible. Plus I use prophylactic magics."

"Yes, for purposes of my contemplations 'immediate environment' can mean 'you'." She hmmmms. "The thing you have described sounds fine but not totally congruent with the 'loving a bunch of people' summary unless you're using a secondary definition there."

"I mean, like I said, I love easy. There's not really a coherent line between 'I love this friend' and 'I love this person I have a lot of sex with' and 'I love my girlfriend', or whatever, it's just that Sally I love and don't sleep with and Xan I love and sleep with and you I love and kiss and have a bunch of fuzzy feelings about. It's all kind of performative. I only really need one person to kiss and have fuzzy feelings about, so I don't feel the need to toss anybody else into the third category unless you say it's alright. It's all different kinds of love, I guess is what I'm trying to say."

"Okay. So... I am a very inherently selfish person. The thing I foresee maybe being a problem here is my opinion that I Deserve An Entire Human All To Myself, with allowances for things like 'people need to sleep' and 'I am an introvert' and 'I am planning to become extremely fucking magic and do all the everything'. And in theory I could accomplish my arithmetic by adding up the best parts of several different humans but in practice I'm disinclined, which adds up to monogamous inclinations."

"Oh, interesting. I can see that. But, like... Is the problem with my availability, or with the fact that other people are theoretically getting bits of me? Because the former isn't really any more a problem than other activities I might do, and the latter falls into the 'my love is a limitless resource' thing. I could put more effort into making sure you're first and foremost in my thoughts, if that helps?"

"And now we're getting way into the thing where we have not approached my end of the L-word yet and therefore it feels entirely premature to be talking about me being first and foremost in your thoughts, but that does sound like where I would want to wind up eventually. ...Also I seem to be taking the phrase 'limitless resource' as a challenge but mostly on a non-planning level."

"No, I mean... okay. Imagine I was presented with a girlfriend-o-mat. Further imagine that I successfully become super fucking magic and proceed to accomplish all the everything. The various dials and levers I would poke on the girlfriend-o-mat would pop out somebody who found not only me, but the sorts of things I want to do with my life, overwhelmingly appealing. Like, if I decide that where I need to be some weekend is, um, hammering out a diplomatic treaty with some aliens followed by acquiring an asteroid mining company and wrapping up Sunday evening with six hours of intensive physics experiments on assorted superpowers, the girlfriend-o-mat would give me somebody who would have nothing better to do, not because she has no life but because she would agree with me that these were the best things to do. Or we would be dividing up the projects in some sensible manner but with agreed-upon sum total priorities and she'd be busy turning seaweed into a cure for cancer or something, but, do you know what I mean? And there is no girlfriend-o-mat and if there was its use would be deeply ethically problematic and I am not only resigned to but reasonably comfortable with the reality of settling short of this ideal, but I am aware that that's a thing that's happening."

"I mean, I totally do find the things you want to do with your life appealing! You want great things. But I will admit that I don't always have nothing better to do, because sometimes there's violence or sex to be done, and those trump a lot of things. Or, like, paintball. Paintball's pretty great too."

"Right, so, I'm not competing with Sally, but my... hobbies might, in a completely different way, compete with your hobbies."

"I don't imagine this action-packed weekend I have described being completely sexless in the ideal case anyway, I'm a lesbian, not an asexual. But this is where the 'taking it as a challenge' part comes in. If I cannot monopolize someone's attention when I want it and that person has any taste at all, it is because I haven't colonized enough exoplanets and designed enough successors to golden rice yet, better get cracking - you see?"

"Ooh, I see. I dunno, if you really wanted to monopolize me and I didn't have a match I'd probably go along anyway. But I do see the point."

"When I say 'monopolize' I don't mean 'ask for', I mean 'command by sheer virtue of awesomeness without even trying'."

"Yeah. It'd still happen most of the time, but, I mean, sometimes there's violence."

"The appeal of which I only partially understand and that only as a spectator, but, yes. Sometimes there is that, because I did not get you out of a girlfriend-o-mat, because - I just imagined Morty building a girlfriend-o-mat and wish I had not done so, pity me."