"Hey you," says the Lorica. She or it sits on Sadde's bed.

"Your bot monitors every conversation you have, doesn't it? Having the exact same conversation twice in a row wouldn't be a good idea."

"Yeah. I mean, it does have a better memory than I do so unless it was prompting me I couldn't pull off a verbatim duplicate."

"So if this is the real you and your bot were trying to emulate you later, it would also not pull off a verbatim duplicate. Unless you'd want to ask for its help to do it?"

"I get info from the bot all the time. Reminders and Wikipedia checks and calculations and whatnot. It's probably like thirty effective IQ points when I put the helmet on."

"Thirty?"

"I haven't actually sat down with a Stanford-Binet," she admits. "But I'm not sure there exist IQ test problems my bot can't do so I might just break it if I took it while flagrantly cheating."

"I suppose. So, if we were to repeat this conversation, would you blatantly cheat?"

"Unless I had some reason to want to fuck it up, yeah. Better come up with a new opener for trial two."

"Oh, well. Anyway, what've you been working on?"

"Populating the flock. Patrolling a whole city's a big job for a few dozen."

"Hadn't you been doing that at night already, before?"

"Yeah, but now I need enough of 'em that they can also perform normal bot functions when I'm patrolling in person or called to some location."

"Oh. Fair. Couldn't I supply you with some, in the meantime? Set them up so that shoulderbot," she pets hers, "will ping me or something the moment they disappear?"

"Sure, that'd be nice. Trouble is they can't go too far on their own because if they do disappear - you're distracted or whatever - they just vanish and you can only remake them near one that still exists."

"Yeah, that's true. But, hmm, that sounds like a solvable problem."

"Yeah?"

"I'm not sure how to solve it, but something I just couldn't ignore, like... Maybe a very loud sound in earbuds, something I couldn't ignore. It wouldn't work while I'm asleep, but," shrug.

"We'd have to test that."

"Mmhm. Do you have other ideas?"

"Not off the top of my head. You do seem to have a limit in how many things you can make at once, so if you suddenly have to make a lot of stuff there'll be disappearing bots no matter what the shoulderbot does about it."

"Yeah, but the limit seemed to have to do with how much I could notice those things. Like, when there were too many things to keep track of, and they could get away with disappearing without my noticing, which the loud beep is supposed to prevent."

"It might turn out to matter at scale if you can tell which one it is."

"That... is true, yes. We should definitely test it."

"We should!"