She probably gets tired before that but absent anything urgent going on online just kills time with vidya or websites until dinner does come.

Dinner is in neither of their rooms tonight; they are having it in a bubble of the underwater lair which looks out onto the reef in all directions, accessed through an elevator platform in the floor. First course is the house specialty fish salad on seedy crackers.

"Oooh, this place is pretty. Love the coral." Crunch crunch.

"Me too!" She makes a bit of a tower of crackers and fish and crackers and fish and then gobbles it up in one bite. "There used to be a lot more octopus around here but Topsy keeps them very well culled."

"That's... unfortunate. Octopus are pretty too. Plus like, they're really smart. If you could teach the belugas to communicate via text, imagine what you could do with octopi."

"I could! I'll probably get around to it one of these days. But they are Topsy's favorite and I'm not gonna stop her."

"Whatever species lives here aren't endangered, are they?"

"Giant pacifics? Least concern. It's okay, they're not parental, easy to reestablish with clones if anybody ever wants."

"That's a relief, at least."

"Does this mean you're going to pass on the bluefin?"

"Frankly you could feed me my own cat and I'd eat it. Are those even endangered though?"

"Cats? Not at all. Bluefin yes! I don't even have to get them on the black market, though, the regulators and the environmentalists aren't the same folks."

"Could you bring them back with clones if you wanted to? Also wait hold on, that'd be a lot easier with tuna because they have bones, you'd need DNA from a bunch of different specimens or else they'd probably all die of inbreeding."

"It's not super hard to fix the inbreeding problem, you just need a lot more volume - you jiggle 'em till they're all mutants and the ones who live can establish from there."

"I see." Crunch goes the final cracker.

"The farm's got bluefins, though, they're not gonna die out, just get thinned out in the wild."

"Good to know."

"I wouldn't've guessed you worried about endangered critters."

"I don't know, I like... I dislike it when something interesting is lost. It's no different than losing the last copy of an old rare book. Except you can't digitize animals. Well, you can digitize their DNA, but doing that and then re-synthesizing it is probably harder than just storing a bone in a safe place."

"It's actually not, you can distribute redundant digital files more easily than you can find multiple secure places to store bone specimens such that you'll be able to get DNA out of them later."

"Ok, yeah, that's true. In any case, preserving unique things good."

"Maybe I should digitize you, so I can clone you if I ever need to."

"Wouldn't get my memories though. Presumably wouldn't even speak English. Might not even want to have sex with you."

"I mean, none of those things are necessary for growing pearls but perhaps they'd be a less charming dining companion."

"Yeah. You should probably keep my DNA on file, just, y'know, don't take that as an excuse to play fast and loose with my safety unless you want the pearl synthesis process to be a lot less fun."