"Have I mentioned that I love how knowledgeable you are?"

"It's been a minute or two."

"Are there like, classes I can take on how to come up with more novel compliments? I want to keep showering you with praise but I feel bad about being so repetitive."

"I didn't pick you up for your poetry. You could learn a language, that'd double your repertoire."

"I've been meaning to, but the trouble is unlike working out I can't listen to podcasts while I do that."

"Who says? They make podcasts in other languages."

"True, but I'd still have to do a lot of learning before I could actually properly listen to them."

"You could put on foreign music."

"I do already sometimes. It has given me, like, a lead poisoned toddler level understanding of German. Probably not a good language to put more effort into though, because it's terrible for love poetry and those subservient Krauts all learn their imperial suzerain's language like a good little client state anyway." Hopefully that comment will discourage Mo from suspecting she's a Nazi for listening to historical German patriotic anthems and military marches on YouTube.

"You wouldn't say such things if you'd read Rilke in the original."

"God, and you're so cultured too. STEM people usually never have any time for the humanities."

"I accumulate culture at a moderate rate, I'm just older than I look and retain it well."

"From what I remember you're around my mom's age, and she doesn't know what a logarithm is."

"That's a STEM topic, my little pavlova."

"She also doesn't know that the war with Nazi Germany and the one with Imperial Japan were the same war, but that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well."

"That is admittedly a failure on several somebodys' parts."

"Yeah I am like, genuinely pretty ashamed of sharing half that woman's DNA."

"Do you want some gene therapy? I need to leave a lot of things there for the pearls but I know which things and can work around 'em."

"What, to make me smarter? You can just, like, do that?"

"Phew, no, I can do that temporarily with drugs a li'l bit but the gene therapy wouldn't do anything in that department since you're already an adult, it'd just make you less related."

"I mean, like, what actual observable traits will it change about me?"

"Not much, but the machinery I have for it is based on CRISPR and I have published some papers on its use so in-the-know biologists will know what you mean if you tell them with a straight face that you are extra crispy."

"If all it does is make me not appear as my mom's daughter to a DNA test I don't think it's a good use of resources."

"Your call. I think you're a perfectly good plum claifoutis the way you are."

Oh god. Thinking about her mom was not a good idea. How long has she been gone again? How long before mom calls her? As stupid as her mom is is, she's always been able to tell when Katie's lying. She mentally weighs the pros and cons of just never answering the phone versus going "I'm an adult, I don't have to tell you where I am or what I'm doing there, but I assure you I am not in any danger." (She'd say she's left of her own free will, but that would be a lie, and as previously established she sucks at lying to her mom.)