"Yeah, good plan."

Lean.

"I missed you."

"I'm so sorry."

Shoulderpats. "Occasionally I'd sit with you like you were just actually asleep but it felt weird so I mostly didn't."

"Lucid dreaming wouldn't work? Not that I'd have appreciated it, but you could hypothetically do whatever you wanted -"

"It works, it's just all - dreamy. By that logic I should never bother doing anything in real life that I could put together in dream form. And you do realize that insofar as I can determine that you don't appreciate things that affects both my enjoyment of a hypothetical and my resolve to hypothetically try it?"

"...right."

"I did check what happened if you woke up. It was 'complain and price psions on the internet'."

"Sorry, I should've thought that you might do that and resolved to be delightful for an hour after waking up."

"That would've had its own problems."

"I have a blind spot in modeling you where even when I'm conditioning on you not being Maira I still expect you to be, on some level."

"Well, the problem isn't even just 'pretending-based delightfulness is nondelightful', since you did demonstrate I could maybe not tell; there's also 'what if you'd been asleep for thirty years and I'd developed a two hour range'."

"That would have been awkward."

"A bit."

"Sorry."

"It's okay. I love you."

"I love you."

Contented sighing.

A knock on the door. "You rang?"

Boots gets it, not having a head in her lap nor needing to remain still to work.

In comes Cam. "Hey, welcome to the world of the awake, you want a chiplocked computer?"

"Love one. - huh."

"Chip installed, here's a computer to go with it." He tosses her a computer like Sibyl's. "Huh?"

"...oh, Isabella said that my alts were all the socially-unacceptable kind of monosexual but I guess I didn't think much of it? I'd been assuming that my problem was that the most appealing person in the world happened to be a girl, not that I was categorically broken on that front --"