He giggles. "I love you, too."

"You wanna go see about hacking into the command center or do you have more questions for Juniper?"

"No questions I can think of, let's go hack the command center!"

"All right then!" Isabella flies in the direction Juniper pointed. "If I got the math right, it's gonna be fiftyish miles - to the island, I guess we'll have to track down the command center from there."

"Yeah. We can probably ask other robots for directions to it. They don't seem particularly smart, though I should probably interrogate one on its intelligence. If they're sentient... Eeeeh."

"I'm not getting a sentience vibe, but it's probably worth asking, yeah."

"I'm not getting one either, but - paranoid. It continues to be a thing that I am."

"What if you ask one and it gives you a non-answer like, I dunno, 'this unit is not programmed to contemplate the philosophy of personhood'?"

"I'd feel obliged to treat them nicely, because if they're alive, in any form, I would not want to - casually tell one to disassemble itself for my curiosity. It would be killing it. So I should ask first, it should have occurred to me earlier..."

"They seem to have a shared consciousness, and they take each other apart routinely, it sounded like."

"That helps. I'll have to see, if it's a shared consciousness thing, then I guess morally I might be fine. I'll check, though."

"Yeah. We'll see if the ones around the command center remember the conversation with Juniper, that'll be a clue."

Adarin nods. "Thanks. Wow, I was not expecting to tackle the moral issues of robotics when I woke up this morning."

"Exciting surprises!"

"Very! So do you think the inevitable huge revolution from this will be filed under me travelling here to begin with and the revolution that came from that, or is it another category just because I didn't personally have anything to do with it?"

"What, you mean stolen tech from our noble robot-army-having predecessors and their wicked enemies? I think it's close enough in time to the other revolution that it'll be in the same history book chapter."

Adarin giggles. "Pfff. I wonder how they'll manage to write it. 'And then a guy from another plane showed up, teamed up with a gorgeous witch, they made lots of money and found some robots that they used to their advantage in miscellaneous ways.'"

"They'll probably be a touch more long-winded than that."

"Almost certainly, yes. But you understand my point, right?"

"'In the year 2007, several exciting discoveries all happened at once due to the activities of witch Isabella Amariah and her consort Adarin Evaniel Sorelas. Together, they brought portal magic to the world, revolutionzed robotics, and applied the proceeds from these activities towards dozens of others. In this chapter we will limit our focus to...' Like that."

He snorts with laughter. Adarin teases, "What, I don't get an entire footnote to myself? I'm reduced to consort? I was the one who made the portals!"

"I do consort with you a lot," she says merrily. "Do you want to take credit for the portals sooner rather than later?"

"I will take credit for the portals eventually," he says loftily. "When we have a proper stranglehold on the transportation economy."

"So between now and then somebody might write a textbook, in which case you probably don't even get a line item, I suppose, you'll be in my little biography insert."

"Awww. Such is the price for patience, I suppose. I only get a small note in a little biography insert. But eventually, my dear, I'll get a chapter to myself. Bwuahahaha."