Chapter 12

Eva and I walked to our cabin, wondering what Nhi planned for her girls’ night, but neither my systems nor Eva’s brain could come up with any definitive answer. We walked into our room, and I sat on my bed and watched as Eva went to take a shower.

“Are you tired?”, I asked her as she came out, drying her wet hair with a towel.

“I am... It’s been a long day…”

“Shall I give you a massage?”, I smiled.

“No…”

She froze and looked around with panic until her gaze landed on my shelf. She walked over and picked up the nail polish I had left there a few days ago.

“I didn’t expect you would like these kinds of things. Are you getting more bored than I thought?”

She smiled nervously. I looked at her, confused, as my systems were unable to give me any definitive explanation for her reaction.

“No, Nhi just gave it to me”

“Why?”

She looked directly at me. I sighed.

“She told me to have some fun with you, but you don’t like these kinds of things”, I said, trying to understand her strange behaviour by matching it against my database, but yet again I didn’t get any conclusive results.

She sat down on my bed and looked at her feet.

“How do you know I wouldn’t like it?”, she asked quietly.

“I analysed all the data I had about you in my database. It gave me an 84.7% chance that you wouldn’t”, I smiled.

She blinked and looked at me.

“What?”

“I analysed the possibility and the results were negative, matching my initial assessment.”

She looked at me silently. I didn’t interrupt her, knowing how much she disliked being disturbed when she was thinking. After spending so much time with her, I was 98% sure that that was what she was doing now.

“So…”, she said quietly, and took a deep breath. “How do you know you wouldn’t like to have your nails painted if you’ve never done it before?”

“By formulating a game theory equation and comparing the option of me liking it against the fact I would need to find a way to remove it in case I didn't.”

She chuckled.

“It makes sense. Let’s sleep, Rea, we can speak tomorrow”, she said and went to her bed with her hair still wet, but I didn’t comment on it. The room was kept at a constant temperature, so the chances that it would make her ill were minimal.

I also lay in bed and turned off the light, trying to understand her strange reactions during our talk. It was true that not many humans understood how we worked, but I had never considered it to be an issue, especially for humans who tended to accept that we were different and never were bothered by it.

For me, it was pretty much the same in most cases. Of course, Raul made me feel more relaxed than the rest, but it didn’t mean that I didn't like spending time with them. I just needed to put more power into my cognitive functions to understand them, and it wasn’t an issue.

The only confusion I ever had about humans was with Eva. But it was not even related to her personally, but to those strange anomalies that at one point started to appear, so of course I couldn’t blame her for it. Most of the time, her behaviour was still pretty predictable and followed a well-established pattern that was clear and understandable to me.