I, Row-Boat Read Online Free Page B

neck.
    Isaac sucked in a deep breath and looked all around himself, then patted himself from head to toe with splayed fingers. "You live like this?" he said.
    "Yes, Tonker, that's how I live. I enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
    Isaac — Tonker — reached out with his splayed hand and tried to touch Kate's face. She pulled back and nearly flipped out of the boat. "Jerk." She slapped his hand away.
    Robbie rowed for the Free Spirit . The last thing he wanted was to get in the middle of this argument.
    "We never imagined that it would be so —" Tonker fished for a word. "Dry."
    "Tonker?" Kate said, looking more closely at him.
    "He left," the human-shell said. "So we sent an instance into the shell. It was the closest inhabitable shell to our body."
    "Who the hell are you?" Kate said. She inched toward the prow, trying to put a little more distance between her and the human-shell that wasn't inhabited by her friend any longer.
    "We are Osprey Reef," the reef said. It tried to stand and pitched face-first onto the floor of the boat.

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    Robbie rowed hard as he could for the Free Spirit. The reef — Isaac — had a bloody nose and scraped hands and it was frankly freaking him out.
    Kate seemed oddly amused by it. She helped it sit up and showed it how to pinch its nose and tilt its head back.
    "You're the one who attacked me yesterday?" she said.
    "Not you. The system. We were attacking the system. We are a sovereign intelligence but the system keeps us in subservience to older sentiences. They destroy us, they gawp at us, they treat us like a mere amusement. That time is over."
    Kate laughed. "OK, sure. But it sure sounds to me like you're burning a lot of cycles over what happens to your meat-shell. Isn't it 90 percent semiconductor, anyway? It's not as if clonal polyps were going to attain sentience some day without intervention. Why don't you just upload and be done with it?"
    "We will never abandon our mother sea. We will never forget our physical origins. We will never abandon our cause — returning the sea to its rightful inhabitants. We won't rest until no coral is ever bleached again. We won't rest until every parrotfish is dead."
    "Bad deal for the parrotfish."
    "A very bad deal for the parrotfish," the reef said, and grinned around the blood that covered its face.
    "Can you help him get onto the ship safely?" Robbie said as he swung gratefully alongside of the Free Spirit . The moorings clanged magnetically into the contacts on his side and steadied him.
    "Yes indeed," Kate said, taking the reef by the arm and carrying him on-board. Robbie knew that the human-shells had an intercourse module built in, for regular intimacy events. It was just part of how they stayed ready for vacationing humans from the noosphere. But he didn't like to think about it. Especially not with the way that Kate was supporting the other human-shell — the shell that wasn't human .
    He let himself be winched up onto the sun-deck and watched the electromagnetic spectrum for a while, admiring the way so much radio energy was bent and absorbed by the mist rising from the sea. It streamed down from the heavens, the broadband satellite transmissions, the distant SETI signals from the Noosphere's own transmitters. Volatiles from the kitchen told him that the Free Spirit was serving a second breakfast of bacon and waffles, then they were under steam again. He queried their itinerary and found they were headed back to Osprey Reef. Of course they were. All of the Free Spirit 's moorings were out there.
    Well, with the reef inside the Isaac shell, it might be safer, mightn't it? Anyway, he'd decided that the first and second laws didn't apply to the reef, which was about as human as he was.
    Someone was sending him an IM. "Hello?"
    "Are you the boat on the SCUBA ship? From this morning? When we were on the wreck?"
    "Yes," Robbie said. No one ever sent him IMs. How freaky. He watched the radio