conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Krina, Alizond, Neptune's entitled Neptune's Brood?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Neptune's Brood: The novel presents itself as an extended first-person report by Krina Alizond-114, created by the "incalculably wealthy" Sondra Alizond-1 to be a scholar of accountancy practice historiography.\nHer clone sister, Ana, has disappeared, and Krina is following her trail.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first paragraph for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Neptune's Brood
  An hour later, I arrived at a docking node in an old part of the station. It was all grubby metal and delaminating anticorrosion treatments, the lights flickering, ventilation ducts howling mournfully behind rattling panels. Fat umbilical trunks snaked between nodes and across exposed walls, floors, and ceilings, their papery shrouds rippling in the breeze: Odd gelatinous globules hang quivering from leaky pipes, their surfaces fogged and filthy with trapped dust and fluff. There was a marked lack of life in this place, a sense that here the bones of the world were showing through the skin.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs? End with the sentence '"'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The bottommost level of Ana's apartment was a comfortably furnished lounge area surrounding the watery vestibule: We had to dive briefly into the undertunnel before we could enter. Luckily, despite my lack of gills, I was perfectly capable of submerging for the three minutes it took for the constable on duty to notice our arrival and open the hatch.
  Which might be an unfair and slighting judgment on my part, for the paraphernalia associated with our study of the historiography of accounting practices require no more physical tools than a retina to grid out our spreadsheets and, additionally, a storage and numbers mill that might be no bigger than my little finger; but ferrous furniture on a water world is a high-maintenance headache, and Ana did not strike me as the sort of person to prioritize interior-design aesthetics over practicality.
  Serjeant Bull nodded lugubriously. "Take your time." A momentary pause. "Our forensic investigators finished recording here a year ago, but try not to damage or move anything unnecessarily."
  I went upstairs after a couple of false starts—it had been ages since I last essayed a staircase in full gravity, and I kept missing the treads—and thrust my head even deeper into the zone of alienation that my missing sib had cast like a spell across her residence.
  He held the device toward me, and I saw that it had a compact screen built into a visor, with some sort of sensor on the outside. "Magic police goggles: They're a terahertz imager. You use it to see through nonconductive surfaces. Water and metals reflect terahertz radiation, so they show up. But the ceiling is opaque."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Iretain only confused impressions from the boarding operation: the hollow darkness to every side, icy cold. A cylindrical metal fabrication the size of a skyscraper looming out of the darkness, studded with inexplicable nozzles, scarred by ancient microimpacts, a glaring pinpoint light burning holes in the cosmos at one end. Shoving and bashing and jolting as our crude lash-up cargo carrier rocketed across the gap, closing on one of the many blisters that studded the ship's side. A crazy rocking motion and a brief glimpse of another, smaller vehicle in the distance, sitting atop another glaring knife-bright line of radiation: then a bone-rattling impact.
  Corridors and skeletons—not Fragile carcasses, but something else: bodies flensed of superficial mechaflesh, hard-skinned and bony with nightmare claws, optimized for weight and speed and killing. Then the body of a boarding crewman, batwings slashed and back broken. Sondra's accomplices had better bodies and equipment, but Rudi's people had more experience of this kind of action. A sudden flare of light in the shadows, and a cutting charge opened up a path through into a new chamber.
  Then it was over. Or rather, Marigold was in front of me, trying to get my attention. "Ms. Alizond? Come with me. We need you to identify..."
  She made a strange, muffled noise. After a moment, I recognized it for a snort of laughter. "So the little thief comes home to charge her mother with a bigger theft? Nobody's going to believe you! It's your word against mine, and I speak loudly, for money talks. Anywhere you try to go in Dojima System, my process servers will follow you. And don't think you can get away with murder here, either: I have backups. They'll come after you, too."
  She stared at me, uncomprehendingly. "You raised me to always pay my debts," I explained, making one last attempt. "And I'm done, so I'll be going now." I reached over and carefully deposited the cylinder containing a copy of the full transcript on the desktop beside her couch. "I don't expect we'll be meeting again, so good-bye, Mother."