conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about White, Howard, Morhaim with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'The Bread We Eat in Dreams'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Bread We Eat in Dreams
  I walked home from the reading in my red coat, the one I bought the spring after she left. I'm a sentimentalist, really. It's a flaw, I admit. The night was cold; falling leaves spun around my hair. I pulled up my hood. My boots crunched on the hard ground as I turned toward the wood that leads to my house. I listened to the wind, and my feet, and I knew someone was following me. Someone tall and thin and hungry. Someone with golden, slitted eyes who can make it to my door before I can. And when I get there, when I get to my eaves and my stoop and I open the door—
  There is a room and it moves through the world. The door of the room is black. The ceiling is blue. You have probably never seen the room—it is shy. Do not feel that it is a personal slight. The room moves according to its own unfathomable imperatives, on a schedule too long and hoary to sketch out on any flickering dark board. Once the door lived on a snowy beach in Norway for five years. It gathered ice on its lintel. A woman in a grey dress and shiny heels went in. Identical twin children came out, each holding a purple balloon with silver stars on it. The local council had just begun to charge admission to see it when it demurred, and migrated elswhere. For exactly three quarters of a second, it lived in Buenos Aires. A man saw it, but he told himself it was nothing.
  I will tell you because we are close, and there can be no secrets between us, that it lived in my house for an hour, when I was seven and a half. It lived on the back wall of our garage, between moldy Stephen King paperbacks and a golden tower of National Geographics. I sat in front of the door cross-legged, and ate a cherry popsicle. It had an iron doorknob, with paisley copper flowers raised on it. I watched it. The sun went down. In the grain of the wood, I saw stars. I was very quiet in the presence of the room. It inspires silence. I didn't go in. I was not a brave child. When I say it disappeared, I mean that the garage remembered that it did not have a black door in it, and was embarrassed.
  Inside the room there is a thermostat. The old kind, with a crystal dial and a red arrow. It is set to 59 degrees. This is rather cold, of course. Perhaps it was hot, where the room was born. There is a double bed—the room is generous. The bedspread is deep red, with swirls and ferns in the same black as the door. The floor is wood, blond, slightly uneven, polished as if by many feet. The room also owns a silk rug that has seen better days, once indigo and figured in gold, now pale blue, figured in nothing. There is a porcelain washing basin, and a mirror with an ebony frame, a small bathroom with a clawfoot tub. A slip of rose-soap waits for dirty hands. There is a folding screen with a moonrise painted on it, and a velvet chair with a little footstool. A mahogany secretary sits redly in the corner, bearing three blue pens, a stack of very fine paper, (17 sheets), and a rotary telephone. The room has a window, but the curtains are always drawn. I do not know what it looks out on, no one who has drawn back the butter-colored curtains has come out again. On the wall is an oil painting of a black door—the room is self-regarding. And the ceiling, the deep, endless blue of the ceiling, slightly arched, with silver rafters, and silver stars painted with a tiny brush, constellations and chaos and the beginning of space.
  They don't all say it's French. When the room lived in Marseilles, the message was in Sanskrit. Sometimes it's Finnish. Sometimes Vietnamese.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'But all this happened very fast'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But all this happened very fast. When you live inside someone, you can get very good at the ciphers and codes that make up everything they are.
  Ceno Susumu Uoya-Agostino took her mother's hand—bare and warm and armored in onyx all at once. She unspooled a length of translucent cable and connected the base of her skull to the base of her mother's. All around them spring snow fell onto the glass dome of the greenhouse and melted there instantly. They knelt together, connected by a warm milky-diamond umbilicus, and Cassian Uoya-Agostino entered her daughter.
  We had planned this for months. How to dress ourselves in our very best. Which frame to use. How to arrange the light. What to say. I could speak by then, but neither of us thought it my best trick. Very often my exchanges with Ceno went something like:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As we walk back over the empty seafloor, the thick, amber ocean seeps up through the sand, filling the bay once more. Suited Neva becomes something else. Her skin turns silver, her joints bend into metal ball-and-sockets. Her eyes show a liquid display; the blue light of it flickers on her machine face. Her hands curve long and dexterous, like soft knives, and I can tell her body is meant for fighting and working, that her thin, tall robotic body is not kind or cruel, it simply is, an object, a tool to carry a self.
  I make my body metal, too. It feels strange. I have tried so hard to learn the organic mode. We glitter. Our knife-fingers join, and in our palms wires snake out to knot and connect us, a local, private uplink, like blood moving between two hearts.
  Neva cries machine tears, bristling with nanites. I show her the body of a child, all the things which she is programmed/evolved to care for. I make my eyes big and my skin rosy-gold and my hair unruly and my little body plump. I hold up my hands to her and metal Neva picks me up in her silver arms She kisses my skin with iron lips. My soft, fat little hand falls upon her throat where a deep blue jewel shines.
  I bury my face in her cold neck and together we walk down the long path out of the churning, honey-colored sea.