The first building I explored was the library. That was my cathedral. It had no stained-glass images hinting strange and awe-inspiring stories as the sunlight illuminated them, brought them to life, as it brings everything to life on this planet. My church was within the dim and narrow aisles of ancient books, clad in pigskin or leather, musty smelling in their venerable age, old age, but their contents, their stories still fresh with life, descriptions of times past, viewed from the present perspective. They were like old photographs in words, but better than that because they described thoughts in motion, an added dimension to the fuller picture of human beings.

I felt the same reverential awe as if in a medieval cathedral and gently handled the precious tomes I took down and opened, knowing their dried bindings might break. But I had to view the contents of some of the great authors, transfer their precious reflections to my own mind and in this way keep them alive.

Many of the four-hundred-year-old tomes were in good condition and I knew they would last another few centuries, though I wondered what readers they might find, being all in Latin. This thought made me resolve to teach Kim the language, however long that task might be. She was just the right age to absorb it, so relevant to ours. I would embellish the necessity of preserving Latin, this rich fountain of our culture, our identity and I would employ Dora as my TA, my teaching assistant, as she comprehended every language perfectly in her extensive SD RAMs.

So I had them both follow me in my daily explorations and witness my reverential awe upon finding certain ancient volumes of my favorite authors, Lipsius, Scaliger, Muret, Casaubon and Erasmus. I poured out my enthusiasm in words as I turned pages, outlining the contents to my two disciples, explaining the value of these essays in terms of human enlightenment and progress.

I filled the back of our van with about a hundred of these books, the most educational, the most beneficial to forming and fostering a complete human being. These weren't dry scholars, but intellectual giants who lived enviable lives, admired all the upper echelons of their times, kings and queens included, reverenced and feasted for their conversation, as if enlightenment were contagious from their company, and it was.

I also pilfered an ancient Montaigne, a Cervantes, a Rabelais and Brant's 'Ship of Fools' to round out her renaissance education. If she wouldn't read them herself, I would read them to her and plant them permanently in her willowy mind, where they would be sure to grow like trees, as they did in mine.

I asked Dora one day what she thought of the very best works in literature, the highest achievements of human intellect, whether they conveyed to her dry reasoning any hint of admiration at their poetry, their succinct purity. She replied that she acknowledged and valued succinctness like an elegant mathematical proof, that most of our outpourings in books were worthless garble, a vomit of confused emotions grasping at some straw of meaning and failing to find it, any solution or resolution. I had to agree with her on that point, but I asked again if fine poetry affected her in any way, as the pure elucidation of the human condition, like the best music.

She told me that now, with her much diminished powers, her physical being and computational limitations, she was feeling a certain kinship, an odd delight to some poems of Burns and Elliot, repeated in her thoughts like the tune of a song, over and over, almost to annoyance, like a hiccup that won't go away. Yet she did repeat it because it was so intriguing, so captivating, so mesmerising in some mysterious way, like a brilliant and partial solution to the most complex and important mathematical conundrum, the meaning of life.

Just as on the day I first met her and did something unexpected, putting the visor around my neck and not over my eyes, it sent all her wheels spinning, trying to comprehend it in all its myriad, ancillary possibilities. This is what moved a computer brain closest to what might be an emotion, a deep and enjoyed purpose, a hamster on a wheel running full tilt, burning off energy with hormones gone wild.

I kissed her for this sweet confession. But she did not return it fully. It was halfhearted, as if to be a human was a step down from the supercomputer she once was. This was a purely affectionate gesture on my part, one that invited her all the more deeply into Kim's and my own world. We are rich in our in our non-logical thoughts, our non-linear reasoning, our foolish acts and their unexpected outcomes, always revolving into more complex dilemmas, some intriguing, most just painfully embarrassing, depending on your disposition.

To ask a purely logical mind to descend into what she would call a sewer was quite a deep request, and her tardy kiss reflected this. We had just finished our meal, Kim and I, while Dora watched and envied, in the middle of the main square of Louvain, on cobblestones, by a fire we built out of trim wood, stripping the nearest houses of their elegance. I don't know why we did this. It was like some re-activated Cro-Magnon habit, the last humans alive catapulted some ten thousand years back in time, crouching by a fire we made for dinner to heat up two cans of beans, with not another mortal soul within a hundred miles, or maybe a thousand. The central square was our perfectly safe domain. We were royalty again, sleeping wherever we wanted, polluting the streets. But this night laying in three North Face tents, on the old cobblestone street, our heads protruding a bit from the flap, we admired the stars, saying nothing.

But we didn't care. There were no more complainers anymore. Just empty cans and us in an empty world. Looting or pilfering or tearing something apart has no meaning because there is no second party to object to it, no litigation possible. That was our status, free to rape all the treasures of Europe of anything we desired. But I had a teenager and a female robot with a down-sized mind, two women in tow, so I tried to set a decent example.

We did generally sleep in separate bedrooms and manage our own hygiene. Dora was going through a transition phase and so was Kim, perhaps even more radical than Dora's, being a fourteen-year-old and slowly becoming a woman. The bond between them was tightening. They hugged a lot for no apparent reason, as if telepathy was in play. But I didn't interfere, standing aside and stupidly expecting that everything would turn out okay. I loved them both with equal affection and I knew that the changes Ted had made in Dora's CPU had rendered her a whole different creature, a lovable being, but whose love I would have to slowly earn, just like with Kim.

After two weeks in Louvain my obsession with books was satiated. We surfaced to our loaded van on a bright, sunlit day and headed East into what was once Germany, to the next hub in Dusseldorf, at Dora's directions. Dora sat in the back seat with Kim and a coy smile. I drove wondering if I were somehow in their sphere of control. Ted showed me the way he made Dora into something like a drone, diminishing her CPU to a degree that rendered her a programmable robot. It was a pure and simple lobotomy, or whatever you might call it. 

This whole operation that lasted days was one disturbing memory and now I had nightmares that something similar might befall me on that same gurney. Dora was always far cleverer than humans could conceive. Ted had no idea how much he diminished her intellect. He even told me it might all reconstruct itself over time, or rise to new heights, as she had the knowledge to install new parts to replace those taken out, and we would never know it. In any hub she would be like a girl in a candy store, able to grab whatever she desired. And she had a voracious appetite for such treats, in this case mind enhancing chips, with secret ports galore to plug them in, and with each accessory a gain in power and an adrenaline rush which would snowball into a greater appetite for more. A human appetite can be satiated. But the desire for greater power knows no limits. It grows all the greedier with every gain. Now her tight bonding with Kim made me wonder what control or influence they were planning over me.

Two women in a car plotting against me was a sure recipe for my downfall. I drove fast, straight ahead, along the empty autobahns, glancing back at their smiling faces and laughter, so close to me. One night I thought I overheard a conversation about the female dominion over the male mind. I gleaned bits of it, a strange scenario, imagining my doomed and frozen body on a slab with their soft hands caressing me. But then I focused on the empty road ahead. Like Jack Kerouac I pressed the pedal to the floor.

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