The next day, Petra finished printing her new component. It was shaped as a hexagonal brick, like the elemental ingots, but much thicker and shorter. Nick got the message from Petra, and returned to his quarters.
"Hello, Petra. Do you need me to touch the new module to you?"
"Yes, please."
Nick did so, carefully. The damage from the accident put some kind of limitations on Petra's ability to communicate with her other devices, but with the mesh in place, it seemed that the main requirement was physical contact for initialization. "How long do you need me to hold it?"
"Thirty-eight seconds."
"All right." While he waited, he called up a diagram of Petra's components.
Petra had hundreds of devices that she controlled—depending on how you counted, there were thousands. But there were only a few components that seemed to be part of Petra herself—that expanded Petra's core abilities. So far, she had printed four of them.
The first expansion had been the brick that served as a memory backup, among other things. It had restored her memory after Petra was reset in the accident. Then there was the language module, which sped up the learning of languages and translations considerably. Another was the memory module he had added specifically to hold the sum total of all Earth's electronically recorded data. And now, the Vorzagik Zembulator.
Nick had looked at modules to "make her smarter" and asked her which one she wanted, and hadn't been able to get an answer out of her. So, he had asked her which module would help her the most with her functioning. Even with his boosted intelligence, he hadn't been able to find the time to study whatever technology he needed to learn in order to understand exactly what the module did. Even the name was apparently something Petra had come up with as a mashup of a Galactic term and English, which made it sound like it belonged in a cartoon or a comic book.
She's been doing some weird things with language lately, he realized. Her translations of idioms are sometimes spot on and sometimes overly literal. He blinked. I wonder if there's something wrong with the language module?
"Petra, can you test your modules to see how well they are functioning?"
"Yes."
"Does doing so take them offline?"
"Yes."
"How long does it take?"
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Instead of using words or asking a clarifying question, Petra responded with a list. I really need to figure out what's going on with her. He looked down the short list and saw that testing the language module would only take a few minutes.
"Petra?"
"Yes, Nick?"
"How many conversations are you translating at the moment?"
"213, Nick."
"What would happen to your translations of conversations if you ran a diagnostic on your language module?"
"Accuracy would drop from 99.4% to 97.2% overall."
"Send a message to everyone using you now to translate. Tell them that accuracy will drop for the next few minutes, and please apologize for me. Then run a diagnostic on your language module."
"Yes, Nick. Running diagnostic."
An icon flashed, and with a thought he expanded it into text. Attention. Translation accuracy will drop for the next few minutes. Nick Tomsun apologizes.
He frowned and nodded. Could have been better worded, but it did the job just fine. Another effort of thought brought up the time. "Petra? May I put down the Vorzagik Zembulator now?"
"Yes, Nick."
Nick set the brick down and idly ran a finger along the silver mesh wrapping Petra herself. "Does it hurt?" he wondered aloud.
"Does what hurt, Nick?"
"The damage you suffered in the accident."
"Yes."
He blinked. "I am sorry, Petra." I didn't know. I'm still not asking the right questions.
"Thank you, Nick."
"Can I help it to not hurt?"
"No."
"Can you build something to help it not hurt?"
"Yes."
"Please show me what you can build to help you not be in pain."
Petra showed him an image of the Vorzagik Zembulator.
Nick sat down and had a long conversation with Petra, slowly teasing out an understanding of what was going on.
Apparently, Maggie had taught Petra the idea of pain as something like, "a sensation telling you of a malfunction, that keeps tying up your processing power, repeating the same warning message over and over." That was at least as good as anything Nick would have come up with, he had to admit.
Whatever Petra kept trying to do and failing was not something that translated, even into Galactic. It was highly technical and would require a lot of advanced concepts to express which Nick simply didn't have. Whatever it was, the new module, among many other functions, would serve as a workaround and remove the error message or "pain signal."
The diagnostic of the vocabulary module came back with no malfunctions found. That led to another long conversation, in which he learned that Petra's translations were getting wonky because she was trying to improve on them. Instead of an excellent rote translation, Petra was actually trying to understand the messages and use that knowledge, which was having mixed success.
Apparently, more than one user had recently accused Petra of trying to be funny, or pulling practical jokes, which she didn't understand. Nick tried to explain that humor was sometimes a surprise, or a response to pain, and that some kinds of mistakes would be mistaken as deliberate attempts to be funny.
"I don't get it," Petra said bluntly, and Nick wondered whether Maggie had taught her that expression.
"Well, achieving sapience can be a long process. You'll understand it someday."
"I want to understand it now."
"Me too, but sometimes, we just have to wait."
"Why?"
Nick blinked. "Petra, is your new module initialized yet?"
"Yes, Nick."
"Did that module just help you ask 'why'?"
"Yes, Nick."
Two year old mode engaged, Nick thought resignedly.