Interesting things (aka a lot of boring exposition).

"Feeling better?" Mrs. Hill when Ross and Madison reappeared on the veranda.

"Much," Madison said with a pleasant smile as she took her seat and idly gazed into the middle distance.

"Thank you, Ross. I'm sorry if my words were overly harsh, but you must understand that this is an extremely painful topic for me." She snapped her fingers and a beautiful woman appeared with a bloody mary. She took it and sipped, humming with with approval at the flavor.

"I love a good bloody mary," she informed Ross. "Now, I believe you have some questions regarding nitrates in golem soil."

He was taken aback by her statement. Even Madison raised one eyebrow and looked at her. Mrs. Hill continued.

"I'm the owner of the largest golem company in the world. We spend more on R&D than most countries. Of course I know about the nitrogen. I can tell you that you're on the right track."

"How so?" Ross was burning with curiosity. He wished Madison could be too, but she just swayed slowly and smiled disinterestedly.

"These things are great for performing tasks, of course, and have a limited ability to formulate plans and ideas in pursuit of their goals. The problem, though, is that they don't have any true creativity. Ask it for a novel and you'll get an uninspired string of sentences stolen from an airport thriller. Ask for a song and it'll hammer out a basic chord progression and sing cliches on a major scale.

"We initially conceived of a sort of 'creativity drive', a random-number generator internal to the golem that they can poll to make arbitrary artistic decisions. These decisions could be processed and refined or rejected by the script, but they will ultimately be generated from outside of the script."

Ross took Madison's hand in his and squeezed it. She cooed happily and put her head on his shoulder.

"Unfortunately, scripts can't really interface with electronic components very well. It's been tried repeatedly, but our best scientists mostly believe that it's impossible. Something about the animating ****... anyway, one of the golem engineers had a stroke of genius a few decades ago. Ironically, the sort of idea that we were trying to let golems have."

She sipped her drink again, relishing in making them wait. Ross was on the edge of his seat, but he'd become wary of offending her again so he remained silent. Madison nuzzled him softly.

"Are you familiar with Walther gating?" Mrs. Hill asked. Ross nodded.

"It allows for the physical to affect the transcendental, right? Isn't that where spirits come from?"

"That's a drastic oversimplification, but it's basically correct. Spiritual energy can be contained or blocked by the mesh, but cannot be changed. Our kabbalists created a mass of nanofibers of a special compound we developed interwoven with Walther gate material. At room temperature the compound reacts to a critical mass of nitrogen, expanding and heating rapidly. It slowly begins to cool and shrink again; once the temperature drops below a certain limit, it expands randomly again."

Ross was mostly following along. "So that's what that weird substance was? It was a Walther gate thing?"

She nodded. "That's right. Your professor was equipped with a very, very rudimentary version of it. It hardly ever changed the golem's behavior, and when it did it was trivial and unpredictable. Using the word "car" instead of "truck", or blinking slightly more rapidly for ten seconds. We've come a long way since then."

Ross squeezed Madison's hand even tighter. If she wasn't so dopey it might have actually caused her pain. "Yeah?"

Mrs. Hill sighed and handed her empty glass to a passing golem. "I understand what you want, and we're not there yet. I'm sorry to say this, Ross, but I think we're at least a few generations away from giving these things true sentience. And before you ask, I have no interest in turning that thing on your shoulder sentient. It's not Madison and it never will be. I want to grieve my daughter in peace, not be haunted by some Frankenstein's monster wearing her persona like an ill-fitting suit."

Madison giggled. "That's me, alright!"

That reminded Ross of something. "You said my room was haunted earlier. What did you mean by that?"

"I meant it's haunted," she replied. "You don't become the largest golem producer in the world without picking up some other esoteric sciences on the way. Not all hauntings are caused by restless spirits, no matter what Hollywood would have you believe. Hauntings can be emotions or thoughts, images and sounds. If something reaches a critical threshold within a Walther gate, the excess transcendental material will 'overflow' whatever's generating it and be trapped in the gated area. I haunted your room with happiness and restfulness."

"Huh." Ross was taken aback. He sat back in his chair and thought about it. Mrs. Hill rose and prepared to leave them.

"Now, I have my daily orgy in ten minutes and if I don't get off by noon my whole schedule will be thrown off. You and your little doll are free to wander the grounds and entertain yourself as you see fit. Oh, and you have an excellent eye for companions - these three are lovely."

Sarah blushed, Marissa nodded gratefully, and Jane rolled her eyes. They were so quiet that Ross had forgotten they were with him. He watched Mrs. Hill walk around the side of the house and turned to Madison and his companions.

"What now?" Marissa asked.