Talking about an ass.

The trio looked over Madison's answers.

Rover
April
Merlot
Hawaii
Babe Ruth

"Do you think it's code?" Andrew asked.

"How would that work?" Erica replied. "They were Ross's questions. Besides, why tell us to wait until the nitrogen wears off?"

"Maybe without the influence of the nitrogen she can help us decode it."

Erica shook her head. "Nuh-uh. That's not how golems work." She bent to examine the golem's face, then straightened suddenly.

"Was this the golem my script was intended for?" she asked. The boys nodded and she laughed. "That makes sense! She looks way more like a student than me."

"Do you have any theories?" Ross asked.

"Well, she specifically requested random and subjective questions, then she told us to try again without the nitrogen," Erica said thoughtfully. "She might have been trying to call attention to the difference, but how would completely arbitrary questions highlight it?"

Andrew snatched the script and held it up to Erica. "Can you tell if the dot's gone yet?"

"I don't see a dot," she said after scanning for a moment. "Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean-"

She was interrupted by Andrew speaking, his fingers on Madison's forehead. The girl stiffened and sat up, looking around curiously.

"We want you to-"

"Answer some questions?" she asked. "I know. Apparently the nitrogen doesn't cause blackouts."

She took a paper and began scribbling. She frowned when she got the last entry.

"I don't know why I put Babe Ruth," she said. "I don't know anything about baseball. He's probably the only player I can even name."

She finished the list, which was identical except for the last answer: I don't know.

"So does the nitrogen do something about baseball?" Andrew asked.

"I've got a theory," Erica said suddenly. "What if the nitrogen creates irrationality?"

"I'm not irrational," Madison huffed.

"Not right now," Erica replied. "But something you said struck me. You said you didn't know why you answered how you did."

Madison looked taken aback. "...you're right, I can't explain it. In retrospect it makes no sense. I remember writing it but I can't remember what I was thinking."

"Great," Andrew said sarcastically. "So we've determined that the nitrogen is changing her in ways we don't understand."

"I don't think that's it," Erica said. "Why go to all that trouble to make her bluff through a random trivia question? And why take such elaborate steps to hide it?"

They started at her, waiting for the answer to her rhetorical question. "I'll bet if we repeated the test, we'd get different results from the nitrated script. It's irrationality, which means it's not fixed. What if the nitrogen is creating small sparks of irrationality at random? The script is always changing, constantly being altered in unpredictable ways."

"Like Buridan's Ass," Ross said with quiet wonder.

"What's that?" Erica asked.

"It's an old thought exercise about free will. A donkey sitting an equal distance between food and water can't choose either. Assuming that animals are simply machines programmed for self-preservation, a donkey with equally self-preserving options will be unable to make a choice. Only a human with free will could arbitrarily choose to eat the food even though there's no objective reason to prefer it over the water. They've given her irrationality."

His voice quavered slightly on the final word and Andrew was surprised to see tears on his friend's cheeks. "Dude, are you ok?"

Ross turned to him and let out a relieved laugh. "It's a human flaw. They're making her more human."