Primordial Daphne.

Daphne sits up and sees a man. He is holding three modifier scripts. The incomprehensible mechanism of stochastic routing that dictates her behavior is bent, molded, and redirected in a thousand different ways and she giggles. Her smile widens a bit. Her pupils dilate. The warmth radiating off of her exquisitely šapāru skin increases slightly and the chronologically encoded patterns of cognitive mappings become... looser.

"Hey," she says woozily. "Wow." She perfectly emulates a woman struggling with a pleasant but overwhelming mental fog. She even puts a hand up, as if to clear the air in front of her. "This is crazy."

Suddenly her gaze is drawn to the man. He is the best-looking man Daphne has ever seen. Of course, he's the only man she's ever seen. She giggles again.

"You ok?" he asks. It sounds like he's at the end of a long hallway.

"Yeah," she laughs. "Daphne." She sticks her hand out to greet him. She feels a funny jiggle and follows the man's gaze downward-

"Oh shit!" she cries. "I'm naked!" She covers herself with the sheets around her.

"Do you think we overcooked her?" the man asks. Daphne's startled when a woman standing behind her responds.

"If anything we undercooked her. Look, I think she's following our conversation." She bends over to look Daphne in the eye. Her eyes are green and really pretty. "Do you understand what we're talking about?"

What they're... shit, what was she saying? God, those eyes! Like fucking emeralds! "You're worried you burned me. Or, like, fucked something up with me. I don't know. You're, uh, kinda distracting me."

"How so?" She flashes a smile that would make her unmodified deutero-neuronal pathways trend toward suspicion. With the modifications, she trends towards affectionate flirtation.

"You, just... I don't know. It's your eyes. They're nice to look at."

"This is too high-level?" the man asks. He's pointing to Daphne. She smiled and waves. "She's a fucking simpleton."

Daphne thinks about what he said. She thinks about good things first, because the modifier makes her. He's talking about her! She smiles and scoots over so that their legs are touching. Also, his skin feels so nice right now.

The negatives... oh! "Hey," she says, and stops rubbing his chest. When did she start doing that? "You... did you call me a fucking simpleton?" She was proud of herself for remembering the exact phrase, or at least close to it. She might actually be a simpleton, she realizes.

"What?" the others say. "That was like ten minutes ago." Was it really?

"Quiet, D," he says, and Daphne knows he means her. "Anyway, it should register no matter what scripts is in her, right?"

"Of course," the woman says. "However, it can take a while at first. Working with her at a lower cognitive ceiling is a good way to speed things up, especially in these early days."

If there was one thing Daphne knows about, it was golems. "Just think of it like... early memories," she slurred laboriously. "You guys imprinting?"

"Yes," the woman said.

"How sweet," she says sincerely. Daphne decides she likes her.

"What's your name?" she asks innocently.

"Monica," the woman says. She crouches and smiles. "And this is Brad. He's cool. You can trust him."

"I am can trust him," Daphne says. She nods. She can trust Brad, he's cool.

"And you love me!" Brad shouts and Daphne keeps nodding. She loves him too.

"Careful with that one," Monica says. She's not talking to Daphne. "You don't wanna go too heavy-handed. Doing a full wipe isn't cheap."

"Doing a full wipe..." Daphne mutters. That's what Monica said. Monica who was pointing at her.

"See, this is what I'm talking about. Just the fact that she can talk means any non-English speaking script will have no memory of this. It's about cognitive and behavorial similarities."

"I know a little Spanish." Daphne giggles a little, delighted to be helpful. "Se habla espanol."

"When am I gonna have her not speaking English?" Brad asks, and Monica shrugs. Daphne stares at her tits. Monica notices. Daphne doesn't care.

"That's not the point. The point is, you're trying to get her to such a minimal state that almost every script will have at least some dim primordial shadowy memory of what you're doing."

"And it makes her always trust me," Brad says. Does she trust him?

"I trust you," she says confidently. "Brad."

"That's not what it does," Monica says with a sigh. "Whatever interaction you have in this state will be simple enough, with common enough tendencies, that virtually any script you put in her will have it as a sort of distant memory, or maybe a recurring dream."

"This does feel like a dream," Daphne adds. "Like, there's no way this is really happening."

"Why not?" Monica asks. Daphne stares at her for a moment, her cognition pitifully cumbersome.

"It's... it just doesn't feel real, right? Am I the only one that feels that?" A new thing, Daphne finds. Anxiety. "Who is- Are you all real? What's going-"

Monica's holding a paper. The paper makes Daphne feel strange. Her cognition is not impaired, she thinks, because she's supposed to think that. It's the thing she has to think. Her thinking is fine.

A hand on her tit. She's looking down at it, and the person with it is looking at her. "Brad," he says, and she hears it again and again in her head.

"Trust Brad." Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad. Trust Brad-

"Love Brad." Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love Brad. Love and trust and love and trust Brad.

He keeps talking and she keeps hearing it even as the tip of his penis brushes against her vagina and she performs a flawless impression of a person lost in sexual ecstasy. Her chronological sensitivity goes dark and her logic blurs into a whirlpool of orgasmic thrashing before she climaxes, coming coming can't see, Monica, Monica-

"-Monica!" he screamed, futilely trying to be heard over his shrieking companion. "Monica! Help!" Monica rushed to his side. "What?" she screamed. He was having trouble seeing her with all the bouncing from his golem screaming animalistically and pounding herself against him. The bedframe groaned under the onslaught.

"Get her the fuck off of me!"

Monica wrestled the girl off of him, Daphne screaming her name senselessly. She pressed two fingers to her forehead and then Brad's ears were ringing in the sudden silence. Monica was saying something to him, but he could barely hear her. He leaned in closer and turned an ear to her.

"...told you to be careful, asshole!"