The next day dawned bright and clear. Solace was playing with one of the dogs in the park when he walked up, and he stood back and allowed the human to move on before going up to say hello to her.

"Well, you look none the worse for yesterday's soaking." She smiled, as though nothing had happened between them yesterday. Perhaps for her, it hadn't.

"Neither do you."

Shrug. "It's just weather. It won't kill you... if you're careful."

"Indeed."

Pause. "What do you want to do today?"

The question made Smith stare at her as though she had lost her mind. What did he want to do today? When did he ever want to do anything?

She came up with something when he didn't. "Come on... I know where there's a nice pond... we can feed the ducks."

"All right."

They walked into the woods, going further than he had been before. It occurred to him that he had never downloaded the maps for this area, and he briefly considered doing so. He thought about it as he watched Solace practically skipping down the path in front of him, watched the sunlight glint off the golden threads in her skirt, the dust motes on her boot. That must, he thought absently, be a new skirt. He hadn't seen it before.

He didn't upload the maps, and kept following her.

"And here we are..."

She stood at the edge of a not inconsiderably sized pond, ringed around the edge by thick trees. Ducks were indeed swimming over the surface as well as some geese, and young of both kinds followed their parents. Other than the animals there was barely a ripple on the water.

"Do you have something with which to feed the ducks?"

"As a matter of fact... yes." She smiled her Mona Lisa smile and pulled a small cylinder of what appeared to be bread crumbs out of a skirt pocket. "Hold out your hand."

"This was not in the job description," he muttered, but did so. She poured a quarter or so of the bread crumbs into his hand and then poured some into her own hand, stepping up to the edge of the pond.

"What is the purpose of this exercise?" He had to ask; he couldn't see any reason behind it, himself.

She chuckled. "You sound like some sort of science fiction military commander. The purpose of this exercise, as you so quaintly put it, is to relax. Have fun." She began to scatter bread crumbs on the surface of the water. "Feed the ducks."

"Ah."

True to their greedy nature, the ducks swam over and immediately started eating the scattered crumbs. Solace knelt down by the edge of the pond. "Among other things, feeding ducks like this is an exercise designed to instill patience. It takes a relatively long time for the ducks to..." A particularly daring bird swam up and grabbed a beakful of crumbs from her hand, and she fell on her butt in the mud at the edge of the pond.

"You were saying?" Smith actually felt himself repress a chuckle of amusement.

"Okay, they're not normally pre-carnivorous..." she laughed, pulling herself upright. "Yuck."

"You are covered in mud."

"Thank you, Captain Observo, master of the obvious."

"I was only saying..." Pause. "What are you doing?"

"Going swimming."

"... why?"

Shrug. "I'm already muddy and dirty. I might as well be wet in the process."

"But... you're..."

Splash.

She resurfaced a few feet from the edge after diving cleanly into the water. Her shirt, he was dismayed to notice, was entirely transparent. She wasn't wearing any sort of undergarment, and her pale skin showed right through the soft material. With preternatural clarity he saw every curve of her chest, the puckered skin of nipples drawn taut by the cold water. Her skin came in three shades... tanned over most of her body, pale over her breasts and upper abdomen, and darkest pink over aureole and nipple.

Her hair was three shades darker and plastered all over her face, and she was treading water. Her hair was also a good deal safer to think about than her chest.

"Half-naked..." he finished, five minutes later.

"I'm still wearing a t-shirt and bike shorts..." she laughed. "Don't be so stodgy. Besides, my skirt's a mess." She swam closer to shore and picked up her skirt, dragging it into the water with her.

"But... you're...." He shook his head, taking off his sunglasses. This was bothering him so much more than it should. "What if someone comes along?"

Shrug. "No one walks on this path, as far as I can tell. I've been here dozens of times and every time I've been the only one here. Relax. Enjoy yourself." She grinned. "Feed the ducks."

He did. "You are still behaving very immodestly."

"Oh come on..." she flipped over onto her back and began lazily paddling around the pond. "Number one, since when have you known me to behave according to the standards of modesty I should follow. Number two, there's no one here I don't trust with the knowledge of what my body looks like beneath the clothing. Number three, that knowledge is only taboo, not as dangerous or scary as most people would have me ... or you... believe."

Pause. "You are strange."

She sat up again, treading water. Her mismatched eyes gleamed. "And you say that to me every day."

"It never ceases to be true."

"Indeed." The skirt plunged underneath the water, out of sight. "Why this time?"

"You are much less modest than ..." he hesitated to say it. "Normal people."

She laughed. "There are so many more things to worry about, it never ceases to amaze me why human beings constantly invent new ones."

"Such as?"

"Physical modesty. It's just a body. Just a shell, a conglomeration of organs, connectors, and bio-electrical impulses. Why worry about covering up the packaging?"

There was that sense of unreality again, as though somehow their roles had been reversed. "It is a common cultural taboo..."

She flipped onto her back again and made a rude gesture at the sky. "Oh, cultural taboos are 99% crap, and you're smart enough to know that. The only realistic reason to wear clothing is to protect the body from the elements. It's a perfectly fine day, Smith. Take off your jacket and relax."

Well, there couldn't be any harm in that. He shrugged off the suit jacket and indulged himself enough to create an appropriate outcropping on a nearby tree, hanging it up with care for the nonexistent material. And then he turned around.

"Solace!"

She laughed. The pond rippled. "What?"

"Put ..." She was very nearly a natural blond. He blinked. "Put your clothes back on."

"I'm wearing my shirt."

She was just doing it to bother him. Why was the sun so warm today? "Barely. Put your clothes back on."

"Spoilsport. It's hot. I'm enjoying the cool water. Relax."

He was a computer program. She was a creature of flesh and bone and blood in a tank of goo, a battery. There was no importance to how she chose to manipulate her avatar. If it came down to it, she was really naked anyway, with the wires and cables connecting her... naked in the pod of goo... he shook his head.

"I am perfectly relaxed."

"No you're not. You're practically shaking." She sank back down into the water and was visible only from the shoulders up, much to his relief. "Honestly, if it bothers you..."

"No... you are right."

Pause. "Oh?"

"There is no..." Pause. Swallow. He knocked back the revulsion he felt at being subjected to human responses, human indignities. "There is no real reason behind the taboo against nudity."

"It's a silly taboo," she nodded. "And I will admit, normally I conform to it because it's the law of the land as well as the custom. But every once in a while I find a nice pond and I can't resist." Her feet kicked lazily at the water. "It's so nice. And cool."

He walked over to the edge and dipped a hand in. She was right, it did feel warm against his approximation of skin. "I still don't understand how you arrived at this conclusion."

She swam over, close enough to talk without shouting and yet far enough that he could see little more than the outline of her body. "It took some doing. After a while... I guess I just met someone who forced me to look a the world in a completely different way."

"Who?"

She looked away. "No one you know... an old boyfriend."

"And how did he ... open your eyes?"

She stared sharply at him. Her blue eye glinted nearly azure in the light from the water, while her green eye seemed so dark as to be almost muddy. "Long story. Mostly ... well, philosophy with a hammer."

"That doesn't explain anything."

She looked away. "It's a long story. And it was a bad breakup, anyway.":

Pause. "All right."

Long silence. "He did make me think, though."

Smith knelt down at the water's edge. "About what?"

"About things. About life. About why we do what we do, and whether or not it's important."

"And what conclusions did you draw?"

Another pause. She stared at the sky and thought about it. "That we should choose what we do a lot more carefully than we are accustomed to... because everything is important."

"Excluding clothing?"

She laughed. "Not that way. I mean, everything we do, everything we say is important. Everything we do or say that affects another thinking being."

"Whether or not..."

"Whether or not it is custom or habit. We've got a lot of bad habits, humans do. And we don't break them because tradition, culture tells us not to."

Silence. "And have you come up with a solution to this dilemma?"

"No... not really. Except to pay attention to what's going on... what I'm doing. And do things... with more deliberation than I used to."

"Ah."

Pause. "That's really what deliberately means, after all, isn't it? Or it should be. Doing things with deliberation, with sureness."

He watched her swim in restless circles around the pond, wondering what had happened to the conversation. "I suppose."

"You suppose..."

Silence. "You are having a crisis of faith?"

"I guess I am, at that. Which is funny, because this way of thinking was supposed to deal with those. But now..."

"You are no longer performing your actions with deliberation?"

"Maybe less deliberation. I don't know. And, that's really the problem isn't it?"

"Is it?"

She nodded. "I find myself... having doubts."

"You are acting with less sureness than you used to."

"Yes."

"And you are doubting yourself."

"Yes."

"Why?"

She blinked. "I..." Paused. "I don't know. It seems like some of my actions are having consequences I... did not intend."

He opened his mouth to say something reassuring and then stopped. She deserved better than platitudes. He thought about it. "Is that necessarily a bad thing?"

She opened her mouth and then stopped, thinking. "No... no, not really. But..."

This, at least, was ground with which he was familiar. "All our actions have unintended consequences. If we knew every outcome of every action, there would be no need to act because we would already know what would happen. The future is so malleable, and there are so many possibilities, that it would take more algorithms and more mathematics than we are capable of to calculate each and every one of them." As he spoke his eyes widened, his thoughts turning inward. It was true, and it was relevant to his existence as well as hers. "Just because a thing is unintended does not mean it is unwelcome." He wished he hadn't said that.

She had, while he had been musing out loud, floated up in front of him. He could see down a lot farther than he wanted to, and she was still wearing only her soaking, transparent shirt. "When did our roles become reversed?" she asked, smiling up at him from the water. "I thought I was the one who was supposed to dispense sage, philosophical advice."

"You seemed to need it more than I did, today."

Pause. "Maybe I did. Probably," she amended. "I probably did. Wise man..." she smiled, reaching up to brush leaves out of his hair, or at least making the token gesture. "Very wise man."

He knelt there at the water's edge for a little while, waiting for both of them to digest the words. It was hard, very hard. Finally he stood up, almost expecting his knees to pop sharply, as a human's might. He was almost startled to find that they didn't.

"Put your clothes back on."

She laughed, stuck her tongue out at him, and swam further out. "Yes, mother."