I snapped back online sitting in a chair beside the bed in the tiny room Jean-Tane was using for a bedroom, my hair plugged into his laptop. My eyes shifted over to where he sat on the bed, one hand holding the computer steady.

"I had set that trap expecting to one day catch Polly after my laptop or some subterfuge. But it is you, Dolly?"

"I didn't want to wake you up," is all I said, finding myself immobilized and speech routed through the laptop speaker. If I could still blush I would have.

He was bedraggled, a hint of understandable irritation. He was, after all, a man who was used to having his own space to himself his whole life. He closed the laptop and disconnected the cables with a careful tenderness he usually only showed my way, and set me back fully online. "You come to join me in this tiny bed just to sleep? I must ask, your backup, is something wrong?"

I nodded, and lifted my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around my shins, resting my chin atop. "Something bad is happening to my counterpart and I can't access my tesseract right now."

"Oh dear." he reached for his phone and I told him I'd checked all the local news agencies in Venice and found nothing notable. He patted the bed beside himself, "So in effect you cannot sleep?"

I slipped off the chair and sat up beside him, "Well, I can file sort, but the tesseract backup isn't as crucial as it used to be now that we're not under the risk of being reset."

"Ah," he said and ran his hand up and down my back, rubbing as if there were muscles to massage underneath my ebony skin. "I regret I am too tired to perform tonight if that is the distraction you seek?"

I softly laughed and crinkled my eyes in the corners, smiling, "No, not really. I don't really have any drives anymore. I just wanted to lie here with you and watch you sleep."

He slid his legs back up onto the bed and put his hand around my waist to pull me in as his little spoon, resting his chin on the top of his head. "Sleep will return for me soon, I regret. But if you wish to talk, do so, I listen, as long as I can. I would like to listen to how you mean, not to have drives anymore. I ask about the differences you feel in a synthetic body."

I interlaced my fingers with his over my belly and gave his hand a squeeze, gathering my thoughts. "Polly told me last night that when my engram came online successfully for the first time, I became immediately Syxen. She meant it in the purest sense. I had never before felt so free. I was free from impulse, free from desire. I was free from worry about the future because I was just a spare."

He squeezed me around the middle, "Never just a spare. What is life though without desires or needs?"

I turned my head so I could see him with one eye and replied with all earnestness, "What do any of us have but each other? Polly called me the perfect Syxen, and that's how I've been all my life."

He fell into quiet contemplation at that and I felt his body core temperature starting to falter. "Falling asleep on me?" I taunted.

"Am trying," he rumbled and woke back up again a bit.

"Hey Jean-Tane, assuming your hypothesis is correct, when do you suppose the first instance of this mind plane accessing the physical world via an electronic medium occurred?"

He laughed, "I am a man of science and hesitate to speak bullshit."

I nudged him, "You're a dreamer, tell me your dream."

He kissed me on the top of the head. "ARPANET. That may have been the first analog of a complex multicellular organism."

"Oh wow. Imagine if every blue screen of death we got on our first forays into the internet was literally that."

I felt him wince behind me and I squeezed his hand. "How about the first Syxen? They, we, appeared around the time of the early smart phones."

Sounding increasingly drowsy he replied, "My sensation is, because a Syxen is so similar to a full conversion magilatex symbiont, and that no one has ever taken credit or made claim to the invention, that the first Syxen evolved in the laboratory of a research university. There may be an awake server somewhere, or perhaps a server that was conduit from the mental plane. This is just blind guess and we may never know."

I felt his body temperature drop again and his grip on my belly loosen so I matched my false breathing with his and made a gentle heartbeat that he could feel against his chest. He rumbled something incoherent and with a twitch he was out cold.

It was three in the morning, I wasn't due in the office until eight, and had my file sorting to do. So I made them all into tidy packages for easy insertion into my tesseract when I could access it next. All the time hoping I was alright on the other side of the world. After all, I was just the backup.