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trying to parse all this out.
    She kicked the deck hard and yelped as she hurt her bare foot. Robbie made an involuntary noise. "Please don't hurt yourself," he said.
    "Why not? Who cares what happens to this meatpuppet? What's the fucking point of this stupid ship and the stupid meatpuppets? Why even bother?"
    Robbie knew the answer to this. There was a mission statement in the comments to his source-code, the same mission statement that was etched in a brass plaque in the lounge.
    "The Free Spirit is dedicated to the preservation of the unique human joys of the flesh and the sea, of humanity's early years as pioneers of the unknown. Any person may use the Free Spirit and those who sail in her to revisit those days and remember the joys of the limits of the flesh."
    She scrubbed at her eyes. "What's that?"
    Robbie told her.
    "Who thought up that crap?"
    "It was a collective of marine conservationists," Robbie said, knowing he sounded a little sniffy. "They'd done all that work on normalizing sea-temperature with the homeostatic warming elements, and they put together the Free Spirit as an afterthought before they uploaded."
    Kate sat down and sobbed. "Everyone's done something important. Everyone except me."
    Robbie burned with shame. No matter what he said or did, he broke the first law. It had been a lot easier to be an Asimovist when there weren't any humans around.
    "There, there," he said as sincerely as he could.
    The reef came up the stairs then, and looked at Kate sitting on the deck, crying.
    "Let's have sex," they said. "That was fun, we should do it some more."
    Kate kept crying.
    "Come on," they said, grabbing her by the shoulder and tugging.
    Kate shoved them back.
    "Leave her alone," Robbie said. "She's upset, can't you see that?"
    "What does she have to be upset about? Her kind remade the universe and bends it to its will. They created you and me. She has nothing to be upset about. Come on," they repeated. "Let's go back to the room."
    Kate stood up and glared out at the sea. "Let's go diving," she said. "Let's go to the reef."

----
    Robbie rowed in little worried circles and watched his telemetry anxiously. The reef had changed a lot since the last time he'd seen it. Large sections of it now lifted over the sea, bony growths sheathed in heavy metals extracted from sea-water — fancifully shaped satellite uplinks, radio telescopes, microwave horns. Down below, the untidy, organic reef shape was lost beneath a cladding of tessellated complex geometric sections that throbbed with electromagnetic energy — the reef had built itself more computational capacity.
    Robbie scanned deeper and found more computational nodes extending down to the ocean floor, a thousand meters below. The reef was solid thinkum, and the sea was measurably warmer from all the exhaust heat of its grinding logic.
    The reef — the human-shelled reef, not the one under the water — had been wholly delighted with the transformation in its original body when it hove into sight. They had done a little dance on Robbie that had nearly capsized him, something that had never happened. Kate, red-eyed and surly, had dragged them to their seat and given them a stern lecture about not endangering her.
    They went over the edge at the count of three and reappeared on Robbie's telemetry. They descended quickly: the Isaac and Janet shells had their Eustachian tubes optimized for easy pressure-equalization, going deep on the reef-wall. Kate was following on the descent, her head turning from side to side.
    Robbie's IM chimed again. It was high latency now, since he was having to do a slow radio-link to the ship before the broadband satellite uplink hop. Everything was slow on open water — the divers' sensorium transmissions were narrowband, the network was narrowband, and Robbie usually ran his own mind slowed way down out here, making the time scream past at ten or twenty times realtime.
    "Hello?"
    "I'm sorry I hung up on you, bro."
    "Hello,