I finished three novels already just this year (PoG, CP and UoW). Currently reading The State of the Art, which takes place in the Earth. Here and there I'm alw

I finished three novels already just this year (PoG, CP and UoW). Currently reading The State of the Art, which takes place in the Earth. Here and there I'm always wondering how much agency is realistically given to humans since Minds are just so powerful. This particular passage evoked this feeling one more time: I wondered what the ship was up to. I did have an idea (wrong, as it turned out). The Arbitrary, like every ship I’ve ever met in Contact, loved intrigues and plots. The devices are forever using their spare time to cook up pranks and schemes; little secret plans, opportunities to use delicate artifices to get people to do things, say things, behave in a certain way, just for the fun of it. The Arbitrary was a notorious match-maker, perfectly convinced that it knew exactly who would be best for each other, always trying to fix the crew placements to set up as many potential couples or other suitable combinations as it could. It occurred to me that it was up to something like this now, worried that I hadn’t been sexually active recently, and perhaps also concerned that my last few partners had been female (the Arb always did have a distinctly heterosexual bent for some reason).