Sum
@Summmluv
She smiles. She says his name.
Ender Wiggin, my precious.
Wang mu and her fangirl phase
Now, of course, she knew that almost every poor girl had dreams of marrying a rich man or finding out she was really the child of a rich family or some other such nonsense. But dreams were also sent from the gods, and there was truth in any dream you had more than once; everyone knew that. So she still felt a strong affinity for Peter Wiggin; and now, to realize that Demosthenes, for whom she had also felt great admiration, was his sister – that was almost too much of a coincidence to bear. I don’t care what my mistress says, Demosthenes! cried Wang-mu silently. I love you anyway, because you have told me the truth all my life. And I love you also as the sister of the Hegemon, who is the husband of my dreams.
She wasn’t simply a Wiggin – she was one of the Wiggins, sister of Peter the Hegemon and Ender the Xenocide.
I hate your gods and how they humiliate you without ever telling you a single thing worth knowing. So let them strike me dead for thinking that thought!
‘Unless maybe the programs don’t want to be used that way.’
Qing-jao laughed aloud. ‘Now, Wang-mu, that was one of our first lessons about computers. It’s all right for the common people to imagine that computers actually decide things, but you and I know that computers are only servants, they only do what they’re told, they never actually want anything themselves.’
Wang-mu almost lost control of herself, almost flew into a rage. Do you think that never wanting anything is a way that computers are similar to servants? Do you really think that we servants do only what we’re told and never want anything ourselves? Do you think that just because the gods don’t make us rub our noses on the floor or wash our hands till they bleed that we don’t have any other desires?
Well, if computers and servants are just alike, then it’s because computers have desires, not because servants don’t have them. Because we want. We yearn. We hunger. What we never do is act on those hungers, because if we did you godspoken ones would send us away and find others more obedient.
‘There is no way for anyone to hide an ansible transmission,’ said Qing-jao. ‘Not unless they were right in there at the very moment the transmission was received, switching it away from the normal logging programs and – anyway, it can’t be done. A conspirator would have to be sitting at every ansible all the time, working so fast that—’
‘Or they could have a program that did it automatically.’
‘But then we’d know about the program – it would be taking up memory, it would be using processor time.’
‘If somebody could make a program to intercept the ansible messages, couldn’t they also make it hide itself so it didn’t show up in memory and left no record of the processor time it used?’