Short story: The Garden Gambit

It was the second time he was sitting in her garden, and again her AI snake was looking at him from over her shoulder. The first time he had not thought about the intelligence he knew far exceeded the snake’s own hardware, about the obviously engineered subliminal harmonics of the garden, or about the way the woman seemed to smile and nod at something the snake had softly hissed to her like a joke or a command. The first time he just listened to the offer and refused it with pride.

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