Deborah Barns and the LadyBot 9000 computer were the last vestiges of humanity in existence, save the spaceship they were trapped in. Through a small porthole, Deborah watched orange explosions cool and dull in the vastness of space. Trying to make herself respond emotionally with the abject destruction of her planet and her people was proving more difficult than she had anticipated. It was impossible for her to think. As one's movement might stop when frightened, so too had her thoughts frozen at the sight of this early-morning nuclear holocaust. No tears, no shouting, no thoughts. It would take more than a while for her brain to rewire itself to fully integrate this new information, and as that was occurring, Deborah sat; and she watched the fires smolder.
LadyBot, although technically speaking a simulated human, was able to adjust her programing in a matter of milliseconds, but understood that her traditional counterpart would require more time. From a purely physiological standpoint, LadyBot calculated because: (a) it took her 3.2 milliseconds to adjust her neural network, and (b) she was able to perform roughly ten times more many calculations per second than Deborah Barns, that (c) a conclusion could reasonably be made. Conclusion (c) was of course that the human would require 32 milliseconds to process this input and could then begin with the daily tasks. Luckily for Deborah, LadyBot waited longer than that, not entirely sure her calculations were correct.
