Sentimentality was not a trait that was high on Mimsy's list of attributes.

Though, to be fair, that wasn't quite what this was about. The little electronic bird that was cradled in the palm of her hand, already modified with the faint blue glow of runic technology, was not meant to be a gift. It wasn't a token of friendship. It wasn't a peace offering.

It was something far more complicated, because none of Mimsy's endeavors were simple undertakings. This was especially true when it came to the connections she made with other humans, which were more complex than a multiverse atop a multiverse with a thousand theories in between, the space filled with dark matter printed on the very hypothetical fabric of the universe, split into halves and folded into sixteenths, arranged in a method congruent to the golden ratio--

After the exchange on Twitter, guilt might have seemed like a heavy contender for her reasoning; but she scarcely felt guilty for anything, and certainly never had a negative reaction to a vague experiment that had no immediate effect upon her. She had caused much greater pain for many other people and hadn't lost a moment's sleep to nightmares from an overactive conscience. And 'guilty' came with the slight implication that she cared, anyway, which she still didn't like the idea of.

There were a hundred other simple solutions, actions to reactions that normal people in healthy social situations felt, but none of those properly fit her rationale.

Perhaps it was safe to say that sentimentality and simplicity had both not even made the cut for her theoretical character sheet in the cosmos. Still, en route to the infirmary, she held a very fancy toy which she had not obtained to keep for herself. She knew who it was for, and why it was for him, and had nobody to answer to regarding her reasons...but it still would have bothered her until she found a comfortable solution. She did nothing that could be perceived as friendly without explaining it away. And she could never have made it this far into the delivery process without knowing for certain that this meant continued detachment, not anything to the contrary.

Necessity was what she had finally settled upon.

Robert was very likely never going to leave her alone. She had unwittingly opened that door, and it could not possibly be closed with the absence of one of their deaths, unless she had miscalculated something along the way (the chances of which were slim, because she was too confident in her ability to ever admit otherwise). He was a needy creature at times, requiring far more than she was usually willing to give in the face of such an uneven trade. She enjoyed answering questions, but his inquiries went far past that, pushing her into the realm of frustration. It might have been that she'd expected to be among like-minded peers. Or it could have just been Robert himself, since none of the others elicited the same reaction.

Of course, there was a dash of curiosity, as there always was. Of all people, methods similar to a placebo should have affected Robert - but it hadn't. He had not heard the bird speak. She had applied every method meant to trick him into believing, in the most scientific sense of the word. He had done everything that she told him to do, and her instructions had the proper amount of excessive technicality to them, but it had done nothing.

He had not heard the bird.

So she set about finding a bird that was impossible to not hear, meant to repeat a set loop of phrases under the guise of 'answering' or 'responding', things just simple enough. She fed it answers she had not cared enough to give, and facts that might be deemed interesting, and many things that she guessed that Robert might bother her about in the future. In the span of an hour, she transformed it from a cute plaything to a glorified answering machine, all for the sake of necessity (and that bit of curiosity). It was a gamble of an experiment, with a very high ratio of failure to success. The highest probability dictated that the likeliest outcome was that Robert would completely misinterpret the entire situation and increase the efforts that she considered bothersome, but curiosity often led her astray, and had coaxed her into believing that this would be successful. At the very least, this increased her chances of discovering why her convincing had failed her. If he could hear one bird, might he be able to hear another next time, even if it had no true voice? Why had he not heard the bird in the first place?

She placed the bird beside the infirmary bed with a little note, handwritten in meticulous print: Tap the bird.