"Bill, this ship needs direction."
"That goes without saying. I've seen more leadership in the offices of the Nova Police," the cyborg said.
"I worked for them once," Hugo Salvia proclaimed. "The pay is shit. But I got plenty of wetwork assignments."
I got out a napkin I had scrawled on. "I've got a plan. We're going to grow me a brain. We'll cross the genes of a dolphin and a cauliflower and produce a seed we can stick up my nose and water through my ear. The roots will pierce my dessicated tissues and touch every cell with their root tendrils."
"Grow brains?" He began to drool. The fluid looked greenish.
The cyborg stared at me for a long while, ignoring the zombie. I was fine with this. Though I might get worked up, I still possessed the patience of the undead. And Bill cogitated with what seemed steam-powered thoughts, churning through the concepts like a riverboat through a stream of consciousness. And this was his method: think fast; talk slow. Weighing my words, he finally replied, "Spacemummy, you're an idiot. But you're my kind of idiot. You're what my auntie would call a blessed fool. But she's long dead and no one revived her consciousness to send her churning through the syrup of interplanetary, and if we survive, interstellar space." He paused. If you had Mark Twain aboard this ship instead of me-- and there are times I've felt like the old goatbiter, felt his acerbic wit working through me, a Mark Twain who preferred the company of feral boys and junkies to cigar-smoking hucksters and talltale tellers-- Mark Twain would comment on the aptness of growing a cauliflower in your skull in the place of a brain. He once said, 'I'd rather have a cabbage than a college degree.' But I am not Mark Twain. I do not prefer the solace of vegetables."
Another long pause. "However, the presence of dolphins in the mix gives me something I can sink my teeth into." He seemed to grow hungry by this idea, but this was only a memory of some kind. He continued, "The dolphin is a clever creature. It understands life in a multidimensional space. Unlike the simians from which humanity descended, they do not consider three dimensions to be structured by branching hierarchies. If you follow me, in the development of the minds of monkeys, they rose above mammalian 2-dimensional territory marking through the understanding that a good tree will get you quickly away from a roaming predator. But it also established the pattern in its thinking that higher is better. Dolphins do not suffer this problem. Their space is omnidirectional, though it has references such as surface and bottom, these do no have the same meaning as for the sky-reaching apes. By the same reason, you would never find a junk-addicted dolphin. Dolphins would not invent addictive philosophies, like religion. And though dolphins are competitive, their politics involve a set of nested hierarchies and alliances between individuals."
"Where did you learn this?"
"I have always been interested in societies of all types. But I've also been surfing Deadweb while we've been talking, always multitasking. The dreadful long and forthcoming short of it is that I will assist you."