"You can kill me," Naomi whispered, testing him. "I am soft. You are strong."

Are you researching ?

He reached out, taking her hand. The contact was electric. The 'Yapoo Queen,' the butcher of the lower sectors, stood paralyzed. In that touch, she didn't feel a slave's submission. She felt the weight of the 302,619,808 bytes of history stored in his mind—the rise and fall of empires, the poetry of dead languages, the memory of love before the world went gray.