Teaching empathy to a crystalline logic-engine was perhaps their strangest challenge yet. Data streams and logical explanations failed. Finally, Lena brought Shard to a stream where children were skipping stones. She had Elias access a memory of his own childhood, the simple, profound joy of the perfect skip, and projected it to Shard.
Then, she had Kael explain the geology of the stone, the physics of the throw. She combined the subjective memory with the objective data. Shard was silent for a long time. "The event is the same. The data is the same. But the context of the feeling... multiplies the data. It creates a new, subjective layer of information. This is... inefficient. And... intriguing."
It was a breakthrough. Shard wasn't feeling, but it was beginning to comprehend the value of feeling as a form of information processing. The Ambassador was becoming a student.