Icy cold morning outside the camper. Plenty snug inside. Even so, Naomi really wanted a nice hot cup of tea, preferably with at least a teaspoon of honey, and there was honey on the shelf, but no tea.

“How can that be?” she asked Nils. “I’m sure I packed a box of green and a box of regular.”

“Right,” said Nils, “but with the blizzard last night, we haven’t unloaded everything from the car. Only the perishables.”

“I guess I could get dressed and scurry out there and bring it in,” Naomi said, her eyes indicating she was hoping Nils would do the scurrying, whether dressed or not.

“I have an idea,” Nils said. “You know those AI illustration programs? All we have to do is feed it a picture of you and ask it to do one with you drinking a nice hot cup of tea.”

“With honey?” Naomi asked.

“Sure. Honey.”

Nils took a quick picture of Naomi,

then prompted the AI program to produce the illustration.

“Um, I won’t be naked will I?” Naomi asked.

“Nope. These AI picture apps are pretty conservative. Look, it’s already done.”

“Interesting,” Naomi said, examining the picture. “It does kind of look like me, but what’s with all these weird fingers?”

“Yeah, that’s one of the problems with AI. Sometimes it has trouble counting anything more than two.”

“And the shape is wrong, too,” Naomi noted. “More like worms than fingers. Ugh.”

“Let me try another version,” Nils said.

Again the program produced an image in seconds, but while somewhat different from the first, it still had the finger problems.

“I have another idea,” Nils said. Six minutes later he’d completed a painting of Naomi holding a teacup.

“Not bad,” Naomi said. “Hardly more time than it would have taken for the water to boil and the tea to steep.”

“And you have just the right amount of fingers,” Nils mentioned. “But as long as you have those lovely fingers, shouldn’t you be putting them to use?”

“How do you mean?” Naomi asked.

Nils did another painting.

“Oh Gosh, Nils, that’s so...”

Nils and Naomi fell into a loving embrace.

“You know what?” Naomi said, not quite an hour later. “I could really use a cup of coffee.”