Ned's surprised (but not in a bad way) when Dirk opens up to him. Something about the way he's speaking changes. It's less... flippant. Less of a show. Ned takes note of that, listens more closely than he might have otherwise. The story itself is unexpected but charming.

Perhaps he'd judged too hastily, after all. The way Dirk sounds when he's talking about this girl changes Ned's mind. Perhaps he has an awkward sense of humor, but maybe his heart is in the right place. At the very least, the two of them have something in common, from the sound of it.

"What's her name?" Ned asks. He wants to hear more about her, about how she thinks and copes in a human body.

He is far less hesitant to launch into a mini-rant on Daneel's behalf, after Dirk expressed his opinion about artificial intelligence. "Daneel doesn't want to be human, exactly. But he's just now starting to deal with the fact that some of his programming is-" he pauses, trying to think of a politer equivalent for completely fucked up, "-problematic. Where he comes from, robots are slaves, and they're all programmed to think they're inferior. That they have to do anything a human tells them to do. That they shouldn't be allowed to think for themselves, or want anything. But he does."