The four of us cocked our collective heads and tried to puzzle out the meaning. We came up dry. I drifted towards the scene that was pixelating on the screen while we waited for her to elaborate.

“We weren’t really sure when it happened. Miller was the first to point it out – he always had an eye for details,” here her mouth twitched in another one of those heartbreaking half-smiles “and that was about three days ago. But it was one of those things that happens slowly, over time, so it was easy miss. It might have happened earlier.”

“Why didn’t you check the playback?” I asked. Acting on reflex – It was only after I spoke that I realized I had no idea what they would have been checking for.

“We did.” She shifted her weight forward and scooched her back against the wall, sitting up a little straighter, and moving more of her into the shadows. “We tried, anyways. Charles started picking through it as soon as we saw what had happened. But by then it was so contaminated that, well…you’ll see for yourselves soon enough.”

The scene finished manifesting. It held for an expectant moment, then melted into motion. Miller, Rauch, and the girl all were working at Station One, the console at the front of the tower. This time Rauch was at the controls, swiping, tapping, zooming, and coding at the phase-boxes that popped up in patterns I couldn’t even begin to follow, while Miller stood behind him, scanning. He looked…exhausted. He must have been, to cede the captain’s chair the way he apparently had. His eyes were shot. His shoulders slumped. His whole body hunched over the back of Rauch’s seat in a way that just seemed…defeated.

“He worked himself so hard that night. I don’t think he’d slept at all since our ‘breakthrough.’” She made a halfhearted pair of air quotes with her hands, working around the syringe in her left. They barely made it past waist-high. “I don’t know how he was able to stand, let alone code. It must have been forty-eight hours straight at that point. Two solid days of picking through these goddam lines.” She let her arms fall back to her sides. I noticed again how knobby her elbows looked when she let them hang. Like a tire iron wrapped in Spandex. I checked again the gauntness of her face, thankfully now hidden in shadow, and wondered what she’d look like after

(if)

she got out of here, and got back to a normal life. How much of that pretty young thing I had seen on the playbacks would come back to her, and how much of that strain would stay? I sighed, and shook my helmet, once. It felt like such a waste. “Rauch was pretty jazzed about it though. He’d had some thoughts the previous day – how to re-sequence some of the com-lines or something, he thought it might speed up the link with the tower – and he was just dying to try them out. But as long as Miller held the reigns he wasn’t going to get to. This was his shot.”

“Anything worth noting with this last round of mods?” Miller was asking. He called it back over his shoulder, towards the girl, who was working on the station pressed against the leftmost wall.

“Negative.” She eyed her holos. One showed what looked to be rack of EKG outputs. The other gave the impression of a video feed of one of the coneys, but the angle made it hard to tell. “Nothing we haven’t seen already, anyways. Our second is still showing incredible levels of empathy for whatever the primary feels, but the other three are flatlining. At least as far as that’s concerned.”

Miller tapped his fingers on the back of Rauch’s chair. “So what are we missing?” he grumbled. “Why can’t we replicate those results?” He lowered his head and inhaled deeply, then let it out slowly, enough so that I wondered if he was going to fall asleep on his feet. He closed his eyes in concentration, and began ticking off points with his finger, moving his lips in a semi-audible whisper.

“…introduced randomization in the com-lines earlier than we have before…”

“…probably would have reacted in the Alabaster frame, which could have caused the…”

“…a loop that would have…” But here his whisper dropped too low, and the rest was indistinct.

The other two listened to the first few snippets, then turned back to their screens. They studied and coded once again, but tentatively now, unable to claim their full attention while Miller traced his little puzzle. “Bring up the original adenine sequence again,” he finally mumbled, not bothering to raise his head or open his eyes. “The one from Monday’s demonstration.”

Rauch tapped frenetically at one of the frames trying to finish a blocklet of code, then did as Miller asked. Two more frames planed into view, these backed in reference green instead of the typical black. Miller busied himself in the text they displayed while Rauch pulled the frames he’d been working with over to the second screen and resumed his assembly.

“What are we looking for this time?” the girl asked after only a few seconds. She approached Miller with hesitation, as if weighing the need to snap him out of his fugue against the risk of prompting an explanation that would only tax him further.

“I don’t know exactly,” Miller answered. His voice ground and caught with fatigue, like a garbage disposal sticking on a piece of bone. “Something to do with interpretation and signal sharing. This loop here was designed to process the inputs from the sensory portion of the hosts after they had been re-trained, and this subroutine was supposed to transmit these findings back to the Tower in real-time. And they both seem to be doing what we wanted them to do, but…there’s something else going on.” He brought a hand to his forehead and rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefinger, listening to the synthetic whoosh! the interface made every time Rauch sent up a line. He stayed that way for a long time. The girl took another step towards him and reached out a tentative hand, but resisted needling him a second time. She pulled back, an arm’s length away, and fidgeted, as if unsure what to do with herself.

“Just look at the playback,” Miller reanimated, and gestured towards a third display, which had the visuals from the demonstration running on an infinite loop. “We all saw the doe on the left, and the overlays the Tower showed us when we hit her with our various tests, and we’ve analyzed them to death over the past two days. But pay attention to the guy on the right for a while. He was in a totally separate chamber with its own heat, light, ventilation, and soundproofing…there’s no way he could have known what we were doing to his girlfriend. And yet, somehow, he reacted to it. Not as strongly as she did, but look at the overlays he was generating…like here, when we put her in cold, he curled up in his corner, and his overlay showed winter fur. And here, when we turned out the lights, he thought of foraging for food under cover of night. And notice how his hunger lines spiked when we first removed her dish. We weren’t the only ones getting her feed.”