Rauch sighed. He looked Miller in the eye, then let his gaze fall to the floor. He glanced at the girl for a moment before bowing his head in contemplation.

“OK,” he said when he came out of it “let’s try a different tack. Let’s say you’re going to mail a letter – I mean actual, physical, ink and paper mail now, not just transmitted through the Post.”

“Haven’t done it in years, but OK, I’ll play along.”

“Yeah, me neither. But let’s say you’re mailing, like, a Christmas card to your grandma or something and you want that special touch…nostalgia, and all that shit. So you get it all written out on your fancy stationery with your felt-tipped pen, and you get the envelope addressed and credited, only when it comes time to stuff it your mind is elsewhere and you grab a circular for Bubba Boobalot’s Adult Superstore by mistake, and that’s what they deliver. Who do you blame when dear old granny hols you up and asks her what the hell you’re trying to say? The post, for delivering exactly what you put in the envelope to the exact address you told them to, more or less exactly when you asked them to deliver it? Or yourself, for stuffing it with the wrong thing?”

“Well, myself I guess, but when we talked about this yesterday you said there wasn’t anything wrong with the message.”

“There isn’t! I’m sure It’s a perfectly fine message. It just doesn’t mean anything the way it’s being sent today. If the circular happened to be written in High Arcturian Script, and THAT’s what you posted to granny, no harm done – she just gets a bunch of gibberish and she throws it in the recycler. It’s the same as if you never sent it at all.”

Miller took a couple of steps towards the tower. Slow, shambling steps, using the minimum of muscle movements to accomplish the task. “I see what you’re saying,” he bent down and picked up a couple of the meal containers. The girl moved to help but Miller shook her off again. “So let’s say you’re right – and I’m not conceding that you are, mind…just playing out the string,” he gave Rauch a halfhearted wink at being able to turn his words around on him, “what do you propose we do?”

“Oh, I don’t know…” Rauch turned back to the interface, made a few final pecks and swipes, and gestured towards his half of the holo. “Maybe something about like this…”

Miller and the girl moved in for a closer look. “It still needs a lot of work,” Rauch explained, “and it hasn’t been tested yet, of course. But you get the idea.”

Miller’s lips moved as he read through some of the code. He traced some of the more complex portions with his finger, as if doing sums in the air. One could almost see him following arguments in the logic, pretending to be a packet of data getting run through Rauch’s gonkulator. “You really think this will work?” he asked.

“As written? First try?” Rauch threw his hands in the air. “No idea. But eventually, if we keep at it. We need to get down to the cellular level of communication that we saw on Monday, and this will move in that direction.” He swiped at the interface to re-activate the frames, some of which had gone dormant as they’d chatted. “And even if it doesn’t, we’re bound to learn a thing or two. Just remember that ‘work’ is a relative term. Monday’s demo didn’t ‘work’ by the definition we had at the time...it was an aberration, albeit one we welcomed, well outside the expected range. It’s only since then that we rewrote our definition of success, and it’s only by this new definition that we’re failing now.”

“But you think this will replicate the results? You think this will elicit the sort of empathetic responses we observed then?”

“Again, no idea. Near as I can tell it will. You’re never sure with runs like these. Like I said, it could take a round or three.” He started on his code again. Lines of text began to appear, seemingly of their own accord. “I might be able to give you a better answer if we had the genomes from the Monday strain, but it’s a little late for that.”

“A limitation of the tower,” the girl clarified. “It only tracked the bots at first. We designed it as a check-and-adjust for all the artificial code we were cramming down the virus’s throats, and we only cared about the viruses to the extent that they were taking or not taking the insertions. We didn’t sequence the virus halves at all. We forgot all about the other ways those things can change.” I tried to follow the sound of her voice, but failed. There was something different about it this time, something…not quite right. The pitch was just a little off, and it didn’t seem to come from the bunk as it had before. I spared her a glance; she hadn’t moved. Still leaned against the wall, still with her arms on her knees, still idling her syringe, and watching the liquid move within. About as far from engaged as she could be and still have a pulse. If it was she who had spoken, she’d already forgotten she had.

“Mutations,” I mumbled. I tried to address both the girl and the holoscreen, not really sure who I was talking to.

“Exactly,” her voice said. “Rogue alleles in the strain itself…random, chaotic, wild. Just like there have been for billions of years.” Her eyes never left the needle. Her lips were frozen lines of stone. It almost sounded like she was speaking through the holo, but…that was impossible, wasn’t it? Holos could render scenes that had been captured previously, or they could relay full-dimensional scenes that were being captured elsewhere in real time, but this was neither of those. This was something new. “That’s why the…uh…the anomaly took so long to show. It hinged on a mutie, one that probably started as a single organism, and it was a score or more of generations before the sample could evolve. And we didn’t have a freakin’ clue.”

She stirred. Sat up, shifted her weight forward, crossed her legs, and used her arms to prop up her head. A pained look came over her face. Her eyes, wet and with the beginnings of tears, drifted upwards, towards the steel of the ceiling. I followed them on instinct, but even as I did I knew there was nothing there that I could see. It wasn’t that kind of stare. “We’ve fixed it since, of course,” her voice continued. “As of a couple of days ago. So any tests we’ve run since then sequenced both the bots and the strain. But Monday’s run was lost forever. That’s what Rauch was talking about when he lamented the genomes he was missing.”