“Wait a while, what’s this bit here?”

Miller’s voice, from the holo. I swiveled my head and confirmed that yes, it actually was from the holo. His lips and words moved in lockstep, and his body language was consistent with his tone. I almost sighed with relief. Only then did I realize how taxing it had been to reconcile the girl’s voice with her appearance.

“That’s the com sequence,” Rauch answered. “That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time.”

“No, I mean what’s that!?” Miller swiped to sync up his biosignature with the interface again, then dotted a finger at the air. A slim portion of the code, perhaps only thirty lines, highlighted itself on the display. “That looks like a spinal tap. What’s one of those doing here? And why is it in the com-line program?”

“Where’d you expect me to put it? We have to gather data before we can transmit data. To me that makes it part of the com-lines.”

“But why’d you have to write it like THAT, with all the probing and the stripping on the front end? Can’t we make it less invasive?”

Rauch shrugged. “You want the data or don’t you?” He took back control of the interface and tapped a handful of times to clear the highlighting. “This ain't like the bots, where they’re coded by design using our technology, our language, and our style. These are homegrown viruses, cooked up over millions of years by nothing more than trial and error, in hosts that typically aren’t too thrilled to have them around; they’re going to have their share of shields. We’ve got to get in there and bust some heads if we want to make any sense of it at all.”

“But you’ll kill the goddamn things!”

Rauch shrugged again. “Not all of them. Some will adapt. Some will survive. Enough to report back anyways.” He seemed to consider the lines that had been highlighted, as if seeing something in them that he hadn’t seen before. “Besides,” he said softly, “I’m still working on that part.” He tapped twice more, zooming in on the first few lines, and stepped back into the set.

“No!” An ear-splitting shriek pierced the air as the girl strode across the room. No, not strode…glided. Flowed effortlessly, free of the jerkiness of her typical walk cycle, moving like a ghost in a dream. She reached the chair where Rauch sat coding in three long gliding-steps and, after a full windup, slapped him square on the side of his face. She stood over him, panting like she’d run a mile, turned to one side from the force of her follow-through. The sound of her hand contacting his cheek resonated through the holo. It looked like she’d given it everything she had.

Rauch didn’t seem to care. Less than not care, in fact. He didn’t react in any way. He didn’t flinch, or wince, and his neck didn’t twist with the force of the blow. He showed no signs of pain whatsoever. He just tapped his finger at his screen and stared, like a grandmaster pondering his next move.

Suddenly the holo slurred. Its images twisted, shifted and warped, and the background noise it had been playing stretched and condensed in a Dopplered wail. When it came back into true the girl was back where she’d been before she moved on Rauch. The rest of the scene remained unchanged.

“S…sorry about that,” the girl choked out through semi-sobs. “It’s getting harder to control.” It sounded like the real her this time, not the unowned voice from the holo. The richness in her tone was back, the human emotion behind the words. But I couldn’t find the nerve to check. “I’ll push it on a bit. This part is isn’t w…worth much anyways.”

“...might work better as a checkpoint down below, let’s try moving it there.” Miller and Rauch were still arguing about the com-line sequence. The code Rauch was working on, which had previously been a tight thirty lines, was now a disjointed mass of text that edged off the screen in all directions. Half-formed arguments and hanging calls littered the set like tools at a construction site. Many had been referenced out.

Rauch hesitated, then obliged. It only took him a few seconds to re-write the snippet to serve in its new capacity. Just long enough to shoot Miller a ‘where would you be without me’ look as he did it. When he was done he studied it through squinted eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, “looks pretty ghetto to me. Maybe we should just scrap it out and start all over. You know, get back to the original plan.”

“Get back to your plan, you mean?” This wasn’t the first time he’d been offered this suggestion, by the sound of it.

Rauch turned up his palms. “Your words.”

Miller considered, then shook his head. “Uh-uh. Proceed as directed. We need to take it down a few notches if it’s going to do us any good. The goal is to recognize the mutations, not to cause them.”

A sigh and an eye-roll. Rauch closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, stalling. Or perhaps just trying to gather enough energy to dive back in. The interface remained active and keyed to his signature. He put his hands behind his head, resting.

“No, no, take it down a notch chickendick! You’re going the other way. And put that call-box back where it was!” Miller hissed as a couple of lines rearranged themselves. A reference blue block of text reactivated itself a moment later. “Ref that back out! We idled it for a reason…it’s not compatible with the transubstantiation logic we picked out below!” He glared at Rauch, still reclined and semi-conscious. “What’s going on here? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Rauch pulled his arms down from the back of his head and crossed them just above his navel. He turned slightly and laid on his side, as if that might help him rest. “Just what we’ve been talking about,” he mumbled, eyes still lidded. “Trying to make this more observational, less invasive. You should know, it’s your idea.”

“No, I mean what are you doing right now? That…that code you’re writing…what IS that?”

Rauch’s eyes flew open. They widened when they saw the holo, where the cursor had just laid a quarter of a screen’s worth of fresh text. The speed with which it had done so suggested they were sent up rather than picked out, as Rauch had done a moment ago. “That isn’t me,” he whispered.