Charles took another sip. “Why do we need the coneys?” he asked. “Wouldn’t the test work just as well hooked up to a paperweight?”

“Maybe,” Miller sighed. “Maybe not. Let her fetch them. You never know what might make the difference.” He picked up his thermos and inhaled, savoring the aroma, or perhaps clutching it for warmth. Then he put it to his lips, and drank more at a draught than I would have thought possible of a beverage so scalding hot. “So. Kill switch.”

“Yeah,” Charles set his coffee down and held his hands, palms first, to the interface.

“We’re almost there. Drill into the Sibilance series and then scroll down a bit…further, further…okay, you see that section there, where it’s picking up that call from the bots? Ref that out.” Charles gave a twist with one of his hands, like he was getting ready to throw a karate chop, and the block of text turned blue. “Good. That will keep the Tower from trying to repair the bugs once the switch gets thrown. Now we should be ready for the switch itself. Sneak back up to the Colavita area and…”

“The Colavita area?” Rauch couldn’t help but overhear, apparently. “What the hell’s it doing there?”

Miller ignored him, “…and step into that string there, where it goes into the recursion test. Good, good. Now drop it a couple of lines…there you go, right after the collection command. Add one.”

Charles turned towards him, confused.

Miller nodded, “Yep,” he said, “it really is that simple. Just add one to the counter every time the recursivity check runs and you’ll drop this thing where it stands. The recursion will never prove out because we’re changing the count between collection and comparison, and the program will need to suggest bigger and bigger adjustments to correct itself. Within a few generations those bots will be so far out of true they won’t be worth the sand they’re printed from.”

Whoosh! Charles sent up the extra code. The surrounding lines reorganized themselves to make room for the argument, which settled neatly into the niche. “So why bother with all the work we did earlier?” he asked.

“Oh, just some fail-safes we had to disable. A kill switch should activate when we tell it to, not when it feels like it. Could you imagine a rogue mute tripping the switch in the middle of a run?” Charles shook his head no. Miller took another deep draught from his thermos. “I can. Seen it, actually. So I put in a couple of e-brakes.”

“Huh,” Charles shrugged. “The things you learn. Now what?”

“Nothing, really. Just need to drop it in the hopper and seed whoever we need to disinfect. But you don’t need me for that.”

Charles shook his head no, he didn’t, and Miller turned back towards Station Prime. The doors whooshed open as he did, and the girl walked in, shambling around the awkward bulk of a vessel held in her arms. Inside the cage were the same two rabbits from the Monday trials. One of them was healthy and well, and pattering about amongst its batting exactly as it had been then. The other was…not.

Rauch paled when he saw the second. “What…ah, what happened?” he choked.

“I don’t know,” said the girl. “She was like this when I found her. I haven’t checked the replays yet, but I have to believe it’s the same thing we saw on Sunday. Look, there’s a crust of blood still on her chin…and more here, between her toes. She must have just snapped.”

A pall descended. Eyes flicked nervously between Rauch and the dead rabbit. “Maybe we should set up a quarantine,” Britt suggested, joining the girl at the cage. He put a finger on the plastic, tracing along with her commentary. “Just in case.”

“It isn’t airborne, dipshit.” Rauch spat. “It’s not going to hurt anyone.”

“You mean it wasn’t airborne when we coded it. What if it grew wings?”

“It didn’t.”

“But what if it did?”

“I’m telling you it DIDN’T! It…it can’t!”

“It’s doing a lot of things we didn’t think it could,” Charles said, still swiping away at the kill-switch code. He had a faraway look on his face, and he spoke to no one in particular. “What if it–”

“Rauch is right,” Miller cut him off. “The strain we use – it won’t inoculate unless it’s activated by the tower. It’s coded into the mech half, at the very basest levels. I was on the team that coded it.”

Rauch shot Charles a spiteful, ‘I-told-you-so’ glance. Charles’s eyes never left his interface.

“But…” Miller focused on the rabbits as he crept the conversation forward, “we still find ourselves one mind short of being able to re-create the EKG setup like we talked about. This may sound a little crazy, but…what if we used Rauch?”