Miller paused, then stutter-stepped, glancing back and forth between Charles and Rauch. He made an off-balance about-face and leaned over Charles’s station as they both began to study the holo. Britt and the girl also gathered around.

“It’s…incredible” Charles breathed. The whirr of cooling systems suddenly dominated as four sets of pupils mosquitoed over parts of the screen. The three that were standing craned their necks, trying to get a better look. Their faces glowed a ghostly blue in its ambience. “It’s all so far beyond anything we designed. The things it’s coding into itself, the speed at which it’s learning, it’s just…incredible!”

“Not learning,” Rauch said flatly, stirring as he spoke. “Evolving.” He made his way over to the secondary station, moving in an awkward sidelong fashion, as if afraid to admit that was really where he wanted to go. He didn’t join them at in the huddle – not quite – but settled a few feet short of the cluster, just out of arm’s reach, and squinted at the screen.

“But…that’s impossible!” Charles argued. “Look at this rate of change in the Epsilon coefficient. Look at those r-scores! You could string them out and barely miss a pip.” He reached for his thermos and brought it to his lips. “Nothing can evolve that smoothly,” he said, eyes tracing the tendrils of steam that wafted from the opening. He sipped. “Or that fast.”

Rauch merely nodded, in the general direction of the console. “Bring up the life cycle. You’ll see what I mean.”

Charles set his thermos down and swiped a couple of the coded interfaces. An array of reports tiled itself out before him, representing every measure and every indicator every hack that had ever dabbled in the field of cybernetics had once thought might be useful, from charts that plotted their lethality to anatomically correct drawings of the human body, with phasing highlights indicating which parts could be infected. There was even one that tracked the taste the things might have if dissolved in liquid…whether it would lend a flavor that was sweet, salty, bitter, or sour, or some combination of the four. He pulled up the regression analysis Rauch had mentioned, which showed the average lifespan of each generation, plotted over time. It peaked and valleyed as schizophrenically as the EKG readings from a few days before. “Why would it…” he shot Rauch a questioning look.

“Because it can,” Rauch said. “The code I sent up earlier today…the lines that seemed to write themselves while I was keyed into the interface…I never told you what they were for, did I?” His eyes, widened to the whites, darted back and forth among the lot of them, to make it clear the question was for all. They answered without saying a word. “Their purpose was to manage change…to accelerate the rate of change, to be exact. I didn’t think it took at first, what with that awkward syntax and all, but…” he trailed off for a couple of seconds, lost in his own sense wonder at what he was seeing. The others seemed surprised to hear him speak. No…surprised, for sure, but not by Rauch, or the words he was saying. It was something else that had them fixed. “Just before it happened I was...thinking, you know? About how much time we were wasting trying to force the tower to write targeted code. And so I asked myself, why bother? Why kill ourselves trying to figure out exactly which code would fit in here, or what kind of structure is going to work best there, when we could just let it randomize and cull the ones that don’t work out? You know, monkeys at typewriters and all that jazz. And then I thought, ‘we could vary the bots’ life cycle based on the success rate it was observing for whatever characteristics it was trying to breed. When the success rate is high, we’d want to lengthen their reproductive cycle to give our selection process – whether natural or artificial – more time to make them stick. When low, shorten it to speed the cull, and find that next mutation faster.’ In this way it can manage the shape and rate of change in the population as a whole, instead of having to guess and check with every line it wants to try.” He flashed them a smile, sheepish at first, then more and more toothsome as he realized the gravity of his accomplishment. “It’s got these bots completely under its control,” he grinned. “As far as they’re concerned, the tower…is God.”

“Rauch,” Miller breathed as he stood amongst the other three, each of their eyes still transfixed by the space above and behind Rauch’s head. By the sourceless pane of pulsing blue, roiling with text and ghosts of scenes, that hovered there. “We know.”