Rauch was speechless for a moment, clearly not understanding what Miller meant. Then he followed their collective gaze, and he saw what they were seeing. He jerked. It swiveled with him as he turned, staying above and behind his head, at the corner of his field of vision, which caused him to jerk again, and again, like he had an itch he couldn’t scratch. It settled after a few gyrations, and fell back in its original position, allowing Rauch to see it along with all the others. He was speechless once again. They all were.

The holo, however, was not.

‘I can’t believe the syntax took…it sent itself up in such a jumble, almost like it sent at random…how the hell could that have worked?’

‘…can’t wait to show HQ. I wonder how they’ll react. They’ll have to give me something. A promotion, or a task force of my own…’

‘…all because I bucked the system, and did what I thought was right, instead of listening to these dinosaurs…”

The text flitted across the holo over background images of rabbits, syntax, life outside the bunker, and eventually an image of Rauch driving a red Ferrari with a leggy blonde in the passenger’s seat, smiling and laughing on a drive down some sun-drenched coastal highway, ocean breezes rifling their hair.

‘But…how?” Rauch whispered. He waved a hand at a corner of the display. It warped where he touched it, twisting into a wormhole vortex leading only God knew where. He wiggled his fingers through the pane and it degaussed in oily mottles. He held still for a moment and the mottling subsided, save a tremor every second or so as blood pulsed through his arteries. He drug his fingers through the scene, leaving trails like stardust in their wakes. “I’m not logged in to any interface, and even if I was, there isn’t any holo gear. How is it projecting like that?”

“There’s gear,” Charles murmured. He had turned back to his station and was once again studying the readouts.

“Huh?” Rauch reclaimed his hand and turned it over on its wrist, studying it from all angles, as if it might have changed somehow. “Where? We didn’t build any in this room.” He flexed his fingers and made a fist, and rocked it back and forth. He seemed satisfied that everything still worked the way it was supposed to. “In fact, we didn’t build any anywhere in the bunker, other than the floor model in the conference room. And this is well outside its range.”

“We didn’t have to build it,” Charles swiped away at the display. It homed in on another monitor, this one a spidery-looking matrix with a pentagram shape that stretched and quivered around its center, it’s angles shaking ever so slightly, and its colors drifting this way and that, as the inputs that were feeding it changed. A stasis monitor Britt was fond of, used to teep on five key attributes of a sample, and see how well they harmonized. Its motions vaguely resembled an engine on the verge of overheating. “It’s in the bots.”

“In…the…bots…” Rauch stilled and cocked his head, giving Charles a chance to reconsider.

Charles declined.

“In the bots!” Rauch said again. “The holo gear…the projection equipment that’s generating this, uh, whatever it is, full of text and images, that somehow, some way looks for all the world like it’s reading my mind, and throwing out whatever it sees in a baseless display that’s crisp and clear as Lalique crystal, that appeared out of nowhere sometime in the past few minutes…you’re telling me it’s in the bots? The fifty micron shells of tungsten and silica barely big enough to hold a transmitter and a half a strand of RNA? Those bots?” His eyes darted towards Charles, then back to the holo. He was silent for a long moment. “You want to try that one again?”

“Well, why not?” Charles questioned back. “They are programmed to transmit, and you said yourself they’ve been evolving. Who’s to say they didn’t develop the ability to shorten their wavelength and express themselves as visible light?”

“Come on man! This isn’t a few pulses of RBG we’re talking about here. This is full planar rendering! The drag alone is exponentially greater than anything a bot could handle, to say nothing of the data load a proj like this demands. There’s no way they could have gained that kind of bandwidth.”

Charles gulped a mouthful of air. He considered his coffee for half a second, but left it steaming on the desk. “They could if they worked together,” he said. “You’d be amazed what a quarter trillion shells of RNA can do, when they work in perfect unison.”

“You’re talking Star Trek shit, old man. That many bots could never all synch up like that. Hell, based on what we’ve seen so far, even getting two of them to talk to each other is more than I’m ready to believe.”

“But you have no problem believing they can read your thoughts?”

“That’s different,” Rauch said. “The Tower was in play.”

“It was still pretty incredible. Tower or not Tower.”

“But…there wasn’t any other explanation then. I could see it when that happened. I could feel it. It was…”

“Yours?”

Rauch grew suddenly rigid. He edged away from the group, and hunched down into himself, folding his arms across his abdomen. “They weren’t coded to collaborate,” he said quietly. But he was losing ground again, making arguments that would be countered easily, in ways he could already see. And, from the trapped and helpless images on his holo, they all knew he knew.

“They’re coding themselves at this point, Rauch. They’re self-selecting, and engineering the population towards whatever traits the tower tells them are necessary to achieve their goal.”

“Um…Remind me what that is again?” Miller interjected. He leaned back, gingerly, against the station he and Charles had been working on, as if the thing were full of nettles that might poke him if he sat too fast. It sighed audibly as it settled on its joints. “And, if it’s not too much trouble, explain how all…this” he gestured at the floating holo, still not quite sure how to put words to the phenomenon, “is supposed to help it get there?”

“Well,” Charles said, “I haven’t figured all that out, exactly…the code isn’t done evolving, so it’s that much harder to figure out what does what…” his head peeked at the holo, where even as he spoke a handful of arguments disappeared, only to rewrite themselves a second later. “But gun to my head…I’d say it started when Rauch was spelling Miller at the coding station. I’m thinking that by then they had probably been in Rauch’s system long enough to start picking up his body’s vitals: his electromagnetic field, the salinity of his blood, and, most germane to this discussion, impulses in his brain, and had already taught themselves to interpret those impulses in their familiar ones and zeros. They could sense that Rauch had some ideas kicking around in his subconscious that might help them speed their development, but his conscious mind refused to act, effectively creating a barrier between the bots and the code. So they bypassed it. They mapped out his bio-signature, hooked into the interface, and wrote the code themselves. And did one heck of a job of it, if you don’t mind me saying.” Rauch jarred. The holo swirled with reds and maroons at the perceived insult, but that was the extent of his reaction. Charles marveled for a moment, appreciating it for the sheer novelty of the phenomenon, then continued. “But that obviously didn’t last long. Rauch un-hooked almost immediately, severing their link to the tower and all the code it contained, and also killing an effective way of expressing his subconscious. We made it pretty clear nobody was going to hook back in anytime soon, so they had to find another way. I’m not sure I can explain why, but I think this was the result.”