“Very interesting” Miller sighed. “But there are bits I can’t quite follow. Like how they’d know to use images and text instead of pure, meaningless binary? And what good does it do the bots to show us what Rauch is thinking anyways?”

“None,” Rauch spat bitterly. “No good at all. Not anymore, at least. It’s just along for the ride.” He watched the holo as he spoke, checking to see if the sentiment would show. It didn’t. Not in any recognizable way, anyways.

Charles’ eyes widened as realization dawned. “Riiiiiiight…” He turned his back and pulled up another block of code on his interface. A big one this time; he had to zoom in twice before any of the text was legible. “The first question is easy. They needed to communicate to be effective…with themselves, with the Tower, and now, apparently, with us. And any being, real or imagined, natural or artificial, has to know that communication needs to be a two-step process to be effective. They’d have run some guess-and-checks to make sure they were being understood. The second, though…that was bothering me too. But Rauch may have led me to it…” he swiped fiercely at the interface, parsing several of the lines at once, and nodded as he read them through. “Mmmm-hmmm…” he mumbled. “We see this all the time in hardware. It’s a goddam vestigial tail!” He gestured triumphantly towards the screen, as if the answer should be plain. By the looks on everyone else’s face, it was not. “Look at the similarities between these two sequences,” he explained. “One of them evaluates their development as a species, and one controls their signal projection. Look how they use the same syntax, and leverage similar sets of calls. At one point, I think…” he traced through the new code frantically, trying to digest it before it phased out or disappeared, “yeah! At one point they actually coincided, sharing lines like trains on a track!” All at once he remembered his coffee, cooled to the point that it steamed no more, and took the sip he’d considered earlier. It seemed to calm him down a bit. “The ability to express subconscious thought developed as a means to access the Tower’s code. That ability might not be needed any more, but the sequence that controlled it was the same one that facilitated that connection. When we forced them to do it without the interface, they found a way to work together, and do all of it without the interface.”

“So you’re telling us…”

“Like pixels on a TV screen. Each one emits an impulse or two in the needed wavelength, for just the right amount of time, to fill their part of the holo, and all of them working together convey whatever message they’re receiving.” He panned through pages of code as he spoke…code that wrote and re-wrote itself even as he tried to read. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“But who’s doing the sending?” asked the girl. “And how are they coordinating?”

Charles simply looked towards the Tower in response. The rest of the gathering followed his gaze. “I have to assume, anyways,” Charles said, gesturing towards the code on his screen. “This stuff is changing so fast I can’t make heads or tails of it any more. But it’s what we told it to do.”

Silence fell over the gathering as they tried to think of something else to say. Miller came up with something first. “Wait,” he said, “a minute ago, when you were talking about the bots’ evolution…you said ‘nobody was going to hook back in.’ Didn’t you just mean Rauch?”

“Nnnnnooooooo…” Rauch said. “I meant nobody." He spoke in an evasive tone, as if unsure how much he wanted to reveal. He braced himself for the follow-ups he seemed to know were coming.

“But Rauch is the one they’ve infected,” Miller obliged. “He’s the one they all evolved with, the one they communicated through to access the Tower. He’s the one that would have had to hook back in.”

Charles fidgeted and stared at his coffee again. The steam that had been wafting from the lid had ceased sometime in the past few minutes. “Well,” he said, “that’s not exactly true…”

Miller’s brow furrowed. His head swiveled from Charles to Rauch, then slowly back to Charles. He held a finger halfway in the air. “You mean…”

Charles nodded.

Miller exhaled. His already slumped shoulders sagged that much lower. “All of us?”

Charles nodded again. “Afraid so.”

Another silence, this one more gravid than the last. One by one heads turned in Rauch’s direction, their eyes beady with accusation and fear. Rauch’s dipped, almost imperceptibly, and as he settled that much further into his hunch. His eyes narrowed to slits. They focused on Charles, and Charles alone, daring him to say what everyone already knew he was thinking. The whorls on his holo darkened to indigos and violets. They appeared to want to resolve into shapes, but couldn’t manage more than blobs.

“It seems to help, if that’s any consolation,” Charles offered, speaking in that same uncertain tone. As if he would have said anything to break the tension. “Having more than one population, I mean. They seem to feed off each other, to bounce things back and forth, and it seems to help with their development. And there are other impacts too. I think Rauch’s little friend there is actually a two-part process. It’s hard to say for sure,” he gestured towards his display again, at the ever-changing panels of code, “but I think there is a sending and a receiving aspect to it. I don’t think we’d be able to see it if we weren’t, ah, inoculated.”

Miller seemed to struggle with that one. He stared into his therm of coffee, and set his forehead on his fist, as he sometimes did when he was thinking. “How now?” he asked.

“It’s not that complicated. No different than any other form of communication, really. Every transmission needs a sender and a receiver. If the sender sends in visible light or sonic wavelengths then our eyes or ears can be the receivers, but…” he glanced back at the code, which was still ghost-writing itself in and out of existence line by line, “I don’t think that’s what this is.”

“You mean the bots are doing both?” the girl asked. “The sending and the receiving? Like the ones inside of him are interpreting his neural impulses, converting them to some kind of transmittable language, and sending them over to the ones in us, where they get converted back to neural impulses, or some other signal that we interpret as…as that?” She shuddered as she spoke, and slid closer to Miller, until the two were almost touching. Her hand twitched, as if it want to find his, but steadied, and lay dormant at her side. “But why?” she asked. “Why bother with the image of a holoscreen like that? Why not just…give us the message, if it’s that deep inside of us?”

Charles shrugged. “Why not? It’s as good a way as any.”

“But it’s so complicated! Why not just tell us in words, using voice, or with direct submission?”

“Who knows? These are random mutations, don’t forget. Maybe it held on to the vestiges of the original successes, when Rauch was feeding the interface. Maybe they decided they needed us to be able to tell the difference between their transmissions and reality in order to accomplish their goal. Maybe I’m way off the mark and it’s plain old RGB light after all, from a source we can’t yet see. We’d have to study it to know for sure.”

Their chatter settled for a moment, unsure where to go from there. Rauch smoldered in his chair, the roils on his holo slowing only slightly. Charles chased down his latest line of thinking, deciding what type of testing would be most beneficial. The girl was all concern for Miller, glancing sideways at him and fidgeting, but still not reaching out…yet. Britt was tensing by the second, struggling with the pressure of having to make a decision without understanding the situation. Only Miller remained stoic, in his almost trancelike state, unconcerned with anything the other four might have been thinking.

“Kill it,” he whispered.