And that’s exactly what they did. The next hour of playback showed them poring through the guts of it, debating, agreeing, second-guessing, and debating again what certain lines meant or didn’t mean, discussing the toggle the girl had found and pointing it to the calls they thought they needed, and checking to see what all their tweaks were doing to the helix on the other screen. That was their fail-safe, the girl had reasoned. The two codes were so dependent on each other, sharing such a perfect yin -yang balance, with such intricate handoffs from one to the other, that they couldn’t do something they weren’t supposed to, and still have it do anything. That any misstep or improvisation would have to leave a gap, or an overlap, or a connection that would somehow clash, and the whole of it would be a dud. It would either do what they wanted or nothing at all.

But I skimmed through most of that. It meant nothing to Banks and Bergman. Hell, it barely meant anything to me, the first time I saw it, and I was the one that sent the damn thing down there. I slowed it only here and there, in places where they’d had a breakthrough, so I could see once more the path of their progress, and compare it to the work I’d done. And, in so doing, feel a little better about the gambit I had just queued up.

It wasn’t until they were ready to inoculate that I let it properly resume.

“…looks like she’s doing just fine,” Amy said, nodding towards one of the observation chambers. A doe sniffed about inside…the same doe from Monday’s trials, I noticed. A clump of dried, blackened blood still clung to the end of one of her whiskers, dangling like a wizened fruit. The girl had inoculated her a few minutes ago. She looked to be as beady and as spry as ever as she stuck her nose into this corner or that, searching for God knew what in the antiseptic emptiness of the chamber. And her images seem to have slowed. “I think we got it right.”

Miller, crouched beside her in front of the chamber, used the side of the console to climb to his feet, and slowly paced away.

“Well, tell me we didn’t!” Amy demanded. Her fairy showed her indignation via a series of things that could have gone wrong so far. None of which, obviously, had.

Miller sighed. “It isn’t that,” he said, his back to her. “Everything seems fine. But this thing is so unfamiliar. How do we know what fine looks like?”

“If it were broken, we’d know it was broken. You saw how sensy this thing was. Every time we torqued the toggle, even just a little bit, even when we didn’t mean to, it threw the whole thing out of true. It’s doing what it’s supposed to.”

“But on a rabbit. Not a man.”

“On the hybrids,” she corrected him. “I told you, it can’t infect living tissue. Of coneys, of gerbils, of mice or of men, it makes no difference to them.”

Miller reached the end of his path. He paused for a moment, hands behind his back, then turned to face her. “We’d never do it,” he said, pacing back towards the chamber. “If this were any other hybrid, in any other situation, we would never go that far. Not this soon.”

Amy dropped her eyes, and a little of the energy went out of her posture. Her fairy phased out entirely for a moment, then coalesced in an array of scenes from times where she’d been wrong before. One was her right after her performance as Glenda in her drama club’s rendition of the Wizard of Oz, when she thought she might have found her calling as an actress. One was after she’d put in for that condo on Oak, and sublet her apartment a week before she got denied. Three of them were men she’d dated, one from high school and two from her senior year of college, that she’d been sure were the love of her life. The last she’d caught in bed with one of her girlfriends less than a month after they’d gone exclusive. One was Miller, and how she’d thought of him as nothing but a hapless goof the first few days they’d known each other. “I know,” she said softly. “I’m just so sick of these goddam screens!” She waved at hers as she would a bee, trying to shoo it away without risk of being stung. Her hand passed through its center, degaussing it in a spastic ripple. “They don’t let you get away with anything! The things they’ve forced me to admit…the things I used to tell myself, that I’d have sworn I truly believed…” She sunk deeper into herself and cast a nervous glance at her fairy. Three scenes had emerged from the soup of the degaussing…one of a girl dressed in white, waited on by winged spirits as she passed through alabaster halls, one of a girl beset by fire, wailing in anguish as it engulfed her, and one, foremost of the three, of an old woman on her deathbed, surrounded by two, maybe three generations of descendants wearing facades of loss and of love, the woman breathing shallow, ragged breaths as she was absorbed by a dark, empty, inexorable void. “I just…” she dragged her eyes up off the floor (God, they were pretty, looking up at him like that!) but her body remained hunched and closed. “I just need to know they can be beat.”

Miller reached her with his ponderous stride. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Alright,” he said, and held out his other arm, holding it with his wrist to the ceiling. “Hit me.”

And then it was done.

She put up a perfunctory fuss over letting Miller be the subject, but there was never any doubt. She prepped a sample in one of the larger chambers, Miller cycled through the airlock, and, under Amy’s watchful eye, one of the surgical arms injected it into his bicep.

“How do you feel?” she asked when it was over. She had to mouth the words through the glass; the intercom had been collateral damage when they’d sizzled the rest of the communications systems.

Miller flexed his arm, and opened and closed the hand affected. “Tired,” he mouthed, without much emotion, “…but good.” He turned his hand over, inspecting it from all angles. “So,” he asked. “What now?”

She tapped a couple panels on the interface, which bedded down the robot arm. Its motors whirred their mechanical whir as it first ejected the syringe it had used to inoculate Miller, then folded itself back into its recess, where it waited, patient, for the next time it was needed. “Right now? Rest. Later?” The top layers of her fairy teemed with images of bravado and strength, but underneath her worry showed. “I…I guess we’ll just wait and see.”

The playback ended there. It let the last of Amelia’s words dangle in a pregnant pause, then cut to a replay of Miller’s death throes, as if to quash any optimism they might have instilled. We watched as he coughed his fountain of blood, and as the vines strangled the side of his face once again. The pop of his eyeball still made me cringe. I’d forgotten how loud it had been.