The group stared at the prostrate form of the Butcher on the stickscreen. They had detached the display from the wall and brought it with them to the room in which they now sat, the same room the Programmer had first shown them to. Nervous energy filled the air.

“So what do we do now?” said Andreas, swinging his chair from side to side.

There was no immediate response; everyone needed time to think.

“It hasn’t moved in almost thirty minutes. Perhaps…”

Anisa cut the Programmer’s word off.

“Don’t believe it for a second,” she said. “We’ve seen the Butcher do this twice now. The instant we open that door it will…”

“But the pull it experienced was over a thousand teslas! It’s amazing that it’s still intact!”

“I said,” growled Anisa, fixing the Programmer with a glare. “…don’t… believe… it.”

“I’m going to talk to it.”

That stopped the room. Everyone looked at Keri, not quite able to believe what they had just heard.

“What did you just say?” said Anisa.

“I’m going to talk to it,” Keri repeated. “Somebody needs to. We need to know why it keeps hunting us. Hunting the sphere. Unless you think we should just keep hitting it with a magnetic field in the hopes that we can eventually kill it.”

There was an uncomfortable silence at the word kill. Despite what they had been through, no one seemed quite ready to face the fact that this may be what it came down to.

“You think you’re going to talk to it,” said Cassandra flatly. “You think it will talk to you?”

“Maybe. It… It already has. I mean… it messaged me,” She raised her voice over the shocked outbursts of her companions. “In the Ink-Man station, as we ran. It asked me who I was. Who we were. A simple message, that’s all. I didn’t reply.”

“Yet another thing you failed to tell us,” said Anisa.

“I’m telling you now, aren’t I? Look, I didn’t know if it was worth mentioning. If it would cause anything but problems for us. And now that I’ve told you, you can see why I should try to speak with it.”

“You’ll have to go in there,” said the Programmer abruptly.

“What? Why? I’ll use my corps to…”

“The whole room is a magnetically shielded: it’s an MFC itself. Nothing gets in or out of there whilst the doors are sealed.”

“Nothing? Surely there's some kind of communication hub or something?”

The Programmer laughed.

“If there was, it'd be fried the first time we turned the field propagator on. The magnetic fields produced in there destroy any exposed electronics in seconds.” He shook his head. “No, the only way you can talk the Butcher is by going in there, so it's time to start thinking up another plan because…”

“But the camera works, doesn’t it?”

The Programmer nodded.

“Shielded,” he said.

“Then you can keep watch from in here,” Keri interrupted. “If it looks like the Butcher’s going to try anything, turn the magnet back on. It won't hurt me, right?”

“Well, probably not, and certainly nothing permanent,” the Programmer replied. “Except for your corps. That would probably be rendered useless.”

He chuckled.

“Ha, that would be following Terminal regulations anyway. No corps allowed anywhere on site: the biggest danger of all where Kai’s concerned. Imagine if he got into one of those.”

“No corps at all?” said Anisa in surprise.

“None. One of the first things they do before we come here is remove them,” replied the Programmer, turning his arm over to reveal the straight, clean surgical scars that were the record of such a removal. He sounded almost proud.

“Then how do you use the hardpoints?”

“We don’t. They’ve been useless since the measure was introduced. No corps: no sphere-time.”

Andreas whistled.

“So the AI is being designed by a bunch of analogues?” said Cassandra, with a shake of her head.

The Programmer frowned.

“I will be having my corps put straight back in once Kai is ready to go. It is a security measure, nothing more. And we’re not designing it; even with all of us here, that would be a fool’s errand. We’re checking it, going over each data cluster gigabyte by painstaking gigabyte. Any changes we request have to be fed back into machines that can communicate with the machines that can communicate with the machines that actually do design the thing,” he said.

“So I’ll be safe,” said Keri, pushing herself back into the conversation.

Everyone looked at her.

“You’re sure about this?” asked Andreas.

“It’s insane, if you ask me,” said Anisa, shaking her head.

Keri turned to face her.

“I’ll be fine. We need some answers.”

There was a moment’s silence, a void that no one knew how to fill.

“Fine. I’ll set it up,” said the Programmer, standing and striding off towards the observation room.