It took a few hours to make their way towards the grey dot, forced to push their way through ever thickening vegetation. Several times they had to take detours around wide streams or thick, tangled bushes full of thorns. The grey dot, thankfully, hardly moved.

“You're not scared?” Andreas asked at one point.

“Of course I am,” Keri replied. “He could tear us limb from limb.”

“Not of the Butcher. Of the… whoever it is that's using you to screw with it. Who do you think it is?”

“I wish I knew, and I don’t think it's about the Butcher either. It's about the AI. Someone or something wants me to have that sphere.”

“Something?”

Keri hesitated.

“Just a… just a thought.”

She knew Andreas could tell she was keeping something back, but she wasn't ready to speak her half-formed suspicions aloud. There were still too many gaps, too many unknowns.

The rain came back, thicker droplets but sparse, providing a cooling effect in the heat as they pushed their way through the vegetation. It was well after noon, and her stomach rumbled.

They never get hungry in the holos, she thought, trying to push it from her mind.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten anything besides cold vit-vat, and she stupidly hadn’t thought to bring even that along with her on this trip.

“Here,” said Andreas all of a sudden, thrusting a dry energy bar at her.

He smiled at her murmured thanks, drawing several more from his pocket to show he had them.

Keri wolfed the bar down as fast as she could, forced to turn her head to the sky in the hope that some of the rain would help wash it down. The gnawing in her stomach lessened.

Something of the hunger remained, though, and it was some time before Keri realised it wasn’t a physical hunger she was feeling. It was the hunger of an addict. It was an awful need.

She stopped, and watched as her fingers twitched involuntarily.

She was suffering withdrawal from the spheres.

“It’s powerful, isn’t it?” said Andreas, following her gaze.

Keri nodded slowly.

“It’s the reason the others gave it up,” Andreas continued, meeting her eyes. “Anisa always said it was wrong to allow a piece of tech to have such power over you.”

Keri looked from him to her twitching fingers, and to the map that hovered above her forearm. The blue marker was almost upon the grey. All that separated them was a small ridge, clear of trees.

“There’s no way he doesn’t know we’re coming.”

Andreas nodded.

“You can stay here if…”

“No,” Andreas replied. “I’m coming with you.”

She slung her jacket over her shoulder, and they climbed the final slope.

The Butcher was only a few tens of metres down the other side of the ridge, sat crouched upon its own legs in a way no base human could hold for long. It, or he, Keri still couldn’t decide, was staring up at the sky. The moon was visible in the bright blue above, a full circle with features unchanged since long before mankind learned to change itself with its own tools. The Butcher was watching it with silver eyes that seemed small reflections of that which they observed.

Keri wondered what it saw when it looked up there, through its multi-spectrum sensors and telescopic vision. Did it see what she saw? Or should she ask herself if she could see what it saw?

“Why did you come?” the Butcher asked.

It gave no other sign that it had registered their arrival. They walked down towards it.

“You know why,” said Keri.

The Butcher slowly raised a hand, holding the data sphere up where they could see it.

“This.”

“Yes.”

“It is not finished, you know.”

“No.”

The Butcher looked down at her, a flicker of surprise on its face.

“You know?” it asked.

Keri shrugged, trying to ignore Andreas’ questioning look.

“I had to scan it to be sure,” the Butcher continued. “But once I held it, it was obvious.”

“What was? What was obvious?” asked Andreas, looking from one to the other.

“That sphere isn't only a data sphere,” said Keri. “It’s a processing substrate in itself.”

The Butcher nodded.

“It continues to form itself even now,” it said. “Altering its own neural network, completing algorithmic justifications, diagnosing its own layers of code. It's learning, even before it is born.”

The Butcher looked down to the sphere in its hand.

“And it’s nearly ready.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Keri asked.

The Butcher looked at her with cold silver eyes. She could see herself in them.

"You know, when we first began altering our own bodies our senses were expanded, enhanced, but they saw only what was true. With this, you seek to create a world of sensation that is purely in the mind. There is no truth in that."

“You think you decide that?” she replied.

“I am starting to believe the decision is not in any of our hands.”

Keri nodded.

“So we take it back to the Terminal, and upload it.”

The Butcher did not move for a while, then slowly nodded in return.

“But before we go I have to know why,” said Keri. Her voice took on an edge. “Why did you murder Eu?”

There was a long pause.

“I did not,” said the Butcher eventually.

Keri raised a hand to cut off Andreas’ explosion of rage. She did not blink as she stared at the Butcher.

“She chose her path,” the Butcher said. It met her eye-for-unblinking-eye. “Open your corps to me.”

Keri flexed the tendons of her arm in the specific way that opened her corps to accepting the data the Butcher was already sending. It was a vid. She pushed it onto her corps display.

Andreas gasped as Eu’s face grew on the display. The imagery showed her in the Uplink room, standing beside the hardpoint with the data sphere in her hands. Extra-sensory information ran down both sides of the screen, numbers and figures detailing mass, velocity, temperature, and a thousand other details Keri didn’t recognise. It took a few seconds to realise they were seeing the world as the Butcher saw it, translated for base human.

“Give it to me,” came the Butcher’s voice from the vid.

Eu’s face smiled on the display. She moved the sphere to above the hardpoint as if to drop it into the port, and the camera viewpoint jerked closer.

“You will have to take it from me,” said Eu. “Take it from me, or I’ll upload it now and you’ll never be able to take your so-sought-for revenge.”

Nothing happened for a moment, then the image on the display blurred. Metallic arms shot out, grasping for the sphere that Eu was dropping into the hardpoint. Eu went spiraling off camera, smashed aside by the Butcher whose hands could be seen catching the sphere mere millimeters before it came into contact with the curved surface of the port.

The hands and the sphere they held rose and turned, framed directly in the center of the shot as the Butcher inspected his prize. The next instant the sphere dropped from sight, and the vid took in first the door out then the prostrate form lying on the floor nearby. With one final hesitant look, the Butcher ran for the exit.

“Son of a bitch,” snarled Andreas.

He drew from somewhere his antique pistol.

“Stop,” said Keri, raising a hand to subdue him.

“He killed her. We knew he did, but now it’s mocking us!”

Keri could see the anger overwhelming his self-control.

“Play it again, slowly,” she said to the Butcher.

The augmented man looked warily from her to Andreas, and the image on her corps skipped back to shortly before Eu released the sphere.

This time the image played in slow motion, dropped by a factor of ten or more. Keri watched the nearly frozen scene, Eu’s fingers ever so gradually parting, the sphere beginning its long fall into the bowl-shaped port awaiting it, the hands stretching out to catch it.

“There,” she said.

The image paused.

“What was that?” she said.

The Butcher nodded, whilst Andreas looked uncertainly from one to the other. The pistol in his hand wavered.

Again, the image flicked backwards, this time to a point where the sphere was already falling freely, the hands stretching out to catch it.

A flicker of something, a string of numbers flashing briefly across the right of the screen where Eu stood. Andreas saw it this time.

“That looked like a…” he began.

“A data dump,” the Butcher said.

Again, the image flicked backwards, and froze.

The hands were a short distance from the sphere, Eu taking up half the screen so close that only her face and upper torso were visible. The numbers hung in front of her, glowing white.

Readouts like this would be familiar to anyone who saw them. It was a standard volumetric measurement, the visual representation of a stream of information being sent from one data source to another. Anyone who used a corps knew them, thought they were rarely perceptible for more than an eye blink. They told users, quite simply, how much data was being sent and received.

The number on the screen in front of them was large. Extremely large.

“That’s over a petabyte of data in half a second,” said Andreas incredulously. “Through the air. Nothing can do that. It's a glitch, that's all.”

“There was no glitch,” replied the Butcher. “I have run multiple diagnostics. There is nothing wrong with my sensors.”

“But there's no way to broadcast that amount of data that fast. And even if there was, are you trying to tell us Eu was doing it somehow?”

“It was not your companion,” said the Butcher. “It was an active scan and copy. Your friend was read - like a book.”

“Where did it go? The scan, where was it broadcasting from?” asked Keri, raising her voice to override Andreas’ questions.

“Nowhere. At least, nowhere I could detect,” replied the Butcher. She could hear the resentment at having to say those words in his voice.

The image on the corps ticked forward frame by frame, so slow that the sphere had barely begun its fall.

“So a mysterious data dump into thin air milliseconds before you kill her? What is that supposed to show?”

“I did not hit your friend with enough force to end her life,” replied the Butcher. He met them eye for eye. “I was fully in control of my momentum and I was not going to injure her. I could have easily avoided a collision.”

“We saw you crash into her on the vid!” said Andreas.

“Because she was already dead. There was no reason to avoid a lump of meat and bone. However, let me admit here and now that I would have killed her without hesitation had she continued to work against me, so believe me when I say I did not.”

Keri and Andreas stared at the image as it progressed frame by frame, and at this speed they could see the slackness spreading through Eu’s features, eyelids slowly closing as her legs buckled and she fell in synchronicity with the falling data sphere. The Butcher had still not touched her.

“Your friend is dead, but it was not I that ended her life.”