Mark stood in the hallway, palm still tingling with the memory of his last can of energy drink.

He'd single-handedly pulled off the biggest interspecies cultural coup in the history of the United Nations and endured two hours of heckling from General Graa. A hero in a story would get to rest before the next dragon came along, but here Mark was, disturbing the system administrator.

He straightened his shirt and knocked on the frame of the open door to the server room. "Nelly, do you have a minute?"

"No," she said. "The automation I wrote to fix the missing registry errors under the new framework is introducing more bugs than it fixes."

"That must be frustrating," Mark said as he thought of ways to tie all that technobabble into Nelly's lever.

Nelly had been raised to make the world a better place. She'd used her job as a software engineer to make money to donate to worthy causes until she could retire from the private sector and move to the UN. From there, she had exercised obvious skill and determination to maneuver herself to the front of the line for Science Attaché on the mission to the Convention of Sophonts.

And then she'd stopped. Nelly ran the Embassy's computers splendidly, and juggling their mutually opposed surveillance systems would be a challenge for anyone. But that was all she seemed to do. The drive that Mark could see in Nelly's CV simply wasn't there any more. Was she coasting? Was she hiding scared? Was she using this post as a stepping stone to something greater?

"I'm sure there are more important things for you to be doing," he fished.

"More important things?" The Science Attaché looked around at Mark as if she couldn't believe how ridiculous he was being. "This is important. If I don't find a more efficient way to run the NMT, you will certainly notice."

Was that defensiveness Mark saw in the set of her shoulders? "Uh, NMT?"

"The translation system.1 You've put a lot of stress on it. You and Laura and Koen."

"Stress?" Mark asked carefully. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you're talking to all these nonhumans. And not just in restricted environments like summits and meetings. On the streets, in restaurants. People could say anything."

Nelly thumped her hands down, one on either side of the keyboard, and turned. "Isn't this why you're bothering me?"

Mark was bothering her because Laura was on her way back here with Mr. Grumbles, and there were security cameras in her suite of rooms. Laura still cared about not being caught, and Mark still needed her help. How many competing narratives could Mark juggle? At least one more.

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"Yes, exactly," he said. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Security. It's Laura's suite. There's a security problem there."

"You know I don't like that word, Mark."

"Sorry. A security issue."

Nelly got up, thinking that if she was going to be talking and not working, she might as well get her stretches in. Her smart watch buzzed approvingly and Mark averted his eyes. He preferred the athletic body type, but Nelly's back stretches activated certain instincts.

"I'm afraid she'll have to come to me herself," said Nelly. "Or better yet, go to Severo, who is the Security Attaché."

Mark kept his eyes on the leftward corner of the ceiling. He needed his brain working. "I just came from Severo's office." He shook off a memory of the look she'd given him. "And Laura. She's very busy." She might be getting off the bus right now, in fact. Focus, Mark. Get it done! "I thought I'd take on this job for her. Make her life easier."

"Her who? Laura or Severo? Never mind. I'm not listening in on your conversations, Mark. This isn't my job." Nelly waved a hand, dismissing the possibility that she eavesdropped on everyone merely as a hobby. "My issue is the amount of processing power I have to use to keep up with the translation."

Mark bought time. "I thought the bugs did all the translation."

"The bugs speak nonhuman languages, but we're the ones with the neural net trained on human languages. The bugs query the neural net whenever one of us talks to a nonhuman, more often when we're using a language with which the bugs don't have very much practice, like Dutch. Chinese and English are easier, but even so it's a significant issue for me to ensure there is sufficient processing power to satisfy the bugs."

What more questions could Mark ask? He was trawling now, passing his net back and forth, waiting to snag something he could use. "I thought the translators were like Google."

"No! What? No. Google and other naturalistic language translators use statistical rules they learn from enormous training samples to predict what word ought to come next in a string. The translator bugs…I don't know what they do exactly." She held up a hand and counted fingers off it. "I must first translate the elementary school primer to pass the test to get into a program that will teach me the basic principles I must understand to even ask the right questions."

And yet, she didn't. There it was; Mark had caught something. It wasn't in the details of Nelly's speech, which he supposed she'd repeated to herself many times. It was body language.

Nelly was a woman of firm convictions. When she spoke about poverty, or the proper way to do something with data, she spoke loudly, with sweeping movements of the hands, face flushed and eyes raised toward the unreachable perfection of the world that ought to be.

She'd been doing that all the way up until the word "question." Then, her personal space had shrunk way down. Hands folded under armpits, gaze down. She wasn't lying exactly, but she was protecting herself. She was protecting herself. What from?

"Is there anything wrong with the bugs?" he probed. "Are they giving bad translations?"

Nelly shrugged. "Of course the translations they give are better than anything we could do. The bugs have sensory packages that detect both sound and light way above and below human perception. Plus chemical cues, pulse rate, direction of gaze, plus some kind of electromagnetic induction thing like a super-charged micro-miniaturized portable MRI machine."

And she didn't even know the half of it!

1Neural Machine Translation. It's crude, but rather beautiful.