"What did the octopus mean?" Koen asked his hands. "That I'm the key to Mr. Grumbles? Does she know? How?"

"Stop asking me that," Laura snapped. She had liked him better last night, when he was in command of the diners' experience and wasn't so neurotic. "I don't know. And it isn't important. What's important is what Graa thinks."

"Right. Right." Koen straightened and resumed following Laura down the hall.

They had a morning of grace. Graa had let them both come home and Mr. Grumbles was still asleep. They had a chance to attack the question of what Graa thought. That was why they were bearding the programmer in her server room.

"Hey, Nelly?"

Nelly wobbled on her yoga ball, her laptop nestled in its forest of photographs, collectible toys, stuffed animals, potted cacti, and the most cliché souvenirs possible from each of the human Earth's major cities.

"Yes. You two have a question for me."

"Why can't we translate body language?" Koen asked.

Nelly was surprised. She'd thought they'd wanted to ask about Mark and Severo and the sleeping pills mixed with whipped cream. She hadn't been sure about the right thing to do. Maybe they already knew, and none of this was her responsibility. That would be nice.

"Body language?" she said. "That's impossible. The whole point of body language is that it's nonverbal. The translator bug can't smile for you."

"No, I mean like laughter."

Nelly made an effort not to sigh. "Well, laughter isn't body language."

"Fine," said Koen.

Nelly frowned and drew back from him, which made her overbalance on her ball, which embarrassed her. She covered for that by frowning harder. "Don't get mad at me, I'm just telling you what's possible, and this is not possible."

"I'm not mad," said Koen. "I'm annoyed that you aren't focusing on what I'm saying, you're focusing on the precise words I'm using to say it."

Laura put a hand on Koen's forearm and he blushed. "We were thinking of something like translating laughter."

Nelly crossed her arms, still focused on Koen and his challenge to her. "I deal with words. The computer deals with words. If you want me to do something, use the right words. I can't make the translator bugs use body language."

"That's not what I want." Koen took a deep breath, trying to figure out exactly what it was that he wanted. He put out his hands as if separating dough. "General Graa makes this growling noise sometimes, you know? I thought it was because he was angry, but that doesn't match what he's saying."

Nelly was rolling her head around on her shoulders. She believed that she was listening, but was actually worrying about the health of her spine. Were those popping sounds normal? This yoga ball made her look like an idiot, and it wasn't even helping her back.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Laura detected the need to focus the programmer's attention. "So what we want is a new set of translations. Sounds into words. 'Grr' means 'I'm happy' and 'kek kek' means 'I'm frustrated,' and so on."

"Isn't that already how Graa talks?" asked Nelly. "He's always saying 'I'm mad because you're so stupid,' and things like that."

"I think that's a communication strategy," said Koen. "Maybe Graa thinks I don't understand him well enough, so he's spelling out his emotions for me."

"Like you just did," Nelly pointed out. "'I'm annoyed because you're being pedantic."

Koen blushed. "I didn't say 'pedantic.'"

"It worked, didn't it?" said Laura, which made Nelly swallow the sarcastic comment she had been about to make and engage her problem-solving skills.

"New entries for paralanguage?" She rocked on her ball. "Vocal segregates should be easy—you can just give me a list for ravens. But how do we know your list is accurate? And what about other vocalics? And if we want to do a thorough job, we should include kinesics too. The visual sensors of the translator bugs are more than capable…Heat output and pulse? You could build a lie detector!"

"We don't want a lie detector. We want to understand General Graa as well as we understand each other," said Laura, who had noticed Koen's hapless expression.

"Yeah. Yes!" Nelly nodded to himself, bouncing. "We could do it. We could do it. I'd need a couple of years and a staff of experts."

"Years."

"You'd need to be trained to make sense of the output, too…wait. Hold on a second." Nelly bounced around on her ball until she was facing her computer. Yes, this thing would have to go. Her chair would have swiveled much more badass-ly.

Nelly pressed an icon on its screen, and tapped four keys. "Uh huh," she said, "yeah, we can already do it."

"What?" said Koen, over the toll of "Years! Years!" echoing in his head. "What can you do?"

"What do you mean what? What have we been talking about?"

"Body language?"

"No! We can't produce body language, only record it. I told you. Rendering multispecies nonverbal communication as part of the translation is easy," said Nelly. She had been glad enough to help, but now the problem had turned out to be boring. "Just it's an option that comes with the interface for the translator bugs. It's toggled on."

"You could do it all along?" Laura demanded. "Translate nonverbal communication?"

"No, I did nothing. It's toggled on already. Somebody else must have done it, since the default is 'off.'"

"Graa," said Laura. "Or someone else at the Pick embassy. Why would he do that?"

"He wanted to be sure that other people understood his emotional state," said Koen.

"But why didn't we know? Why wasn't there a notification or something?" asked Laura, as if it was the translators' job to notify their users of every little thing.

Nelly shrugged aggressively.

Laura waved away her own question. "What matters is that we can't understand Graa any better than we do already."

"Although maybe we can use this option for other species," said Koen.

Nelly had been expecting a little more gratitude, if not an apology for disappointing her. She'd been looking forward to spending a few years digging into the problem of boundary between 'conscious' and 'unconscious' communication. When a human said "Huh?" was that an intentional utterance like "I'm curious"? Obviously not. Mr. Grumbles said "huh." What about the sound of swallowing past a dry throat? "I'm scared?" Neurons firing in the amygdala? And how to decided what to translate and what not to? At what point of complexity did a translation system become sapient? At what point did it become telepathic?

Maybe Nelly could still dig into those questions. Although there were probably laws against most the experiments she could come up with.