By this point Miller had given up on the controls and was staring at the screens with the rest of them.  But, while the others gawked at the overlays and video feed on the left-hand screen, he alone seemed to notice something on the right.  He approached it at a measured pace.

“Let’s take away the pellets,” Britt called out to no one in particular.  He didn’t take his eyes off the screen.  “I want to see how it reacts.”  There was a small scramble as Rauch, Charles, and the girl all moved at once.  Miller reached the right-hand screen and stared, transfixed.  By what, it was impossible to tell.

Rauch reached the controls and pecked a few of them in order.  Coney number one swiveled its head towards the pellets as they disappeared into the load cell on the other side of the cage’s wall.  The suite of images condensed and shifted.  The one of the pellets being whisked away sharpened, while the one of her resting phased in, then out again.  The three of her nibbling at the bowl condensed back into one, then transformed into the one of her pawing at the holding bay, which subsequently blurred and then faded into nothing.  The one of her pawing wavered, like the air above a car’s exhaust, then it disappeared as well.  The one of her emaciated and lying in the corner sharpened and slid to the front of the queue.

“She’s extrapolating.  She’s wondering when her next meal will be, if it will come before she starves.  Fascinating…let’s try another test.  Hit her with a shot of mist.”  Jets sprayed from a distributor set in the ceiling.  She tried to cower in her corner, but their coverage was absolute.  Droplets beaded on her whiskers.  Her ears twitched with the extra weight.  The fur on her chin formed stringy clumps as moisture dribbled down her face.  The look in her eyes was misery defined.

Britt and the others gawked at the overlays, which showed her dealing with this new assault in a variety of ways.  One had her trudging towards the opposite corner, which she knew from experience was the last to gather puddles when the mist persisted.  One had her climbing up the side of the cage, scaling the walls with limbs spread-eagled like some kind of furry spider, and somehow blocking it to stop the distributor’s flow.  One had her waiting it out, hoping it would be short-lived.  One still had her nibbling at the vanished pellets, like that would make it all okay.

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“Incredible,” Miller breathed.

“I know,” echoed Charles, not understanding.  “It’s like we’re seeing into her soul.”

The girl slid away behind him.  She and Miller shared a moment, pointing at the other screen.  Even Rauch was thunderstruck, staring at the overlay while he dabbed at the controls.  Britt, ever the technician, offered the only response I would have believed.

“More.”

And so it went.  They turned up the heat.  They hit her with chill.  They cranked up the ventilation system and opened the airlocks, generating as much of a wind as the construct would allow.  They dimmed the lights to see if the overlays would function when the feed was dark, then hit her with beams, faint at first, then brighter and brighter, from a variety of angles.  They sulfured the air.  Each produced a sheaf of overlays.  Some of them were pretty random – the pulses of light, for example, djinned up images of her and her litter mates sucking at their mother’s teat, and the sulfur prompted thoughts of predators hungry for a meal.  But most were consistent with her suffering of the moment.  The pellets never left her mind.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt,” Britt concluded, a tense hour and a half later.  “We’re seeing her thoughts.  Those bots of yours are taking the pulses from her brain and passing them on to the tower, which is interpreting, filtering, and expressing them in pictures we can understand.  I have no idea how, or what part of the code we wrote is responsible, or why it forms the images it forms, or any of a million other things I’m probably missing altogether, but the evidence is undeniable.  It’s reading her mind.”  He turned back to the screen and scanned it, confused, a final time, fatigue plain on his face and in his posture.  For a long time nobody moved.

“Boss?”  It was Rauch who broke the silence.  Britt turned to see him holding up a bottle of something corked and foiled, which he had snuck off and collected during one of the tests.  The girl gestured with a rack of flutes that she had likewise smuggled in.  “With your permission?”