And still, it wasn’t enough.

I paged through to the next scene. It showed the three of them working at the secondary station, doubtless trying a series of kills. Britt and the girl looked much the same as they had the last time I had seen them, but Miller looked a little better. Brighter, more refreshed, absent that phased-out look he’d collected in the prior scenes, as he’d worked himself past his breaking point.

Except…

“Negative,” the girl reported. “They’re still evolving.” She gestured to a display that appeared to represent hours’ worth of data. Of very dynamic data.

Of course, I thought to myself. With the Tower offline, they were back to the slow way of introducing mods.

“Huh,” Miller said. He put a hand to his neck and rubbed the bandage that covered one side. Redness radiated underneath it, a web of tendrils branching out beside his veins, buttressing them from either side, like a highway hugs a coast. They squirmed as he massaged the area, and dodged his fingers beneath his skin. It looked infected.

I had a sickening thought: what if it wasn’t so benign? What if the Haggarty, innocent thought it may have been, evolved along with the bots and turned into something more malignant? Or what if the bots were less inert when they dealt with weakened flesh? What if there was more than just a little data transfer going on here? What if…

Swipe.

No. No use dwelling on it. If it was, it was. It wouldn’t make us want to neutralize it any more than we already did.

I skimmed through the rest of the scene. They lobbed a few more volleys at it, coming at it from different angles, trying different kinds of kills. Each had the same effect: Negative. Still evolving. Somehow, they were still supported. Still bouncing results off of something, and receiving feedback and mods to their code to sharpen the teeth of the next generation. It was almost as if the Tower was still online, in some form or another, like a ghost floating through the halls, wailing at the soulless either and touching the world whenever it could, through stains of weakness in the veil. I chided myself for being so maudlin, but then I had a jarring thought: what if that wasn’t too far off? What if the Tower, in all its wisdom, perceived itself to be a hindrance, and decided that the bots could adapt more efficiently if

“…if the Tower’s role in the process were de-centralized,” Miller explained, as Britt’s holo started its playback at the exact moment necessary to effect a seamless handoff of my half-completed thought. “All the back and forth between her and the bots, even over just a few meters’ distance, even at the speed of light, was starting to add up. It was slowing their development, impeding the progress we told her to seek. So she went ahead and dispersed herself…wrote herself into their code, bit by tiny fraction of a bit, into subsets of their populations, so she’d be that much closer to the samples she was managing. So they could talk to each other instead of talking back to her.”

“You mean she made a copy of herself?” Britt asked.

Miller nodded.

“Out there, among the bots?”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Miller only nodded again.

“Impossible,” Britt scoffed. “Something that sophisticated, something that powerful…if she had a month to work with, and raw materials, and a way to manufacture, maybe she could come up with something, but out of thin air, over the course of a couple days? No sale.”

“She did have raw materials, and a way to manufacture,” Miller said. And then, when both of them failed to respond, “think about it.”

“You mean…” Britt pointed to himself.

Miller nodded.

“Phew,” Britt leaned against the console. “But the tower,” he said, contemplating, “she’s made of silicon, copper, tungsten, and steel. Where did she find stuff like that?”

“Who says she did?”

“To make a copy of herself…”

“To make a copy of her functionality,” Miller interrupted. “One she did that, her self was superfluous.”

“Her functionality…” Britt mused.

“Processing and data storage,” Miller helped him along. “She had all kinds of bells and whistles, and firepower like we’ve never seen, but that’s essentially all she was. And you know as well as I do that silicon, copper, tungsten, and steel aren’t the only ways to make that happen.”

Britt shifted against the console. The finger he’d used to point to himself fell absently to his side. “And the manufacturing?” he asked.

“The shells,” Miller stated. “Once they get inside the host, once they juxtapose themselves with is cornucopia of life, they wake up from their dormant phase and serve as perfect little insulators, creating just the space they need to give the bots a running start. I can’t say how I know, but…” he glanced back over his shoulder, at the screen that hovered there, “…somehow, it just feels right.”

I smiled, miserably, and shook my head. A trillion scraps of RNA, I thought. You’d be amazed what they can do…

I kept skimming, noting as many of their tries as I could. I catalogued them mentally so we wouldn’t waste our time with dupes:

Tactic: countermeasures on the insertion sequence. Objective: disrupt host assimilation. Results…negative.

Tactic: De-randomization of the Mayhem protocol. Objective: eliminate the source of the bots’ mutation, and create a stable, stationary target to attack with further kills. Results…negative.

Tactic: Find-and-switch of an adenine molecule in the Capricorn helix. Objective: Create a new offshoot of bot mutation that would turn against the original strain. Results…temporary slowing of the bots’ rate of change as they dealt with the new threat, and then…negative.”

Tensions started to rise as more and more of what each was thinking started to appear on their holos. The girl thought the last attempt had shown promise and wanted to try another like it; Miller thought it ineffective, and wanted to move on something more direct. Britt noticed the two of their affection for each other spawning bitterness and spite as they argued; both of them turned on him when his holo indicated such. Miller wanted to try something with another strain, and break away to the incubation chamber to work on it; Britt thought that was just a clever excuse to get away from the rest of the team so he wouldn’t feel so exposed. The girl’s skin was crawling at having to work so close to Rauch, and wanted one of the men to move it for her; neither of them wanted to take the time, and were secretly more loathe than she was to lay a hand on it. Britt and the girl both noticed the lines on Miller’s neck growing thicker, a sharper red; Miller showed a primal panic, and began to deny it vehemently.

“That’s it,” Britt said, when Miller’s holo began to reveal thoughts of violence. “I’m calling it.” There was a sadness in his voice. A sense of resignation. He glanced backwards, towards his office. His holo dwelt on the ruined com-line equipment that lay within. Irreparably so? “We’re getting nowhere anyways. It’s backhanding everything we throw at it. Worse, it’s using our feeble little pokes to identify weaknesses it needs to shore up. Every failed attempt is just making things harder for ourselves the next time around.” He sighed. “To your rooms,” he ordered. “Get some rest. Maybe one of you will have a brain-wave in your sleep. We’ll try again…ah, tomorrow.” By his tone he didn’t believe a word of it.

I checked the time stamp on the playback. Earlier that very morning. This scene had played out as we had gathered at HQ, preparing for our pre-dawn flight.

Neither did I.