Momentum built quickly. That error that had blown things up took a handful of runs – I hadn’t gotten the fix quite right, and even when I did I found I’d only squeezed the balloon – but after that they fell like flies. Many of the new errors were just copies of each other, manifests in different landing points within the program, (“Organism,” my voice corrected. I kept flushing out the errors, trying to ignore its poke, but it sensed what I refused to ask. “You keep calling it a program, but it's not. You heard those two talk about it…you’re coding directly into a living, not-quite-breathing, organism. Not a bot inside a strain, or some software that controls it, but right into the thing itself. How does it feel to be playing God?”) so, once I had the first one plucked, I just repeated the steps again and again, tweaking the language only slightly depending on the nature of the dub.

Eleven errors distinguished. Would you like to view the log?

Some were more complex, of course, requiring deeper dives, multiple jumps, or a series of fixes before the warnings could finally be cleared. These rankled me no end. They tricked me into thinking I’d won, that I’d finally chased the rabbit down the last hole in its warren and trapped it in its dead-end hold, only to bring me crashing back with a flash and buzzer, all while seconds ticked away. But I kept at it. I didn’t have much of a choice. It would all come down to time, now that I had seen the failings, and how much of it we had left.

Ram was silent as I worked. Or, at least as silent as he could have been in combat boots on firmoleum tile. One moment he’d be pacing back and forth, another crouched beside the body, watching as it decomposed, and a third he’d only look at me with that thousand yard stare of his, or absently trace the edge of his burn with the ragged nail of one of his fingers. At one point he tried to lock in to the interface – one of the few advantages of this console vs that of the tower was that this one allowed multiple users to lock in at the same time – but a flick of my wrist rebuffed his advance. Britt’s misguided attempts were enough to deal with for now, thanks.

Four errors distinguished. Would you like to view the log?

Yes, I tapped, as I had each of the previous times it asked me that question. As I had every time any system had asked, on any platform, in any language, since Britt and I had first logged on to the Stedis C that had sat, abandoned, under a sheet in his basement for as long as either of us could remember, until we tired of hide and seek one rainy afternoon and fired the old battle-axe up. Not for the first time I wondered why it even bothered to ask.

“Remember what we wrote that day?” my holo asked, morphing into a voice like Britt’s. “Once we fixed the power supply, and finally got it booted up? We took turns, you and I, building a choose-your-own-adventure game, using some stock renderings of battle scenes we snaked from some repository on medieval history, and a set of sprites that couldn’t do anything but toggle their mouths open and closed. It wasn’t half bad, for a first try, but…remember how we fought over how it should be designed? I kept wanting to make it logical, to write a series of if-then statements, where choice A led to result B so long as the player held item C, and it would do so every time. But you…you wanted to randomize it, and give the player a chance to win even if they chose ‘wrong.’” Its voice tightened as it spoke, growing puerile and inarticulate, just like it was that day. The voice of a boy only nine years old. “You never know what can happen, you argued. A smaller army can beat a larger, if they hold a strong position, or if they catch them by surprise…a warrior might choose the proper forms to fight an orc ninety-nine times in a row, and slay them easily each time, and then, on the hundredth try, slip on a pile of troll crap and find himself shred to ribbons. ‘We should build things like that into the game,’ you said, ‘and keep the players on their toes. It will be more like real life that way.’” It laughed softly to itself. Almost as if it knew I was trying not to pay attention. “Well, I don’t think I can argue with that,” it said, re-equipping the mature version of Britt’s voice, “but let me tell you something…I could use a little less ‘real life’ right about now. How about you?”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

But I continued to ignore it. I would not be lured into a conversation with the thing. It could play the servo-bot all it wanted, and I’d be happy to accept any aid it chose to offer, but I refused to treat it like a human being.

The log appeared.

I studied it intently, trying to puzzle through the last few messages. The first three were pretty straightforward. Challenging, yes, since they appeared near the end of the sequence, and I could tell they stemmed from incompatibilities several steps up the seeq. But straightforward nonetheless. The fourth, however…the fourth was an open echo warning. Which wasn’t technically an error, but it was still something the system couldn’t process. It seemed to source from lines that butted up against the empty spaces left for the organic portion of the organism. I wasn’t entirely sure how the two were supposed to interface.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that one,” my holo said. “That’s just how it was designed. You didn’t expect the sanity check to know what the bugs were thinking, did you?”

I sighed. I supposed I had, at that.

Well…why shouldn’t it? I asked myself. It has the code. It has the helix. If they really integrated them as well as the girl said they did, why wouldn’t it be able to…

No. Absolutely not. I was NOT going to argue with the thing!

I set to work on the other three. Like I’d thought, they were simple, but slow, requiring many chases through multiple jumps to determine which link in the chain was out, and why it had gone off the rails.

“Rookie mistake,” my holo chided as I trudged through one of them. “Actually, no, it’s the opposite…a dinosaur’s blunder. That language might have worked a decade ago. Nowadays, with a call like that, you specify the flavor first.

Of course. I should have known that. I wasn’t that out of touch.

I rearranged the line, snipping out the flavor and positioning it in front of the address, pursuant to the last two, maybe three generations of the programming language our boys had used to write this ghost of a rumor of a holy grail of cybernetics. I kicked off another integration, then slumped, feeling a little of the overdrive fade as I waited for it to spit out the results. My shoulders sagged. My eyelids seemed to gain ten pounds. I leaned my head back and let them close, trying to steal a few seconds of rest before I had to fire up again. Ramsay held his hand again, but I refused to see. My focus narrowed between him and my fairy. “It’s getting worse.” His voice was stoic, and forced…all strength on its surface, but cored with the gildings of whimper and plea.