“Huh?” Miller was dumbfounded. The drawn skin and sunken eyes did little to conceal his stupor. His holo showed an image of an enraged bodybuilder trying to shove a length of steel through the eye of a needle.
“Other hybrids, to be more specific,” she said, steamrolling his holo’s question. “That is part of their uniqueness. They were designed to tackle both the organic and the tech components at the same time, and hijack both at breakneck speed. It’s the only way they could have done it. And yes,” she swiveled her head towards Miller again, ready to acknowledge what she’d seen and heard, “they had to be small – approximately one tenth the size of the smallest bots we know today – or they would blow their hosts as soon as they entered. That’s another reason why they had to be developed so painstakingly. By marrying the two different types of code, and developing them in tandem, they were able to fit more functionality into a smaller space.” She adjusted her hair clip again, though it didn’t seem to need it. Miller’s holo made it clear she was talking over his head. “Think of it like screws and nuts,” she explained, hands busy gathering strands behind her. “if you have a container, and you fill it up with only screws, it’s going to hold a certain mass. If you fill it up with only nuts, it’s going to hold a different mass. Maybe more, maybe less, depends what kind of screws and nuts. If you fill it up with both, but just dump them in at random, your total mass will probably be somewhere between the two. But, if you take the time to thread the nuts onto the screws, and you fill the bucket up with those, you’ll fill more of the empty space, and you’ll have one heavy freakin’ bucket. That’s kind of what they did here. If the rumors are true, anyways.” She finished with her hair and, now that her hands were free again, waved back and forth across the interface. A block of text went reference blue, then zoomed to fill the screen. Red pips appeared on the screen in half a dozen different places. They multiplied and scattered to all portions of the display, until they numbered in the thousands. She’d activated the syntax analyzer. “Cutting out the interface didn’t hurt either,” she said, as she scanned through the pipped-in code. “You know as well as anyone how much time we waste just trying to get those things to speak the same language.”
Miller nodded. His holo reminded them that streamlining the communication process was one of the goals of their assignment, after all.
Amy twirled a finger on one of the hotbeds the pips appeared to be surrounding. It was mesmerizing to watch them work. They boiled around the block of text, into and between the lines, then into the space between the words and letters, stopping only when the structure and the logic failed to align with a database of ‘successful’ arguments. In this way they would congregate around the high-risk areas, creating a visual cue that something there might not be right. I was never a fan of them myself. Part of it was the way they moved, hungry and keen, like piranhas at the scent of blood, but mostly it was because I found them too restrictive. Any hack worth his badge would, at some point or another, have to go off script, and send up never-before-seen argument structures and syntaxes that would make those pips go apeshit.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“There it is again,” she whispered, tracing her finger through the block. She swiped up a couple of pages, then down again. “That structure…I’ve seen that before.” She scanned through several other blocks, then consulted a helix spinning indolently in another rendering. “I…I think this is it…” She flipped back and forth between the helix and the code, making trace-lines with her finger. Miller crept in behind her, leaning on the back of her chair, squinting and craning his neck to try and see what she had seen. The image of himself as a child, wandering, lost, in a field of crops tall enough to block his view pixelated on his holo, making it clear that he could not. “My god, it’s incredible!” she mused. “So the stories had that part wrong, anyways…”
“Which part?” Miller asked, forcing himself to be noticed.
“The part about…” she snapped her fingers, struggling to articulate the idea she’d just held. Her head started to turn towards Miller, but she kept her eyes on the display. Miller’s eyes flitted towards her fairy, but for once it wasn’t any help. All it showed were a dozen different images of the code and the helix meshing together, like two halves of a half-finished Death Star, forming the nano-cyborg that she had built up in her mind as the holy grail of her chosen field. “…about there being two,” she finished, finally tearing herself away. “The stories – most of them, anyways – always had them developing two types of organisms: one that would denature any hybrid it infected, and one that would accelerate it. It makes sense, when you think about it. With space at such a premium you’d think each strain would be designed for one job and one job only. But this…” she focused back on the helix and set the rendering oscillating with a flick of one finger. Different sections illuminated as it scrolled up and down its height. “It’s hard to tell, since the language is so unfamiliar, but this thing here,” she gestured back and forth between a section of the helix, which was predominately greens and blues, and the last few lines of code she’d scanned, which by now were crawling with pips, “appears to be some sort of toggle, which can be used to change which parts of the code get read any time we like. I think that, somehow, they made room for both!”
Her fairy showed a black-and-white image of her working at a coding table, with a Jacob’s ladder sprouting from the console in the background. Arcs flashed between its arms as she clutched at her new toy, flicking its function back and forth according to her latest whim, killing and enhancing strains however she saw fit, the quintessential mad scientist bent on world domination. That, and amazement that the hacks that wrote it could have fit so much into such a tiny space. She marveled again at how much of the code they wrote was dedicated to things like interfacing and stabilization, and how little went towards true functionality. What a waste, it seemed to say, and wondered what they could accomplish if they didn’t have to lay those kinds of track.
Miller leaned in closer, until his chin almost rested on the crown of her head. He was starting to pick up some of what the code was doing, but, judging by the look on his face, the language it was written in was just as foreign to him as it was to her. “So what do we do with it?” He asked, moving the conversation forward.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. A smirk twitched across the corner of her mouth. A mischievous gleam shone in her eye. “We roll up our sleeves, pick through the code, figure out which way is which, and then we point the toggle the way we want it and we light this firecracker!”