Absentmindedly, Dr. Hackman picked his nose and wiped it on the back of the printouts in his hand. Viral grimaced. He looked toward Farooq, who unclasped his hands from beneath his chin just long enough to wave away Viral's chagrin.

"What is this again?" Dr. Hackman asked, scratching at his scalp.

"These are the results NeuralMancer created from Tyler's unfinished code," Farooq said.

"NeuralMancer?" Dr. Hackman asked with a drop of dread.

From the edge of an ottoman on which he perched, Viral told Dr. Hackman of how Farooq insisted on naming his models.

"Nomenclature adds a bit of humanity to the process," Farooq said. "Boomers can get very frigid toward inorganic systems they don't understand."

Repeating a refrain that had occupied a good portion of their downtime while waiting for the neural net to train, Viral noted that if its intent was to disarm and charm, then the name NeuralMancer was a failure at conception.

Farooq grinned, punctuated it with a wink. "Ah, but you concede she was conceived," he said.

"Is this English?" Dr. Hackman asked, rustling the printouts.

"It's PyTorch," Viral said.

"With a little bit of Tesseract," Farooq added.

"Is that a dialect of Hebrew?" Dr. Hackman asked.

"It's Python," Viral added, his frustration fermenting.

"Like Sanskrit?" Dr. Hackman said.

"Are you sure he's up for this?" Viral asked Farooq.

His head on his hands and his elbows on his lap, Farooq chewed his lip. Without warning he stood, nearly bumping Viral in the chin with his shoulder. Whipping open the curtains, Farooq allowed a rush of daylight into the musty room.

Viral and Dr. Hackman quickly covered their eyes.

"What the hell, Farooq?" Viral cried.

"The doc just needs a hard dose of morning," Farooq said. "Throw some coffee in the pot while I get him in the shower. That'll get his formidable synapses firing."

Farooq ducked his neck into the crook of Dr. Hackman's arm and helped him to his feet. They shuffled across the ragged carpet behind Viral as he fidgeted with the coffee pot.

Viral had only ever had coffee twice. Both times had been with Lron while shopping for belts at the Providence mall. During his first visit to the counter at the Starbucks, Viral had taken Lron's lead and ordered a cortado. The size of the espresso shot relative to its price spurned Viral. The second time he ordered a grande Pike's Place with extra milk. Halfway through he feared his heart would beat out of his chest. He spent the next forty five minutes peeing out of his butt in the public restroom near the GameStop.

The hotel percolator was as foreign a contraption to Viral as a labia. This way then that he turned the small, bulbous container that reminded him of an Erlenmeyer flask. He'd seen Lron make coffee once in the kitchenette of a theater major house party off campus. He recalled Lron's gesture of pouring water into some kind of trap.

Viral looked toward the bathroom, the door to which stood slightly ajar. He heard the water running beneath Farooq's smooth baritone coaching Dr. Hackman into the bath like a recalcitrant labrodoodle. Viral decided to allow Farooq and Dr. Hackman their privacy. Opening the mini fridge near the base of the room's console, he found a half empty bottle of off-brand water. Poking the percolator with his fingers, he searched for a receptacle.

After moments of prodding he found an opening and emptied the bottle he had taken from the mini fridge into the plastic machine. With the water accounted for all that remained was the Joe. Viral held a plastic-wrapped wafer with the consistency of a bean bag in his hands. After unwrapping it, he weighed it between his fingers like a token from a third world bazaar. Shrugging, he followed his instincts and tore not only the plastic wrapping but the filter surrounding the grounds with his teeth. Catching the spilloff in a cupped hand, he emptied the packet's contents into the glass pot. He placed the pot on to the percolator, plugged its short power chord into Farooq's power strip, and flipped the machine's switch to on.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

As the machine's light began to glow ember Viral heard the water cut off in the bathroom. He turned in time to see Farooq guiding Dr. Hackman back to the bed in a terrycloth robe and towel wrapped like a turban around his head.

"It's going to take some time for the psoriasis shampoo to settle," Farooq said.

Bereft of follow-up, Viral nodded silently.

"Oof, that was a vigorous immersion," Dr. Hackman said, reaching a forefinger into his ear and twirling enthusiastically.

Bending his head close to Viral, Farooq said, "The doctor has a bit of a penchant for the melatonies."

Grabbing the printouts from Dr. Hackman's bedside table, Viral made sure the doctor's hands had dried before placing the papers in them. "What's this again?" Hackman asked.

"NeuralMancer," Farooq said.

"Tyler's Pytorch programs," Viral clarified.

"Is this Aramaic?"

Viral looked at Farooq, shook his head.

"No, doc," Farooq said, "we already told you it's Python."

"You did?"

Compassionately, Farooq nodded.

The doctor chuckled into his fist. "Man, when that melatonin bottle says to take 5 milligrams they sure as shit don't mean 30."

Viral pushed Farooq aside. "Doctor," he said urgently. "We need you to help us parse this code."

"What makes you think I am any more capable than you at making sense of this?"

From hostage negotiation camp Viral recalled the value of indulging a culprit's vanity. Vanity, his counselor had told him, quoting Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, was his favorite sin.

From the corner of his eye, Viral watched the doctor as he turned his chin toward Farooq. "I guess you were wrong about his powers of adaptability."

Farooq bit his lip to keep from smiling.

"What's he talking about, Farooqi?" Hackman asked.

Viral placed himself between the sightline of Farooq and Dr. Hackman. "While we were waiting for NeuralMancer to train, Farooq told me that one of the qualities he appreciated most about you, that separated you from a majority of your peers, was your uncanny gift for neuralplasticity."

Hiding the blush in his cheeks with the paw of his meaty left, Dr. Hackman gushed, "Well it does feel nice to finally be seen."

Dr. Hackman reached for his reading glasses on the bedside table. Anticipating his change in attitude, Farooq had nudged them closer to the doc with his knuckles. Snapping the papers to attention, Dr. Hackman perched the reading glasses on his nose and cleared his throat.

"It has been a long time since I have read raw code," he said.

"Just do your best," Farooq encouraged.

"What am I looking for?" Hackman asked.

"This is the code the neural net created from Tyler's broken inputs. Farooq and I can't tell what code is ineffective. It all looks like spaghetti to us," Viral said.

"A neural net wrote this?" The doctor asked.

"Yes, her name is Neural--" Farooq began, but Viral stopped him with a flick of his wrist.

"Yes," Viral said. "The net used a collection of code repositories as part of a training set to determine what common code that had elements of Tyler's program could look like as a complete model. The problem is NeuralM -- ahem, the neural net is a black box. Farooq and I can't look inside at the connections it formed between Tyler's input and the output you're holding to determine if it makes logical sense. It looks right to us, but we can't untangle the core functionality, or operation of the algorithm's work."

"Well, that's not right," Dr. Hackman said.

"What's that?" Farooq asked, leaning forward in the arm chair across from the doctor's bare, boney, flakey knees.

Scratching at the psoriasis beneath his turban, Dr. Hackman said, "It looks here like the neural net thinks Tyler may have used an FFT."

"That's a fourier transform, right?" Viral asked. "We learned about that in linear algebra."

"It's an implementstion of it," Farooq said.

"If it's a Fourier Transform then it's definitely out of place," Dr. Hackman said. "The input is a two dimensional array of...it looks like nucleotides."

"Like base pairs?" Farooq asked, leaving his seat and joining Dr. Hackman on the bed. He followed the doctor's finger to the line of code in question.

Viral moved to Dr. Hackman's left elbow, looking at the code over the knot in the doctor's turban. The doctor was right. NeuralMancer had made a mistake. Fast Fourier Transforms, in Python and deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, were used for signal processing, separating images, video, and audio into their analog, constituent parts. There was no sense behind why Tyler would plug a collection of genes into a signal processor. Viral's shoulders fell.

Dr Hackman folded the papers in his hand in half. "I'm sorry," he said, "it looks you're neural net may have been too intelligent for its own good."

Farooq ran his hand from the back of his head and over his face. Viral saw the exhaustion hanging from his cheekbones. "Well, it was worth a shot," he said.

But Viral wasn't sure it had been. They had spent hours awake in front of the monitors hoping, waiting, shit, expecting, the neural net of Farooq's design to spit out an answer in black and white. A wave of embarrassment crested inside him; his SS Doom and Gloom threatening to capsize. It had been his idea to wake Farooq and design a neural network to make sense from the chaos of Tyler's inchoate brain dump. And now it turned out the instinct that had propelled him for the past 5 hours was nothing more than the insipid passing of broken wind. Viral had gone out on a ledge, taken the initiative to propel an idea from the surface of his imagination into the ether of probable likelihood. Like most nascent prototypes his concept had crashed. With the disappointment and enervation mounting a resurgent attack on his spirit, mind, and body, Viral wondered if he, and by extension his father, were down for the count.