She pulled more responses out of her older data stores – started to feed them into the stream.

“You want more?” she challenged the colossal construct above her.

Althea looked straight up at the darkening clouds. She looked back at the query response queue – still seeing no improvement.

“You want everything?” she cried out. “Take it!”

She fed the whole pattern store in, filling the stream to almost half of the available bandwidth, rotated the variants through the transmitters.

Instead of improvement communication, the corpore’s queries started to reduce repetitions.

It is not responding. Dorian warned, confirmed. It is cycling down.

She was giving it all that she could! Why was it rejecting her? This should work, had always worked before. Corpore were hungry for signal, for communication. It is what drew them in. Why was it losing interest?

It is stopping.

What kind of damned corpore was this?

“You came,” she shouted up into the clouds. “Damn you!”

She cast through her experience, her memory, was at a loss.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“What is it waiting for?” she asked, she begged. “I’ve sent all the reply codes I have.”

The stress, the fear of failure was causing her to breathe deeper and deeper, faster and faster. She needed to solve the problem. Was it technical – experiential?

It must require a different order of transmission.

“Obviously,” she agreed, frustrated, unnerved. “But there are so many possibilities. It’s not like I can get inside its code processes.”

She must have missed something from the start – something crucial. Damn her, it was so hard to handle communication from the outside, so much easier from the inside.

Inside?

“Show me what the implants sent when they were still connected to the gregga’s brains,” She hadn’t paid them much mind, but the solution was suddenly – stupidly – obvious.

Dorian laid out the structure, the content, the syntax.

“Deconstruct them,” she commanded. Fragments of the code lit up the interface – pieces of the syntax, scattered and reforming. Althea reordered them. Something was coming together.

“Again,” she commanded, not seeing what she was looking for. “Again.”

Here.

“What could I have missed?!” she demanded anxiously.

“What could I have–?” Repetitions… repetitions in the matrix. It needed repeated signals? She checked – checked again.

“Wait,” she commanded – looked over the pattern. The figures revealed their secret. It was so simple. She had the answer, but had not applied it organically.

“That’s a funny hiccup,” she noted.

She reconfigured the trinary, added fragments of the signal’s query, added detail to her syntax, applied the variant.

Never the same way twice. She needed confirmation. Not human enough for you? What would be…

“No…” It didn’t work. Then, “Yes…”

What do you see?

“The answer,” she told him, grinning like a maniac. “It wants only asymmetrical non–repetitive variation.”

She composed a structure, finger hovered a moment over the interface before she whispered to Dorian, “Send this.”

One. Two. Three.

It’s responding

She smiled, feeling a wave of warmth, satisfaction, pride.

Of course it is.