Laurence rubbed his bruised occiput with both hands, no longer even trying to cover himself. “I can’t even think clearly,” he said. “I wish I knew someone who could do something, like hack into the Commandant’s computer from outside. Or just get this whole damn school shut down. They won’t even let me near the computers in here.”

“Wait,” Patricia said. “What about CH@NG3M3? It’s been getting smarter and smarter lately, and giving me all kinds of helpful advice. I bet CH@NG3M3 could do something.”

Laurence started to shoot the idea down. But something made him stop instead and look at Patricia, still haloed by the light from the open door and the lingering effects of Laurence’s head trauma. She regarded him, naked and bruised and cowering in the dark, without any great pity. If anything, she was still giving him the expectant, wide-eyed look with which she’d greeted another one of his weird inventions, back when they first met. As if he could still have one last gadget, hidden in his nonexistent pockets.

“You really believe that could work?” he said.

“I really do,” she said. “I don’t think I’m just projecting. CH@NG3M3 has been understanding more and more. Not just what I’m saying, but the context.”

Laurence tried to think this through. The last time he’d looked at CH@NG3M3, the night before his parents took him here, he’d noticed something even odder than usual. The computer had somehow gone from thousands of lines of instructions to a half dozen. At first, he’d panicked, thinking someone had hacked in and deleted everything. But after an hour of frenzied port scanning, he realized that CH@NG3M3 had just simplified its own code, down to a short string of logical symbols that made zero sense to Laurence.

What if Patricia was right?

“I mean, it’s worth a try,” Laurence said. “CH@NG3M3 is smart enough to hide pieces of itself in the cloud. Maybe it’s smart enough to do something for me, if you explain the situation clearly enough. I can’t think of anything else that you could possibly do to help.”

Patricia chewed her thumb. “So do you have any ideas for how to nudge CH@NG3M3 into sentience? Is there some hardware I need to sneak into your house and install? Or something else?”