Slowly, carefully, he slipped the headset into place and didn't fuck up. He sagged onto his back, breathing heavily. The Cohen Board flickered to light.

"Shit," he hissed suddenly. "Nasty little bitch." And a moment later: "Oh. There's your problem."

"What?"

"Elbow room. She, like, attacks random addresses, only you put her in this really small cage so she ends up just clawing her own code. She'd last longer if you added memory." He paused, then asked, "Why are you keeping her, anyway?"

"I just wanted to—ask it some things," Clarke hedged.

"You're kidding, right?"

She shook her head, although he couldn't see her. "Um—"

"You do get that she doesn't, like, understand anything?"

It took a moment for the words to sink in. "What do you mean?"

"She's nowhere near big enough," Ricketts told her. "Wouldn't last two minutes in a Turing test."

"But it was talking back. Before it crashed."

"No she wasn't."

"Ricketts, I heard it."

He snorted; the sound turned into a racking cough. "She's got a dialog tree, sure. She's got like keyword reflexes and stuff, but that's not—"

Heat rose in her cheeks. I'm such an idiot.

"I mean, some Shredders are smart enough, I guess," he added. "Just not this one."

She ran her fingers over her scalp. "Is there some other way to—interrogate it, maybe? Different interface? Or, I don't know, decompile the code?"

"It evolved. You ever try to figure out evolved code?"

"No."

"It's really messy. Most of it doesn't even do anything any more, it's all just junk genes left over from..." his voice trailed off.

"And why don't you just flush her anyway?" he asked, very softly. "These things aren't smart. They're not special. They're just shitbombs some assholes throw at us to try and crash whatever we got left. They even attack each other if you give 'em half a chance. If it weren't for the firewalls and the exorcists and stuff they'd have wrecked everything by now."

Clarke didn't answer.

Almost sighing, Ricketts said: "You're really strange, you know?"

She smiled a bit.

"Nobody's gonna believe me when I tell them about this. Too bad you can't, you know, come back with me. Just so they won't think I made it all up."

"Back?"

"Home. When I get out of here."

"Well," she said, "you never know."

A pathetic, gap-toothed smile bloomed beneath his headset.

"Ricketts," she said after a while.

No answer. He lay there, patient and inert, still breathing. The telemetry panel continued to scribble out little traces of light, cardio, pulmo, neocort. All way too high; Seppuku had cranked his metabolic rate into the stratosphere.

He's asleep. He's dying. Let him be.