Zeli waved dismissively. “Seen my sister go through it. Best friend, too. You all get that same look, like, oh shit what I done to myself?”

Nithya couldn’t help laughing.

Zeli crooked an eyebrow. “So you kissing this project good-bye, then? Peter’s going to be mad.”

“Not necessarily. I’m still thinking about what to do. We had some distractions with the Machinehood attack.”

“Yeah, that’s some shit with your sister-in-law. She got blown up good! You believe what they’re saying? Think they’re going to take out more funders?”

Nithya shrugged. “They haven’t so far, but who knows? I’m more scared that they’ll disrupt pill production and leave us unemployed and sick. Speaking of AIs, what’s your trouble?”

“The Synaxel-approved WAIs are crap. They parse my instructions like a four-year-old, and half of what I want doesn’t get implemented. I think that’s why your tests are coming out all static and weird. I looked at your latest report. Instead of a goal of a faster reaction time, the stupid WAI had them chasing a lower reactant amount. Can we please get help from Deek or Glearn or someone who knows what they’re about when it comes to WAIs?”

“Per our contract, no. We can only use Synaxel’s tools, for security reasons. Have you tried support?”

Zeli snorted. “Those engineers couldn’t write their way out of a box, and they won’t give me the source code.”

“Sorry,” Nithya repeated. Not that it was her fault, but she felt bad for Zeli. “At least it’s helping you slow down to my pace?”

The teenager rolled her eyes. “Yeah, plenty of downtime while I wait for the fixes. I’m beating some ass in the virt-tournaments, making good tips there.”

“If you’re willing to donate some of that time, can I send you over a side project? It’s related to Luis’s sister. Maybe we can put together a tool kit that earns us some tips after it’s done.”

“Sure, I’ll take a look. Oh, I sent you a video I got. It’s not good quality, and my microdrone died before it uploaded the whole thing, but you might want to pass it on to your Welga. Maybe she can get it to the right people. The data file is mixed in with my latest Synaxel build and keyed to the words ‘stupid WAI.’ I don’t know that it’s any news to her, but… well, you’ll understand when you watch it. Hurry up and decide about that baby, okay? We need someone on full-time.”

After her teammate’s connection dropped, Nithya opened Zeli’s project file.

“Sita, extract the embedded video from this. Pass phrase, ‘stupid WAI.’ ” What an awful thing to say to her agent. “Sorry.”

“Apology accepted. I’ve isolated the footage. Would you like to see it now?”

“Yes.”