We all fell silent. I tried to figure it out, but my brain felt fluffy, so I thanked Millon and invited him to stay for supper, which he said would be a great improvement on the breadless gruel sandwich he had planned. We made some tea, and he and Landen chatted about the conspiracy network. Not so much about the imminent smiting but more long-term stuff like HR-6984’s arrival in thirty-seven years. Namely, just what algorithms were being used by the Asteroid Strike Likelihood Committee to account for the 34 percent likelihood of a strike and why this might be important. I got bored just as Friday wandered in and started to rummage through the fridge. “How was work?” I asked.

“ ’S’kay,” he replied, taking random bites from things. “Any news?”

“Not really.”

“Anything cool happen at Home De pot?”

“Neh.”

“Something on your mind?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’ve just eaten Pickwick’s pet food.”

“Ugh,” he said, and spit it in the bin.

“It’s the Destiny Aware Support Group meeting,” he said, after swilling his mouth out with water. “I’m not sure I want to go.”

“It might help to discover why you’re going to kill Gavin Watkins on Friday.”

He looked up at me. “I think that’s why I don’t want to go.”

“I’ll take you. We’ll leave at seven-thirty.”

He grumpily agreed, gave me a silent hug and was gone. I took Tuesday some hot chocolate to her in her lab and found the Wingco in with her. Despite Tuesday’s ongoing work to discover the value of the illusive Uc, she was also committed to helping the Wing Commander with his efforts to try to prove the existence of the Dark Reading Matter.

“What’s unique about early dodos is how they functioned with so few lines of code,” explained Tuesday when I asked them what they were doing. “Whoever first programmed the dodo’s brain must have discovered pretty quickly that it was possible to crash a dodo’s cortex simply by mild overstimulation. Watching a kitten while eating a cake and walking all at the same time would be enough to do it. And although a reboot would take only five minutes, the rebooted dodo would have forgotten everything it had ever learned, ever, which isn’t ideal. Rather than redesign the brain, they simply added a buffer to slow down the processing of information.”

I looked at Pickwick, who was sitting on the workbench with an uncomfortable “If you wanted a guinea pig, why not just buy a blasted guinea-pig?” look about her.

“Is that why she often reacts to stuff ten seconds late?”

“Exactly. But what’s more interesting for the Wingco is that we can pick up the buffered information on a wireless. The annoying static you get between Swindon-KZXY and Rant-AM is actually buffered dodo thoughts.”

“And this helps the Wingco and his Dark Reading Matter project . . . how?”