The rescue

Rollie, Steve, and Ivan hide in Ivan's station wagon. Or maybe it's a van. It's what Ivan uses to haul band equipment.

They're in coveralls from Ivan's job.

They didn't expect it but the office is full of activity. The consultants are all over the place.

Ivan watches the building. "We can't just walk in there. They're going to recognize you."

Steve nodded. "It's nearly midnight. How late are they going to work?"

Rollie, quiet for a long time, speaks up. "These guys all carry cellular phones."

Rollie turns on the police scanner.

Steve says to Rollie, "I was thinking about something tonight. You've been working on the software for like months now, but you couldn't get the thing to work. Then you come over and hang out with me and Ivan, get stoned, and then suddenly you have a breakthrough."

Rollie looks a little annoyed. "Are you gonna tell me I should get high with y'all more."

"Well, I've been thinking about it. Maybe it was the weed. But maybe that's not it. Maybe it was because you expressed your feeling of grief over Leonid."

Steve went on. "That guy was like your soul mate kind of, right? Like maybe the first time you ever met any body that was really just like you acknowledged it."

Rollie focuses harder on the police scanner. The police scanner starts blasting static. Rollie turns down the volume.

Steve keeps talking. "Maybe it wasn't really getting high. I mean, that's likely a catalyst. But you were blocked from your ultimate powers because you hadn't really acknowledged how Leonid was dead. He wasn't just like a father figure. He was like the first time you met another Rollie, right?"

Ivan butts in. "Yeah man, it was cool to see you and him working together. I've never seen you that happy before."

They all stop talking because now they can hear a conversation on the scanner. It is broken up with static but it is clear.

"... that system is worth more than the whole business. You get a copy of it back here so that our engineers can take it apart."

Steve interrupts. "Mother fuckers!" Rollie says "shut up. I don't think they know that if they unplug the system it won't save itself right."

They keep listening.

"These hicks have no idea what they've got. They think it's a glitchy way to schedule freight.

"Funny, I felt kinda bad for that weird dude in that meeting. It looked like he was gonna pop when he couldn't figure out what was going on.

"It's because his system depends on random numbers evenly scattered across a range between zero and one. Well, once I figured out how he was using that, I just waited for him to leave, then I went into the server room, and replaced the built-in random number generator with something that would intentionally give uneven numbers.

"I put a few things in that server when I got in there. I made sure I could ruin anything."

"That's why it was guessing close...

"Damn, you're an evil genius." The two cackled.

Ivan grabs Rollie's forearm. Rollie's eyes are wide.

Steve starts whispering again. "And here's something else I thought about. This computer program, this organism, this whatever it is that we're going to rescue... it's special because it's very unusual, right? And at the same time it is amazingly adapted for certain environments or certain tasks, it's also crazy fragile and depends on a larger society to take care of it."

Rollie says "No. That's completely not right. There's no society. Well, there kind of is. But that's oversimplifying."

Steve says, "It needs friends around it. Friends around it that aren't the same as it. This artificial life form is kind of like you when you were a kid, right? Like Mr. Gutierrez set up this whole thing to help you out so you could learn to fake being normal.

"I didn't know that's why we started playing role playing games after school. I thought y'all just liked them like I did."

Ivan interrupts. "Yeah, we did! It's also true though that it helped you out to learn how to relax around people."

Later they hear another voice on the scanner. "Let's head out. I need to talk to the engineers tomorrow. If we do this wrong, we'll lose it. I'm not going to risk this project."

Ivan watched the last car leave the parking lot.

"We gonna do this? Seems like it's now or never."