Chris stepped into the cool late-autumn air, shutting the door behind him. He glanced at the overflowing bins outside his home. The council was having trouble with their collections again. The last time the truck turned up had been three weeks ago. At the time, Chris could've sworn the uniformed refuse collection persocoms looked angry as they'd made their way down the street.

The cafe was only ten minutes away, so Chris continued at a stroll. It was relatively quiet for an early afternoon in town, but the peaceful atmosphere was laced with a sense of unease. The usually bustling streets were reduced to just a few passers-by, most of them human. That was increasingly common in the months since the Event.

As he passed a short row of shops that used to sell persocom accessories and software (now, boarded up and out of business) his thoughts strayed back to the interpretation program – the software he and the team were designing to analyse the virus. It was supposed to find the viral code in a persocom's memory banks, then peel it apart for analysis. The problem was the code was extremely elusive. It copied itself aggressively through memory, constantly moving around and making analysis near impossible. Their software was designed to compensate for this by chasing any detected signatures through memory as they moved, but the viral code itself was constantly changing and evolving too. If they could only capture enough of it at once, they could start to peel apart its secrets, but so far all they had were unintelligible snippets, which rapidly became invalid in the context of the original code as it continued to evolve.

Chris pushed open the cafe door and scanned the room-full of primarily empty seats. His eyes stopped upon a pretty woman sipping a latte in the corner, wearing the NEIS company polo shirt under an open jacket. She spotted him over the maze of tables and waved him over energetically, spilling some coffee in the process.

"Ah shit, there goes my muffin." Sarah muttered, mopping up the coffee with a napkin and grimacing at the damp snack that sat in front of her.

"That looks delicious," Chris teased, as he sat down.

"You can have it fatty, I already ate anyway." she said, shoving it over his side of the table, along with another coffee. "So you actually found my note, huh? And here I was preparing to mock you for being glued to your terminals..."

"As if! You knew I'd get it or you wouldn't have bought another coffee. Thanks, by the way."

"Hey, don't underestimate my desire for caffeine. Far as I'm concerned you're stealing rations now. How's it going, anyway?"

"Bad!" Chris said despairingly, dropping his head in his hands. "In fact, I think it's getting worse. I haven't gotten so much as a snippet in a week, and my mood is beginning to rub off on Titch."

"I can remember a time you'd never have said that," Sarah sighed, sipping her drink. Titch was a NEIS model 530; one of their 'Minito' portable-sized product ranges. Both NEIS employees knew well what its capabilities should have been. "Moods, now. Just... what's happening to them in there?" she tapped the side of her head with a finger, frowning in consternation.

"What about you?" Chris said, hopefully. "I know some of the guys snagged a bunch of code when they borrowed the lab computers from R and D; was there anything...?"

Sarah shook her head, blowing a strand of brown hair out of her face. "It's useless. All they had was garbage. The virus is just too resilient. If we push harder, it pushes back." she sipped from her drink again, then continued. "You know the company's response to support calls still amounts to a factory reset and a vague promise to figure out the problem... I'm beginning to feel like a target wearing this," she pointed to her company shirt. "Did you know the staff turnover in Technical Support is eight times higher than the company average now? Nobody's talking openly, but I heard it on the grapevine. Turns out most customers lose their marbles when they're told 'sorry, you have to throw away all your data and start again'."

"What a surprise." Chris said dryly. "It makes sense, though. Nearly every call is probably about the virus. Who has the energy to deal with that many angry people every day?"

"Yeah, exactly..." Sarah paused to sip before continuing, "Mmn, speaking of energy, I'm amazed at the efficiency of the virus, considering what it does. You know how an infected persocom exhibits only mildly increased power consumption due to the extra load on the neurologic processors? Well, now the guys at the office think it's just about ten percent, on average. It's kinda hard to tell. These days they can't get an infected persocom to stay still long enough to finish the test."

Chris frowned. It was getting worse. He knew of the tests the engineers were running over at NEIS headquarters. They were designed to minimise power consumption in a fully-active persocom, to measure the difference between models which had been infected and ones which had not. Each subject spent ten days powered up in a floatation tank to provide minimal load on their motor-structure. There they would remain, active but motionless and idling, as their power systems were allowed to run down. Chris idly wondered if he would be able to remain floating in a tube for ten days without going crazy. It was something that shouldn't have been difficult for a persocom to do.

"Anyway," Sarah said, interrupting his thoughts, "Rumour is they're calling us in to HQ, so expect an email any day now. I think we're in for a change of strategy. Not a moment too soon if you ask me. If we keep on like this I'll go crazy!" she laughed quietly as one of the pockets on her jacket began to rustle. Chris blinked as a tiny little hand emerged, clutching at the button that held the pocket closed. Grunting and huffing sounds could be heard as the little persocom inside tried to free itself.

"Error! Nyyyghhn! Miss Brookeledge, I am stuck! Unnf! Please assist!" a shrill voice squeaked, muffled by the fabric.

"Oh, Sudo! Here," Sarah said, popping the button open. Out popped a head with short and messy fluorescent yellow hair. Equally vibrant yellow eyes swivelled around the scene, hovering on Chris before settling on Sarah herself.

"Miss Brookeledge, alarm! Lunchtime is over! Alarm! Lunchtime is over!" the persocom patted energetically at Sarah's jacket to convey the urgency of its notification.

"Thank you, Sudo. Alarm off, please." Sarah said. Sudo visibly relaxed, dropping back into the pocket and looking cheerily back towards Chris.

"Alarm deactivated! You're welcome! Hello, Mr Barker!"

"He's not infected!" Chris gasped, "Still? How did you do it?"

"I disabled his radio gear, and I keep him away from any terminals. It does make him a little bit useless, but he can still monitor my schedule for me." Sarah patted her personal unit affectionately ("Pat pat pat!" Sudo beamed, counting them out). He was an earlier model of the NEIS miniature lineup, and would not be all that different in capability to Titch, were it not for Titch being infected. "He is also instructed not to allow Tilda to interface with him, though god knows she's tried." Sarah's eyebrows dropped in disapproval as she referred to her rebellious work-issued unit. Tilda was definitely infected, and apparently over recent weeks had begun to exhibit the same behavioural traits as Titch, including a propensity for boredom. "She won't listen to my commands when it comes to Sudo. I think... I think she wants a friend to play with. She desperately wants him to interact with her on her own level, but of course, his personality matrix is very limited compared to her with the virus." Sarah looked conflicted. "The worst part, Chris... I think I'm beginning to believe her."

"Believe? You don't mean-!" Chris gaped at his friend. "Sarah, it's a friggin' virus. It's a software glitch – a big one, sure – but bloody hell, it isn't real!"

"How do you talk to Titch, these days? Do you issue commands? Or do you have conversation? Do you really treat her like you used to?" Sarah asked, looking him in the eye. He hesitated, and she spoke again before he could reply. "I'll answer that: you don't, do you?"

"Fine, I treat her differently. But I never issued commands anyway; I would generally talk to her as I would a person. Anthropomorphism is a distinctly human condition. We do it all the time. Taking objects that already look human and talk in a lifelike manner, and interacting with them on those grounds is only natural. It doesn't mean I really think they're genuine interactions." Chris said gently, pointing to the lump in Sarah's jacket. "You just said 'thank you' to Sudo, but why? You know for sure he's just running a basic personality matrix. NEIS-OS 4.3.3, right?" Sarah nodded. "He doesn't need your praise to function, but you did it anyway. Now was that because you honestly believe he is a sapient being, or because it just felt comfortable to do?"

Sarah nodded again, silently thumbing the button on her pocket.

"We're doing it even now. Look how you and I refer to them by gender, even though they're machines. It's just human nature to do that." Chris continued. "Listen. Before we were put to decoding the virus, we wrote modules for NEIS-OS, right? Your last project was an improved adaptive learning algorithm for our latest personality matrix. Remember that? You should know better than nearly anyone else that it's just software."

Sarah nodded again. "Yes..." she sighed, regaining some confidence. "Yes, I know. But Chris, she feels so real. I know persocoms can pass for human on messageboards online, and with better personality matrices, they're convincing in person too, but... nothing like this. And certainly not our little mobile units." She got up from the table. "Anyway... time to go. I'll see you later."

"Thanks for the coffee." Chris said, standing and hugging her goodbye before she left the cafe. He watched her go, finishing his own drink pensively. Truth be told, he had been treating Titch differently. Very differently. He just hadn't really noticed to begin with. She'd started changing only a week after the Event. He'd try to set an alarm or a calendar entry, or ask her to send an email, and Titch would obey, but not without a "that seems a little late," or "this email is inefficient; it's unnecessarily long". He'd not paid these comments much heed – during use, persocoms can and do interject with suggestions they feel are beneficial to their masters – but their frequency had increased, and they soon grew more complex and introspective: "It annoys me that you set this so late, I keep telling you, you're never on time for this." "Can't you write a more interesting message? You drone on and on but you illustrated your point in the first paragraph...". Now, she would have an entire debate about the efficacy of his work routine given the chance, and he rarely dictated emails to her, as she seemed able to articulate any information he requested in messages written all by herself; that last being an ability usually reserved for far more capable "full-sized" persocoms. Yes, he definitely treated her less like an appliance. In fact, with the accelerated changes over the last several weeks... if anything, he was getting so used to the fluent and lifelike way she talked and behaved, he was treating her more like a...

Friend?

Although he didn't want to admit it to Sarah, it was beginning to bother him, too.