"Second year. Blimey.. Time flies." Leo was two hundred miles away but his dry tone was as clear in his words on the screen as if he sat beside Mattie at her desk. "Soon you'll be choosing your doctorate."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." She fired a series of rude emojis at him.
Leo sent just one back but it was outrageously rude.
"Oi!"
"Sorry."
"No you're not. -You're in a good mood."
"I've thought of another way to restore Fred."
"Omg. What?"
"Restore him to a non conscious synth. Wait. I'll call, it's quicker."
She grabbed up her phone when it rang. Leo's shy mumble in her ear. "We'll transfer Fred's consciousness to a dummy synth."
She thought about it. "At a different location? We'd be working remotely nowhere near?"
"Of course."
"Ok. It could work."
"We wake up the ordinary synth, it gives out its, totally useless, location but we are busy removing the code and taking another online backup. Then the bad guys show up but all they've got is another ordinary synth and no connection to us."
It was genius. Of course it was. "How do we get the code back on to Fred?"
"That's the tricky part. How to apply the modded code without waking him up."
"We could trick him into sharing," Mattie said.
"What?"
Her brain races. "Load the ordinary code into Fred's head. Wake him up. He thinks he's a normal synth and tries to share with the first synth he meets. That can be one of you. You share, but you force download of his true code, modded. Reboot him, wake him up again."
She waited. Leo was breathing quickly. "That's brilliant," he said.
Her face broke into a smile. "It's what I do," she said.
"Ha. Yeah. But I've got a better idea."
"Wow, two whole minutes before you try to trump me." Their rivalry was always on. "Go on then."
"Backup Fred's code to me."
"You can't mod yourself, Leo."
"No. But you can."