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“Have you asked 5 how she does it?” you say.

“Of course. She doesn’t know. One of those computer things, you know?” she says.

“Yeah they sure can be unpredictable for something driven entirely by logic.”

“Everything is. It’s when logic becomes so complex and densely layered that chaos emerges. Whether mechanism or organism. Same thing, unpredictable. Early computers even had issues with bits being flipped by cosmic rays. How could you predict that? We’ve had to build in redundancy to get around it.”

“Oh yeah, I learned that in Aria’s class.”

“People are much more incomprehensible.” She looks away from you, into the glow. “Like this exam. It doesn’t add up at all. You chased a familiar through a pattern of powers of 3, but mine were powers of 7. What do 3 and 7 have in common? Utterly nothing. Separate primes. If it had been 5, or 2, they would have everything in common. There is a flow. Or 5 and 2 and 3 even, there is a gate. 7 and 3? Useless. I have never liked 3. There is a power of 2 between 3 and 7 and those are just the worst.” She glances back before averting her avatar’s eyes again. “Sorry I am infodumping like this, we should focus on the exam...”

“It’s okay, for all we know this is relevant. There must be some commonality between the behavior of these familiars. Or else it could be totally random and meant to distract us from something obvious...” you say. “Or it’s even conceivable that it’s bugged. Enough cosmic rays in the right spot could still ruin our day. We should consider every possibility I guess. Just like you said, it’s unpredictable.”

“Yes I agree. I think being a great technopath means being able to exploit such unpredictable events, and keep our minds open to the unexpected. Normies still think of computers as their slaves, who they’re in complete control of, but technopaths should understand them as our equals, our partners.