(polybius's POV)

"Move it! Get outta my way!" clamored the warbly voice of a prepubescent male shoving his way in front of the interface. Polybius let out a growl of fury, the cabinet vibrating with repressed rage as the start button was slammed, but not by the hand he longed for. He'd been so close.

So close.

So...damned...close.

The girl he'd set his sights on was almost in his grasp, and before he'd even registered the apprehension settling in her lovely brain like a vile, mind-killing disease, she'd taken off out the door. Leaving him. Stuck here with these far less...satisfactory organisms.

It hadn't even been ten seconds, and his electric heart ached for her. The way she squinted, the way she stuck her tongue out ever-so-slightly when the going got rough in the little game world on his screen, unknowingly looking him right in the eye as she did so. Oh, and the tantalizing game of cat-and-mouse that was lurking sneakily through the well-hidden nooks and crannies of her mind, bypassing combinations and scrounging through dark catacombs for every secret about her he could uncover.

And such delicious secrets they were.

At the very least, a damn sight better than whatever vibes he was getting from the kid who'd taken over the controls in her wake. Bleaugh.

Dungeons and Dragons. Video games. Stacy who sits in front of me in homeroom, criminy, Polybius ITCHED to scrap the whole data-collecting gig and just mindlessly consume the bodies of every meatbag in the joint!!! But he knew he couldn't.

Polybius tried to calm himself down by reciting a few lines of his own code to himself silently, a mantra of his existence. He was here to serve a purpose, and if that purpose involved collecting trifling information from a bunch of soft-skulled teenagers, so be it. If only to weed out the rare possibility of a few...anomalies.

Like her.

His precious YN...

"GAAAAHHHH!!! NOOOOO!!!" the boy shrieked, his voice breaking as he lost the game on level 2. Polybius, however, was deaf to his petulant exclamations of rage. As the preteen turned to the kid behind him to barter for more quarters, a low, soft, rhythmic hum emitted from the speakers as the computer became lost in its own equivalent of a daydream.

"Hey," someone near the back of the line spoke up, "doesn't that noise kinda sound like Max's voice?"