Tony looked momentarily surprised when she she'd spotted no snipers, but then almost visibly filed that information away--along with the fact that she'd thought to look. Then he was On for time it took someone to snap a picture and walk away, then Off again. That had to be exhausting.
Ellen scanned the area in front of her all the while, watching for sudden or awkward movement, checking the drape of clothing on other diners and passersby for concealed weapons. She couldn't cover her six as thoroughly without turning to look, but a silver carafe of water on a nearby table and the high gloss paint job on a nearby car made passable mirrors.
"I don't know what was in the maintenance injections," she said. "I always assumed...." She paused, taking a bite of her burger while she reviewed what she knew, and how she knew it. She half expected Tony to jump in with questions, but he seemed content to wait. Or maybe he was just too hungry to stop eating for a minute.
"I always thought it was more of the same--the same cocktail they gave us initially. Maya said something once about how the failures were due to accumulating errors in the rewritten DNA. The more errors, the greater the chance of a cascading failure and--boom!"
"So I figured they were providing more of the original cocktail, sort of 'restoring from an uncorrupted backup' to keep things from spiraling out of control. I may be completely off base on that. In any case, it didn't always work."
She pulled a strip of bacon from her burger. It was thin and crisp, just the way she liked it. She ate it. Then she sighed. "The initial failure rate was about one in four."