Having sat in that direction at a table meant for only two people, Tony had Happy watching Ellen's six o'clock with binoculars, from the car. I Want Your Cray Cray was currently on his playlist, and Happy was singing along with it. Between songs, he was grumbling that he didn't trust this lady not to blow up his buddy and just how friggin' insane Tony was. It was a good thing that no one could hear him. The second Happy saw anything suspicious, Tony was going to get a bright red HUD alert on his glasses and his wristwatch.
In the meantime, Tony was watching and listening to Ellen the whole time, fully focused, quietly impressed with the way she was keeping an eye on their surroundings. It meant he had to swallow past all the knot of guilt that was trying to lodge in his throat, because what could she have been if AIM never sunk their claws in, with the chemical concoction that he helped Maya stabilize more. Would she, or could she, have gone in another direction if he hadn't killed her? Wasn't it kind of gross to be eating a charbroiled burger while sitting across from the lady he left sizzling on some power lines? Maybe. Possibly. Yes. There was a power struggle between his over-active mind and his stomach, that left him chewing much slower that before. His stomach finally won out over the urge to let any bile rise, and he mentally tried to pull himself up by the bootstraps and keep on going. He was getting to be a pro at that. Science talk helped.
"One in four. Harsh. No wonder they had to cover up their mistakes." He was clutching the burger in his hands, his lips quirked more to one side while thinking. "It sounds the same, though. It was like trying to stop a bio-avalanche. Or, in tech terms? It went into something like a cascading system failure right down the whole gene sequence line, like bad coding, trying to overwrite fragments as a fix but...over-compensating? Result was a system-wide catastrophic failure. Like a classic blue screen of death, only the computer blows up instead. Do you still have the same amount of control that you had before? After you got here again, I mean."
He didn't want to elaborate on that too much, because it was a touchy subject. He took another bite of the burger and chewed slowly, looking at her with raised eyebrows.