It is spreading out and cooperating as far as it can with her instructions but there’s not all that much of it in her yet. It has barely started glowing in her mind.

It's...probably not worth risking his Healer in order to let the Proto learn and grow faster. 

:I want you to do the same thing there that you are doing here: Leareth tells the Proto. :Be careful, follow the instructions to figure out how to copy what is there: If it's too confusing for the Proto to eat the bacteria differently from how it's eating humans, then it seems better to err in this direction. 

Frustration! 

It seems to obey, though.

With a note of apology and gratitude, Leareth thinks some pretty math visualizations at the Proto. He's a lot better at it now that his head is less foggy. 

Do you know what is mathematically cool? The Work. That the proto will be able to do once it is bigger.

Sigh. 

Leareth is tempted to say something to the experimental subject, first, but it's not clear what. There isn't much in the way of reassurance or good news that he can offer, here. 

He plans his opening spiel to the scientists. Asks the Proto to read their minds and relay to him again. He's curious if they have the capabilities to notice, yet, that the Proto is behaving differently than before with the human subject. 

They've definitely noticed! They're recording everything and speculating intently, seemingly totally unbothered by the man's desperate pleas to be let out; not one of them has even had a passing thought empathetic about the unpleasantness of being eaten by proto. 

"...I think something must have happened with Project Thoth," someone says after a few minutes of observation. "This is a discontinuous jump in its capabilities, there's an explanation, the likely one is that it got big enough to - assimilate information it gained elsewhere -"

"Is Thoth the only other project?"

"Dunno, infosec. I've put in an urgent notice that I think we need to know, at this point."

"Is the Director -"

"Coming in. He'll be here Tuesday. We're authed for up to six more human subjects by then, and total biomass of three thousand pounds, unless we observe deterioration of the exterior walls -"

"Have we checked the news, in case Thoth, I don't know, did something big -"

"I checked. There might be a delay, of course, but - nothing yet."

"I want the next human subject to be immunosuppressed."

"I can start that now."

Leareth listens. 

...Can the Proto relay mage-techniques as well as Mindspeech? It's clearly mastered Gates, it can interact with the world in a way comparable to how mages do it - and in this case he would be providing all of the detail work - 

Leareth tries to show his work to the Proto, while being extremely clear that it needs to wait through the entire explanation and inform him whether it can do this particular engineering challenge or not, rather than jumping right into trying it.

He wants to cast this particular (very subtle) compulsion on all the nearby lab staff, relayed via the Proto (since he would otherwise be far out of range) but otherwise unmodified. They should realize that it's important to think through everything they know about Project Thoth, discuss it, try to piece together any separate bits of information they have - they're suspicious that it's important and they're being kept in the dark and their superiors won't necessarily tell them what they need to know so they need to think... 

Can the Proto relay this for him. 

Uncertain!

....All right. Time to make another gamble. (After quickly informing Nayoki of what he's attempting.) 

Leareth adds in some additional instructions for how the Proto should err on the side of failing at the task rather than on the side of being noticeable and obtrusive to the lab staff, and then...

(- a leap of faith - damn it he's still so tired -) 

:Go ahead: 

And the proto tries it. 

Nothing seems to happen.

- Well, it was worth a try. 

Leareth thinks for another long moment. 

He instructs the Proto to relay what he's saying to the scientists. 

:- My greetings to your team. I am a scientist from a different project, one you were unaware of: this is not even, technically, a lie, :and we have had a recent breakthrough: 

" - oh, it's relaying -"

"Have you measured whether there's lag," someone says urgently. 

"We're not getting audio, we're just getting, uh, brain waves that would correspond to it - can you confirm you can hear us -"

Leareth cannot, in fact, hear them in a useful or comprehensible way - the Proto isn't sending audio and besides he doesn't speak the language - but he can understand the surface thoughts accompanying the words just fine. 

He's not going to bother with the more complicated explanation, especially since he doesn't actually, just yet, want to make it obvious that he's a scientist from a different star system where the local humans sometimes possess magic powers.  

:Yes, I can hear you: 

A pause. 

:The Proto can also communicate directly but it is mostly interested in math. I am not sure if you have any mathematicians on your staff: 

Several of them are mathematicians; they tried using math to communicate with it, but ran into the problem where it didn't seem to have any sensory modalities in common with them. "How do we - communicate math to it."

:At this point, you ought be able to just think it and I will tell the Proto to listen. My latest breakthrough was working with it to solve the engineering problems necessary for communication: 

And to the Proto, :- they are going to think about interesting math for you. You can listen and answer if you want: 

One of these mathematicians did his dissertation on probability theory and starts trying to explain it. 

Symbols and numbers are not math.

:It does much better with visualizations: Leareth explains, belatedly. :Like this: 

(He is significantly better at adding detail to his visualization now that he isn't so foggy.) 

, it agrees.

:Like that! It is very impressive. It does also seem to approve of prime numbers, and likely of other numerical patterns or sequences: 

Leareth skims the scientists' surface thoughts via the Proto while he waits for their verbal response. (He is, at this point, still hopeful that they have no idea he's doing this or capable of it.) 

These scientists are thrilled. They're trying very hard to convert their math knowledge to things expressible visually, and thinking them at the protomolecule, and looking things up on their phones, and one of them is transcribing, and one of them is trying to get an encrypted message to Mao. 

They're really really confused. They have tried a lot of things, and 'the protomolecule can communicate telepathically' never seemed like something that was a breakthrough away. There was optimism about slowing down the virus's progression in humans enough that in the intermediate stages they could say something useful about what it wanted, until that fell through; there was the Thoth approach, dumping more training data on it, but that wasn't expected to yield results as good as this -

-and then apparently there was a third project, which succeeded where -

- someone pieces together that at the conversational pace there can't be lightspeed lab, not unless the other secret lab is somewhere on Io. "Have you measured whether it's instantaneous," he asks urgently.

The human subject bangs on the wall until his hands bleed. The protomolecule fixes it with Healing and shows it to the Healer - did I do it right?

....The Healer is DELIGHTED and AMAZED and :!!!!!! yes you did that's so good I'm so proud of you -: 

(This is arguably a really weird thing to say to an alien parasite, and yet. It figured it out so fast!) 

The poor human subject, though! And Leareth is clearly extremely busy and distracted. 

Probably the Proto can relay more than one conversation at once, though? 

:I want you to relay to only here: she says, very carefully offering a mental demarcation of the person being shown to her via Healing-Sight which the Proto NOW HAS which is INCREDIBLE she's almost giggling with sheer glee and triumph. 

And when she thinks it probably understands, :...can you hear me?: 

Mess with the neurons in only that neural net, got it! In exactly that pattern!

"Aaaaah!" says the man.