Patterbit

It nests in warm circuitry and feeds, improbably, on stray current and the waste heat of running machines, its blocky body flickering with little cascades of light as it digests. It communicates in rapid clicks and buzzes that the campus techs have half-seriously tried to transcribe, and it patters from console to console with quick, glitchy movements, freezing motionless when watched. Harmless and curious, it has become a fixture of the R&D Lab, where the researchers have mostly given up on evicting them and settled for keeping the important cables out of reach.