I’d imagined this moment a thousand times over the past few days. One can never really prepare oneself, but I thought I’d done my best, and over the course of all those rehearsals I’d convinced myself I’d be alright. But seeing it now, feeling it, holding it in my sterine hand, I realized how wrong I’d been.

Britt, old pal…how will I get on without you?

Memories darted this way and that, filling my head with their comet’s tails of distraction and emotion. Memories of times when Britt had pulled my ass out of the fire, or been there through the worst of times, or helped laugh off an epic failure, both in coding and in life. Memories of girls we’d hit on with varying degrees of success…memories of assignments we had taken, pulling each other through all-nighter after all-nighter just to keep ourselves afloat when we’d been in over our heads…the vacuous immemories of being blackout drunk together, using alcohol and sometimes worse to blow off steam when we had somehow, someway kept a nostril above water. And then that one time at D’Antonio’s, when I’d been hung up on that girl that had left me earlier that fall, and Britt had refused to let me waste another lovely autumn evening moping around an empty flat, and we’d met the men who changed our lives…

No, I told myself. Not now. There will be time to mourn, but not right now. Now there is a job to do.

I let go of his wrist and watched, detached, as it pendulated back to its resting position. A red jet of accumulated droplets gushed out all at once, joining their kin in the mess below. I tried to ignore it, and instead checked out the screen behind him. It showed blank, like they always do after periods of inactivity, pulsing its suggestive pulse in a field of unmarred blue. I paged back once, then again and again, through a double-handful of blanks, until I came to a page that was filled with…text? Why text? I thought to myself. The holoscreens were more than capable of projecting voice or video. They could even render complete three-dimensional scenes if needed. Why did Britt bother with text?

No, not even text! I realized as I swiped back through a few more pages, just the basic elements of text…upstrokes and downstrokes, crosses and loops, arranged randomly across the page! It looked like the pidgin markings of a toddler barely learning how to write. What a waste of time!

I swiped through all of it. I sent the screen reeling with a wave of my arm, and only stopped it when I saw something I recognized.

It was a conference room. Dimly lit, with only a few soft incandescents reflecting off the mahogany table from the fixtures up above. A console twinkled to one side, its variegated data bulbs sparking and fading in every color of the rainbow. A bank of plaques comprised the other, each recapping the life and times of a Lead Participants, past or present. I tried to read one of the nearer, but the edges of the projection were distorted by that fish-eye view our Bitshare lenses tended to lend to anything they captured.

A lone figure hunched over a holoscreen at the far end of the table, looking a bit pathetic as it sat amidst a row of empty seats – me, less than a week ago, tired and a little worn but still managing to look a lot more human than I thought I’d ever feel again. A smaller image of Britt projected on the bottom-right corner of the display, showing what his audience was seeing. His lips were moving. Playback of our final call.

“…Cha…thi…we might r…ly be on t…omething here.” The audio started to come online. It came in a little scratchy, which made it tough to catch the first few words, but it smoothed out as it went. “Remember those strains you had us looking at a while back? The ones you sent in stasis cubes, about three months ago?” Britt paused while I bobbed my head, agreeing that indeed, I had. Lancers, they had been, though to potentially re-awaken dormant cycles in the body. Grow back hair, strengthen teeth, even re-start menses in women that had been through menopause already…that sort of thing. I hadn’t told them what they were, or what I had in mind for them down the road. I’d just needed them catalogued, and these guys seemed to have the time. They sure as hell weren’t going anywhere. “Well,” Britt continued, “Charles thinks he found a way to modify one of the strains, and make it compatible with Miller’s hardware. They’re going to try splicing them together this evening.”

“Sounds fascinating,” I mumbled, and swiped through a set of notes (which weren’t even from that meeting, I remembered as I watched it play). “Remind me why again?”

There was a moment of silence as Britt gathered himself, obviously flustered from having to repeat himself. “Well,” he drawled as I was saying earlier, the tech has gotten smart enough and small enough to penetrate some of the larger viruses and replace portions of their RNA sequence. Miller’s got it so smart it can work its way into the reproduction sequence and pass its code – or it’s ‘genes’ if you will – on to the next generation.”

“And?” I interrupted, perusing my text. The minutes from the diamondhead, that’s what they were. I was catching up on all the dust-ups from their most recent soiree. “We’ve been doing that for years.”

“Yes,” Britt agreed, “we have. But here’s the fun part: Miller’s can do all that while still accepting inputs from the tower.” He paused and leaned back in his chair, letting the gravity if his statement sink in.

It worked. My shoulders perked, my eyebrows rose, and I set the holoscreen aside. “So…” I reasoned, “with this new tech, you’re saying we may have a way to code a pop of cybernetics AFTER they enter the virus?”

“Bingo!” The image of Britt in the corner of the screen smiled and tapped its nose. The Bitshare lens followed his finger, seeming to almost echo his enthusiasm. The room felt suddenly less cramped than it had a minute or two before. The mahogany shone a little brighter. Even the data bulbs seemed to notice, syncing up most their phasings so that, for a moment, they appeared toe a single line. But it didn’t last long. A second later they were back to their random, multicolored mess. Britt continued, “So, no more guess-and-check approach to coding. No more days-long processes of sequencing and introduction only to find there was one tiny error on line four hundred eighty-seven thousand five hundred ninety-one that causes the code to fail, no more realizing too late that the synchro-cells in the fertilization cycle weren’t as effective as we thought, and going back to the drawing board when we thought we’d had it pegged. No more watching helplessly as sample after sample dies because we turned up the volume on this trait or that just a touch too high during recombination. If this works the way we think it will, we’ll be able to take an experiment set that used to take months and run it in…”

“Hours,” I finished for him.

The pint-sized Britt smiled again and nodded. “If it works the way we think it does we’ll be able to seed a single sample and keep it as a sort of ‘starter culture,’ and run our variants from that. We won’t have to start from scratch each time. We’ll just twiddle the code for each as we pull it from the main supply.” His grin widened further, if that was possible, showing the china gleam of teeth I’m not sure I’d seen before. “And that isn’t even the best part.”

I felt for the holoscreen and tilted it with a gentle hand. It disappeared from view as it faced me with its narrow edge. He had my full attention now. “There’s more?”