The attacker held for several seconds. It too was still, but its statuesque entasis contrasted sharply with the lifelessness of the victim. Then, in one motion, it released its hold without ceremony and crept back towards its corner, dragging stuck-on bits of bedding with it as it moved. It nosed into the pellet dish and selected a morsel, which it nibbled as it hunched, as if rewarding itself for a job well done. The crumbs combined with the blood on its teeth to form a sickly paste.

“That should have been our first warning,” the girl in the room said. I jumped, startled, and diverted part my focus away from the screen to listen to her. It wasn’t easy. The savagery of the murder – my mind refused to use any other word than that to describe what I’d just seen – had commanded my attention. As did the ensuing conversation that Britt, Miller, and the girl were having as they viewed it from the lab. “I guess it was, really. I mean, it’s not like we ignored it or anything, but you know how these things go. We were so excited by the success of the code, and the way it was re-writing itself, that we assumed we’d gotten it almost right. We figured we just had to tweak a few things here and there to iron out the wrinkles.” She tilted the needle this way and that, watching the liquid flow from one end to the other. “We never could have guessed the truth.”

“What kind of mod did you queue up anyways?” Britt started the postmortem with Miller and the girl on the holo.

“Nothing” Miller answered, “just a color change around the ears. About as harmless a mod as we’ve got in the library.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “I actually thought it was taking for a minute or two. Their fur appeared to be mottling a bit, though not where I’d expected. But then…well, you saw what happened.”

“What was the truth?” I asked.

“Any idea what went wrong?” Britt asked.

“Not a clue. Could have been a misfire in the disintegration sequence, could have been a mistranslation in the communication modules. Heck, for all we know it could have been a random mutation that triggered an atavistic predisposition for aggression. We won’t know ‘til we get in there.”

She shifted, and moved her feet again, burying her toes once more. She tugged the sheets over her to her knees and curled up against the wall, where the shadows of the bunk above fell across her face and neck. Her next words seemed to catch in her throat. “That we’d gotten it exactly right,” she whispered.

“So where do we go from here?” Britt asked.

“Same place we always go.” Miller closed his eyes as he spoke, as if the weight of the past few hours was all rolling up on him. “We’ll take a look at the logs, pick through the code, find out what went wrong and when, and see what we can do about it. And then we’ll try it all again. Don’t worry,” he yawned, “we’ll figure it out. We always do.”

She swiped.

The screen went dark. No, not dark…blank, but pulsing with the same pale light I had seen in the lab. The afterimages of Miller and Britt faded until they might have only been in my head. More of the pidgin text replaced them. A few to start with, peeking out here and there like the first songbirds after a storm, then more, until they covered the screen as before. But…there was something different about them this time. I inspected them more closely, not sure what I was looking for, exactly, but there seemed to be a sort of pattern that I could almost make out this time around, a sort of rhythm in the chaos of the music of the universe I had half a chance of picking up if I only listened long enough. I took a step towards the screen and squinted for a closer look.

“It’s getting to you.” Her words were flat and emotionless, but they would not be ignored. I stopped in my tracks.

“What is?”

She settled deeper into her corner, as if trying to back away. “The virus.” She swallowed. “It’s getting stronger.”

I looked at Ramsay, then at Banks and Bergman, wondering if any of this made sense to them. Ramsay looked as confused as I felt. Banks and Bergman gave me nothing, as if they had written off her comment as the ramblings of a lunatic. I wished I could do the same.

“God, we were such fools,” she mused with a derisive snort. “We came back with guns a-blazing, throwing everything we had at it like it was a problem we needed to solve…like there was a problem that we could solve.” She rested her elbows on her knees. Her joints jutted out like the knots on a stick of birch. “We even thought we had some answers. We tweaked the code a couple of times and ran a few more tests, and none of them ended like that first test did. Even the first wasn’t a total loss. We kept the survivor for observation, and she got along fine after that. She even started to show some of the brown that Miller coded her for. But by the end of the following day we started seeing things we never could have imagined.”