Britt’s confusion persisted for a moment, then broke into a slapstick grin. “What are you waiting for?”

Rauch popped the cork and poured. The passed the flutes around, pinching each at its slender stem. The crew accepted them with enthusiastic smiles, like acolytes at first communion.

“A toast!” Britt offered, once all had been served. “To the team, for all your hard work and dedication…to Miller and Rauch, for their innovative programming…to Charles, for keeping us in A-one hardware…and to you, my dear,” he gestured towards the girl, “for picking out that little bug, and making it something we could work with. To the past six months, full of late nights, early mornings, and all of the blood, sweat, and tears that each of us has poured into the project, both if failure and success…to the good people back at HQ, for the faith they’ve shown in us, and for the resources they’ve provided as we’ve stumbled, fallen, and got back up again…to all those that have gone before, paving the way for days like this, the giants upon whose shoulders we are privileged to stand…and, most importantly, to the reason we’re all here in the first place…to the advancement of the science!” Cries of ‘here here!’ and ‘amen!’ were heard amidst the clinking of glasses.

“We’ve accomplished something very special here,” Britt continued, once the furor settled down. “Something our predecessors have dreamt about since the first strings of ones and zeroes stored themselves in vacuum tubes: the ability to interpret impulses in the brain and express as common thought…all made possible by a truly decentralized approach to programming, where anyone from anywhere, whether man or machine, bug or bot, can help drive the next improvement, and shape its own development.” He took a sip of his champagne. His eyes widened as he did, as if something had occurred to him. He raised his glass again, stuttering against the awkwardness of his second toast. “To true open source code!”

The playback dimmed as the celebrants joked, laughed, sipped, clinked, and their way through the rest of the bottle. The bunker buzzed with incoherent chatter. Even Charles, who I’d never seen take a drink in all our years together, put down most of a glass. The mannerisms of one not used to the act, who lets himself get goaded into it for show.

“So when did it all go wrong?” I asked.

The girl paused, her hand halfway through a swipe. “Huh?”

“When did it go sideways?” I repeated. “The playback makes it seem like the breakthrough of the century. How did we get from that” I gestured first towards the party fading out on the screen, then at the killing field the bunker had become, “to this?”

She finished her swipe. The last of the images voided the screen, leaving only ghosts behind. “You still don’t get it, do you?” She laughed a little as she spoke…the sardonic chuckle of a condemned whose only consolation is a perverse sort of pride in understanding their destruction in a way most others have missed.

I shook my head.

She scanned through the backlogs looking for another scene to queue up, then tapped at the air to make her selection. “It’s not the way the virus is coded that caused all this destruction. It’s how we are.”