“What?” Rauch’s eyes shifted to Miller, leaving Charles for the first time since their standoff a moment ago.

“Is the kill-switch ready to load?”

Charles swiped at his screen, shuffling a couple panes back into the active pile. He checked the kill-switch code that emerged at the top of the deck. He nodded.

“Then do it,” Miller ordered. “This has gone on long enough.”

“But…you can’t!” Rauch complained.

“Sure we can.” He emerged fully from his stupor of the past half an hour or so. “Charles?”

Charles hesitated, looked towards Britt for confirmation, got it, then nodded again. “You got it boss,” he said, and re-engaged the panel.

“But this is a scientific breakthrough!” Rauch pleaded. “A quantum leap for the field! Sure, there’re a few things wrong with it, but when aren’t there? We can work on it! We can fix it!” The blobs on his holo continued to resolve and morph. There were three of them now that stood out from the others. Two thinned vertically at the sides of the screen, while the third panned horizontally across the upper portion.

“Doesn’t matter,” Miller breathed. “It’s a rogue. It’s out of control. Who knows how long before it mutates enough to survive the kill.” He slid off the desk on which he’d been sitting and shambled towards Charles. To help with the upload, no doubt. “I can’t let that happen.”

“But…it’s not malicious!” Rauch screamed. “It doesn’t mean us any harm! It’s just trying to do a job…a job that we told it to do!” The blobs resolved further. The two on the sides took on a vaguely sapien shape, while the one near the top continued to stretch, but in one direction only. All three roiled with the same chaotic energy that had possessed them from the beginning. “You can’t kill it for that!”

“Watch me.” Miller reached the place where Charles sat, and laid hand upon his shoulder. “Yeah,” he whispered, watching Charles queue up the packet, “good. Just like that. Now find the insertion point…no, a bit further back. It has to disrupt the basest sections of the code.”

Rauch’s eyes flitted from one to the other, then at his holo, then to the Tower, and the mess they’d left at the base of its console. His breathing quickened. The skin on his forehead glistened with a filmy sheen of sweat. The shape at the top of his holo, which could no longer be called a blob, at one end sharpened to a needle’s point, and at the other smoothed into a blunted cylinder, with half-moon indentations up and down its length. The two on the sides became distinctly human – one on the small side, hunched and thin, the other muscular and hearty, a warrior in his prime.

“You got it,” Miller coached, “right there, where it first aligns the arguments in the Colavita sequence. That’s where it has to go.”

Two of the shapes snapped into focus. The decrepit figure on one side, now clearly Charles, cowered before the warrior, now clearly Rauch. The third began to move, gravitating towards the warrior-type, but it remained indistinct, continuing to probe and flex as it ghosted across the screen. The girl’s attention oscillated between Rauch’s screen and Charles’s, unsure which deserved it more.

“Nothing fancy now, eh?” Charles mused, as he dragged his sequence into the hopper. “Just send it up and let it do what it does best?” Miller patted Charles on the shoulder and worked a nod into a sip of coffee.

The third shape elongated further. The sharpened end slimmed to its own distinct cylinder, much narrower than the other, and took on a metallic sheen. Cutouts appeared in the pointed tip, forming it into an X-shaped taper. It snapped into focus as it reached the warrior-Rauch’s outstretched hand…a screwdriver. It fit into his grasp, clashing utterly with his bestial aura, as the figure strode across the screen.

The girl noticed a second too late.