The four of them stared as the blinking of the cursor slowed, then stilled, as if it knew its work was done. The girl held two fingers against Charles’s neck, then underneath his nose. She didn’t bother reporting the results. The three of them sat in silence, coming to terms with what had happened. Britt was a statue holding Rauch. Miller slumped, like a tent collapsing, as his adrenaline faded. Only Rauch appeared alert, perhaps wondering if the rest of the gathering was distracted enough for him to…what? His holo didn’t betray any thoughts of escape. Tears welled in the girl’s eyes. She sniffed them back, then realized she was holding a dead man’s head in her lap and eased herself out from underneath him. His skull hit the tile with a soft crack. She stood, knees cracking with stiffness, then helped Miller do the same. The tackiness of the drying blood was audible as he lifted himself from the pool.

“He must mean the kill-switch,” Miller croaked, referring the former of Charles’s final words. There was no need to discuss the latter. “He must have sent up. Or at least, he thought he did.” He picked up a roll of bandages and walked them over to Britt. The cryo mesh, forgotten next to Charles’s corpse, crackled anew as she kicked it aside.

“Only one way to find out,” Britt held Rauch’s arms as Miller looped several layers of cotton around his wrists. He nodded towards the girl, who was using alcohol from the first aid kit to wipe the blood from her hands and wrists, then at Charles’s station. “Do you mind?”

“S-sure,” she choked it out around the remnants of a sob. She tossed her wipe into the trash and swiped in.

Or tried to. The screen remained dark as she sat down. She went through the motions a second time, then a third. Nothing.

“Try the breaker.”

She nodded. For security reasons, the stations were designed without any startup or shutdown protocol that could be activated from the interface. Instead, there was a secondary interface behind the displays, which had to be activated manually. It didn’t actually control the power supply, but it earned the nickname for acting as an upstream control.

She reached around the display and swiped her biosignature. It beeped angrily and refused to let her in. She tried again. More indignant beeping.

Miller, finished now with Rauch’s wrists, joined her and swiped for himself. Same result.

“What the hell?” They inspected the station front and back, but aimlessly, as if they didn’t really know what they were looking for. “Power’ good. Data’s clear. Why won’t it let us in?” He shrugged and swiped again. The girl, meanwhile, pawed at the holo that had appeared as Charles died, as if it might have somehow replaced the hardware on the station, but earned only a degaussing wave.

“I’ll fix it,” Rauch said. He’d struggled only a little when Britt and Miller had tied him up, but now that the bandage was in place he seemed desperate to be free of it. “If you let me go. I can lock in and fix whatever’s wrong.”

“This isn’t a programming issue.” Miller’s gaze drifted towards Charles. It was obvious what he was thinking. Charles had been the mastermind when it came to hardware. He would have been the one to ask.

“But…he told me things!” Rauch squirmed in his chair, causing it to scrap forward across the tile. Nails on a chalkboard. “He put in some special security measures. Last month, after the generator went down. Untie me and I’ll show you what I mean.”

Miller looked skeptical, though he clearly didn’t have any ideas of his own. He and the girl glanced at each other, then at Rauch’s holo. “Bullshit.”

“He did! He was…he was worried that it wasn’t safe, that it might trip accidentally if there was another power failure, and he wanted someone else to know!” Rauch looked over his shoulder, straining to do so against his bonds, and saw what they saw on his holo. It told a very different story. “He DID!” he whined, and thrashed in his chair, hard enough to lift its legs off the floor. Clatters joined the squeals and scrapes. “Don’t believe that piece of shit! It doesn’t mean what you think it does! He didn’t know how to code it to do what he wanted so he asked me to help him, that’s how I know! Let me go and I’ll prove it to you! I’ll show you everything we did, you just have to LET ME GO!”

Miller inspected the cables again. A faint glow could be seen as he knelt into the shaded area behind the display – pale and blue, just like the others.

“Mill?” the girl asked.

Miller depressed the catch on the data receiver and twisted it from its insert. He turned it over in the shadowy light. “Yeah?”

“If the kill-switch got sent…we shouldn’t see the holos anymore, should we?”

Miller blew on the I/O portion of the bulb and plugged it back into its socket. “We might.” He unhooked the power feed and blew on it as well. “It isn’t instantaneous, if that’s what you’re asking. The way it works isn’t all that different than the original code, actually. It is essentially just one more source of mutation, but in a place where mutation is lethal. Not to all of them, not right away…as with any mutation, some will adapt, and some will survive. For a while, anyways. But it will push them, further and further away from the norm, until all of them are over the edge. The kill only goes in one direction, don’t forget. It isn’t random like the rest of the change. Dammit!” he cursed as he swiped at the interface again, and was again rejected. “Why?”

The girl regarded Charles’s corpse, then the holo on Miller’s shoulder. It was stronger now. Almost as strong as Charles’s. “No reason,” she said. “I…just want it to be over.”

“She’s lying!” Rauch yelled. He was almost hysterical now. “Haha, see how YOU like it! She’s lying through her fucking teeth! She’s lying cuz she loooves you, and she doesn’t want to say, but she sees! You’re next! You’re next, buddy boy, and she knows it! We ALL know it!” He hopped frantically in his seat, enough to bring all four legs off the floor for an instant. It crashed back with a metallic clang. “Hehe, but I could stop it. Charles asked my help, you see; I know everything he did. If you just untie me…I could make them go away. I know I could.” He settled down when he failed to extract a response. His thrashing ceased. He focused instead on working the bandages, shuffling his wrists this way and that, trying to loosen what little slack Miller had afforded him. “I know I could…”

Miller noticed his little fairy, now as real as Rauch’s, though not yet as large. He watched it for a few seconds, then shrugged. The novelty was wearing off, it seemed, and after Charles’s had appeared a third was hardly unexpected.

“You won’t brush it off for long!” Rauch continued struggling against the bandages, oblivious to anyone who might be watching. He wasn’t making much progress anyways. “Wait until it starts showing your thoughts to everyone! Wait until you’re on display like a monkey in a goddam zoo! You won’t be so callous then!”

“Sounds like the kind of thing only a sneak like you would have to worry about.” Miller mumbled, allowing himself to be drawn into the argument. The sheepish figure that appeared on his senescing holo showed that he regretted it immediately.