It wasn’t because the symbols had changed. They hadn’t. I couldn’t have said how I knew this; certainly I had no understanding of their nature, no catalogue to which I could compare. But know it I did. They were the same we’d seen when we’d passed by, not yet an hour gone, on the way to the girl’s chambers. Only now, their meaning was clear.

I played my fingers over them, like a blind man reading braille.

“…nosy little BITCH! She CAN’T get the drop on me! Why didn’t she just stay down?! I wasn’t going to hurt her! I was just looking to put a kink or two in her boyfriend’s windpipe…”

“…could have fixed it. I KNOW I could have. When you find a diamond in the rough, you don’t throw it out just because it has some flaws. You have a master take his blade and carefully cut around those parts…”

“…doesn’t really hurt. Not like I would have thought. Actually feels kind of nice, once you get past the panic. Euphoric. Trouble free. She won’t really do it, will she? She won’t take it all the way? No, no, she won’t have the stones…”

Rauch’s final ruminations. Haggarty must have teased them out through the maelstrom of shock, rage, and fear we’d seen on the girl’s holo, and recorded them here as he’d struggled for his last thin dregs of air.

And I could read them.

A quick glance at Ramsay confirmed that yes, he could read them too. A few of the symbols shivered as we conferred, as if resonating with some unheard tone. Fragments of images patterned into existence beneath them. They rendered the scene in intermittent bursts, like a cold fluorescent sputtering to life.

“Every transmission needs a sender and a receiver…”

Charles’s words echoed in the helmet of my bio-suit.

“…a sender, and a receiver…”

Panic welled inside of me. I could feel it rising as I hurried towards the Tower’s console, flooding me from all directions, spurring me to action. Any action. “We need to find that kill-switch,” I called back to Ramsay as I swiped to activate the interface. “We need to queue it up and get it sent, and we need to do it now.” My mind was a blur. My God, I thought, infected. Ramsey and I both, for sure, and likely Banks and Bergman as well. I shouldn’t have been so surprised. The girl had told us, after all, and she’s the one who would have known, but…somehow I had blocked it out, convinced myself it wouldn’t happen, that we, the cleanup crew, who had played no part in the creation or release of the plague we were tasked to contain, could never be corrupted. It wasn’t fair, goddammit! This was their fuckup, not ours! Even when I realized that quarantine was futile, my concern was for the project, and for the black eye it would leave on the department if we couldn’t keep it under wraps, rather than my personal safety. It wasn’t until I saw those markings, those god-damned gibberish markings that the bots inside of now allowed us to read, that the danger we were in hit home.

“You don’t think they thought of that?” Ramsay asked. I swiped the interface again. It wasn’t letting me in. What is it with these goddamn readers? I thought, slamming a fist lightly on its surface. First the door, then Charles on the playback, now this? Doesn’t anything around here WORK!?! Of course, Rauch was locking Charles out on purpose so that wasn’t a malfunction, but…he couldn’t be locking me out too, could he? I glanced in his direction, at the face that now seemed to be grinning, and that bulging jackdaw eye, but…no, that was ridiculous. It would have released Rauch’s hold on any interface he’d linked the second he lost consciousness. It was coded that way in case someone forgot to disengage before they went to sleep. Piss off a handful of beta testers by having to roust them in the middle of the night because they forgot to sign off before they turned in and they’ll code a safety valve in one hell of a hurry.

“You didn’t see them try it on the holo, did you?” I snapped, more violently than I’d intended.

“We didn’t watch every minute,” Ramsey said. He had sauntered over to Britt’s holo and was now paging through the text it held with one hand. The other he held on the butt of his sidearm. Whether because he genuinely perceived a threat or merelyfor the comfort of its familiarity, I couldn’t have said. “I’ll bet that’s the first thing they tried, once the kid was out of the way.”

Ramsay wasn’t exactly here for his technical knowledge, but he wasn’t stupid either. He’d picked up a thing or two. Of course that’s what they would have done.

I felt my swiping slow. The reader wasn’t yielding anyways.

“So…” I started to ask how he thought it went, but caught myself. The answer was all around us. Real fear jetted through me. Not for the project, or my career, or at the thought of a run of Saturday nights lost to cleaning up this mess, but fear for my life, and the lives of everyone I knew. This wasn’t just a random strain that necessitated the annoyance of the decon systems, or an outbreak in a distant land I could deal with in cold equations. This was an epidemic. It was real, it was close, it was deadly, and we did not have a solution.

I exhaled, deeply, trying to calm myself down. We had to think rationally if we were going to address…whatever it was that we decided needed to be addressed. “What do you think they tried next?” I finished instead.

Ramsay paged back a few times more. The symbols on Britt’s holo, dormant not as long as Rauch’s, were already morphing into images and more dynamic views. “Why don’t you come take a look?”