I didn’t answer. I didn’t believe a word of it, what he was implying. At least, the me in the lab didn’t…I couldn’t speak for the one on the holo. But that didn’t really matter. I wasn’t the one he was trying to convince.

“There’s nothing we can do,” he whispered. “Not anymore. Miller might have been on to something with that new strain he was coding, but…oh, hell, I can’t make heads or tails of it. The language he was writing in, the syntax he was using, it’s all gibberish to me. I never was any good with the bio half of those goddam things.” He sniffled back a tear. “I don’t think it would have worked anyways. I think it’s grown too strong for that. Too aware of what it is, too good at identifying weaknesses, coding its way around and through them, and turning them into untouchable strengths, to fall to just another kill.” He ambled towards the waste bin, moving with no discernable haste. When he got there, he bent, grasped the bottle by the neck, and hefted it in both hands, studying it like unearthed treasure. The fluoros nearly blinded me as they reflected off its surface. “’cause that’s all it really is, in the end,” he whispered, picking at one corner of the label with a bloody, dirt-encrusted fingernail. “Just another type of kill.”

He raised the thing above his head, and smashed it on the edge of the desk.

Shards of green flew everywhere. They arced through the stillness of the air, tumbling on triple-axes like polished bits of asteroid, then fell to the tile in a chorus of tinkling, which sounded louder than it should have without the drone of the Tower’s fans. Britt cut his hand on one as the neck first cracked, then crumpled in his fist, slicing his skin as his grip shifted unexpectedly. He winced, and cradled it against his abdomen, applying pressure to slow the bleeding. The irony was lost on him.

He pawed through the shards with the toes of his wingtips, pulling a few of the larger off to one side.

“You remember why we got into this business?” he asked the me on the holo, as he knelt down and made his selection. A hand-sized piece, with a bit of the base at one end, which he seemed to like as a makeshift haft. He ran a finger over the edge, then held it up to the light, inspecting the slit it had left in the first layer or two of skin. He nodded grimly to himself. It would do.

“A couple of nerds like us?” I answered. “Only way to get some tail.”

Britt laughed. Actually laughed, as far gone as he was, somehow finding humor in the joke that I/he/the nanobots had fired back at him. He always was that kind of guy.

“Yeah,” he chuckled, “you got that right. But seriously…what was it we told ourselves, that night at the bar on Jefferson Street, when you were helping me get over that teacher’s aide from our Poly-Sci class, before we pissed away the last of our paychecks buying those blondes their cosmo-tinis? What was it we promised ourselves?”

“That we were going to change the world someday.”

He stood, and turned to face the holo. “Close…” he said. “You got the gist of it right, but we didn’t say it like that, did we? When our last-call rounds showed up, and we were looking for something to toast?”

No, I said, and shook my head from side to side. We didn’t.

“What did we really say? Word for word?”

A wry smile curled my lips. I remembered that night like it was yesterday. I’d been in my room, “prepping for a midterm” with one of our co-educational friends, when Britt had holled me up, begging me to take him out. He’d been pretty beat up over that one. He had never quite put it to words, but I’d always gotten the feeling that, to him, she was the one that got away. I’d have said anything to cheer him up. The first couple rounds had been sacrificial lambs, consumed in relative silence at the diviest hole in staggering distance, but things had livened up from there. Before long we were slapping each other on the back, bidding her good riddance, reminding each other of all the awesome times we had in store, and sneaking one of the most poorly-officiated games of table shuffleboard I’ve ever been a party to in between hitting on anything that moved.

“That we were going to knock it on its mother-fucking ass!” Once again I found myself mouthing the words along with the me on the screen, and feeling the energy from that night. Everything had felt so…so possible. I’d have given anything to feel that way again.

Britt nodded, and smiled. “Well,” he looked directly at me, head cocked to one side. The image of his face on the holo overlaid perfectly on that of his corpse. His nose, his lips, his brow, his chin, all sat where they did in death, morphing, twisting, and wrapping around his features just enough, and in just the right places, to refute coincidence. His eyes locked mine through the pulsing of the holo. He gestured towards the expanse of the lab. “Mission accomplished, eh?” I couldn’t shake the feeling he was speaking from beyond the veil. In a way, I supposed he was.

He sat back down and began to roll up one of his sleeves, peeling it back from his forearm inch by inch. He rested the shard in his lap as he did, twisting on his pleather cushion so it didn’t poke him in the crotch. “I’d like to think you’ll find a way to stop them,” he said. “Leave them down here, in this antiseptic pit, where maybe, just MAYBE, they can be contained…but I know you too well. It’ll be your ass as well as ours when news of them gets out. You’ll have to send someone. Even if we could still talk, even if you saw me now, pleading with you, praying that you’ll see the truth, you’d still have to send someone. And by the time they make it down here, and realize they shouldn’t have come, it will be too late. Once that hatch is blown…”

My stomach lurched as he confirmed what I’d long since suspected. It wasn’t a surprise, of course. The girl had said it too, and I had more or less believed her. But to hear it from Britt…Britt, who since we were twelve years old had joined my folks on summer trips to our cabin on the shore, who’d roomed with me the last two years of undergrad, once we’d scratched up enough of a bankroll to move out of the dorms, who was the only other soul on the planet that knew just how I’d managed to snag that final spot in professor Englebert’s Applied Cybernetics program, where I’d first had a chance to meet the people who would eventually take us on, who’d been my wingman those first couple of years after we’d joined the Coalition, using his charm to build relationships and open up doors for me to get my ideas out there, who’d been at least peripherally involved in every meaningful success I’d enjoyed in my professional life – who was the reason I was down here personally, instead of ‘sending someone’ like he’d expected – hearing it from him, it somehow felt more real.