It was tedious work. Identifying which lines were Britt’s and which were Miller’s was easy. Their styles were night and day. But segregating them was a different story. Every call I tried to reverse, every block of reffed out text I tried to reactivate, brought with it a syntax error, or a recursivity paradox, or some kind of illogical flow, as it tried to talk to the parts I’d yet to fix. And then there were the lines he’d simply stomped over. I had to figure them out by context, looking for the parts where they hooked in to lines that had not been disturbed, to puzzle out what they were supposed to be.

“Hard to say,” I said. “It’s pretty jumbled. I can fix some of it right away, but…Oh, come on!” I slammed my fist into the interface as it rejected one of my edits. “Missing argument my left nut! It’s all there!” And then, turning back to Ramsay, “If I had to guess…A few hours, maybe? To get us back to where Britt took over, anyways. Miller wasn’t finished, don’t forget.”

Ramsay nodded, in a way that suggested that was a few hours more than we had.

“If only I had some way to home in on the juicy bits,” I lamented, “instead of wading through the whole damn thing like this.” I tried another argument set and got the interface to take the code. But it wasn’t right. Just a placeholder I’d dropped in to get around the error. I’d have to circle back and fix it later.

“How do you mean?”

“A mod like the one Miller was working on…it wouldn’t need a total re-write. The bulk of the code would be just fine. At most we should see ten, maybe fifteen percent fresh copy, and the rest should still be off-the-shelf, with a couple of tweaks here and there to make the newcomers feel at home.” I moved on to the next section and re-integrated a block Britt had reffed. The screen exploded with open calls. I cursed again under my breath. “Britt should have known that,” I whispered.

Melissa? No, it was an A-name for sure. But like that…Alexis? No, too rigid…

“It’d be so much easier if I could isolate that ten percent,” I sighed, and began to clear them out. “Then I could just copy it into a fresh vessel and integrate from there. It’d be doubling up on some of the work Miller already did, but a heck of a lot easier than untangling all of Britt’s BS.”

“A fresh vessel?” Ramsay asked. “What does that mean?” He was asking a lot of questions. More than I was used to. He seemed to be trying to distract himself from something.

“You know, a blank slate,” I said, as I cleared the last of the errors and prepared to integrate the block again. “A new strain with nothing on it, instead of the substrates we usually start with. This things’s got all kinds,” I tapped the data house beside the console, “with skeletons pre-programmed into them to help us get our projects going. You think we start from scratch each time?”

“Never really thought about it.”

More errors. Almost as many as before. I banged the console again, clapping it on either side as if it were a head with ears. “Dammit!” I shouted, and then, turning to Ramsay again, “Here, I’ll show you. Maybe it’ll help me figure out what’s wrong with these calls.” I backgrounded the interface and in its place pulled up the list of samples. We had all kinds waiting in the inky’s hold: easy access, designed to integrate with a wide variety of different programs, strong-arms, which, once they were in, were almost impossible to get rid of, and were perfect for running long-range observations, highly virulent, designed to replicate as quickly as possible, and one especially nasty set we called Leeches, designed to consume their hosts completely, and replace them with a parasitic construct of our choosing. Not a set we used often, but it was perfect for testing real-world applications without the risk of the host fighting back and skewing the results. “The library’s pretty standard by now, even among the landed states. Any halfway decent hack knows these things better than he knows his testicles. Picking the right – or the wrong – sample to work from can be the difference between hours and weeks on a project. Of course, we’ve got a few the public doesn’t know ab…”

I trailed off as I noticed one that caught me by surprise. It didn’t belong.

My finger hovered over it, and I checked its vitals in the comment bubble that popped up. One of the more aggressive strains, with a rapid replication rate. Even in cryo, it hadn’t gone completely dormant. The preamble didn’t show enough of the code to tell me any more than that, but I did catch a glimpse of Miller’s name in the header. I couldn’t tell how long it had been in storage. It had last been accessed a day ago.

“What is it?” Ramsay asked.

“I don’t know. It’s…new.” I ran through some of the possibilities in my head. A new template would only be useful if they were integrating with a new type of virus, one we’d never tried before.

That scared me. I’d pulled some strings when the bunker was stocked and had shipped in some strains that weren’t technically part of the project. Not all of them were on the manifest.

“Well, what does it do?”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, with more bravado then I felt. I tapped it open.

It wasn’t really all that risky. No matter how gruesome a form was designed to be when launched, it was harmless without its strain. Opening it up in code was no more dangerous than carrying malware around on a data bulb, or throwing bullets without a gun. My nervousness was more about what might have already been done than what I was about to do.

I scanned through some of the code. It wasn’t easy to make sense of. The style was something I hadn’t seen before…not Miller’s or Rauch’s, and definitely not Britt’s. It didn’t seem to integrate the same way as the others, either. It still needed to hook into its strain, but the feelers it was putting out there, the way it meant to reproduce, they were all so primitive. So, so…

A sickening thought pressed its way into my head.

“Play it back,” I ordered.

“Huh?” Ramsay stared at me, dumb. The stress was starting to affect his responsiveness. I made a note to speak with Hodgkins about that the next time I had the chance. It was unseemly for a soldier in his position.

“His holo,” I said, jerking my head towards Miller. “Play it back.”

Ramsay hesitated, clearly wanting to avoid the holo, and possibly the corpse as well. “But…we saw how he…”

“No we didn’t,” I cut him off. “We saw what Britt remembered.” I zoomed in on a block that looked like it might be telling and began to read. Yep. There it was, plain as day. The language, the hierarchy…there was only one strain known to man this could possibly hook into. Sorry Britt, I thought to myself, looks like you only deserved most of the cursing I just sent your way. “He didn’t see everything.”

Ramsay stared at me in silence, waiting for me to explain further.

“Just play the damn thing back,” I repeated.

Small miracle, he actually did.

Whoosh!

The girl sent up a line of text. The girl, who’s name I still didn’t know

(…Ashley? Or Amber? No, nothing quite so valley girl…)

Not the strongest of the crew when it came to programming, and was there more for her knowledge of viruses and communicable disease than for any prowess with the bots. What was she doing sending code?

“You really think it’ll work?” Miller asked.

She kept swiping, but her holo shrugged for her. You got a better idea? it seemed to ask, as she focused on her other screen, where a colored helix twiddled indolently in a rendered field of blue. She pointed at it here and there, working her way through the nodes she thought she might affect. Her lips twitched in silence, the commentary to her inner monologue as she bounced back and forth between the helix and the code. “It might.”

Miller fingered the bandage on his neck. Just a bandage this time, I noticed. The wound had not yet swelled or reddened as it had in later scenes. I checked the time stamp to see when this one took place: yesterday afternoon, about the time Britt was busy sizzling the Tower. “Remind me again…how?”

She explained. My blood dropped ten degrees.