Ten minutes later. I’d gotten nowhere. Sheets of gibberish, laced with red, filled one half of the display. A four-color helix spun about within the other, twisting this way, then that, depending on which part of the sequence I was interested in at the time. It rendered the selected nodes in sharp, crisp slats and spheres that shone a few lumens brighter than their unselected neighbors. In my weaker moments I imagined them a xylophone, coiled by some incredible force, waiting for Maestro to come and play the music of the universe.

Melanie? Could that be it?

I’d tried to pick through some of the errors, but it was an exercise in futility. There were so many of them, and they were all so goddam strange…

Gattaca dispersion immobilized. Cannot compile consequent inputs...

Empty recursivity observed. Correlate values or redirect determination…

and, my personal favorite:

Invalid conjugation…

Gee, thanks. Big help there.

No, dumbass, it starts with an A!

I couldn’t even prioritize them. Normally, when faced with a sea of red, I could pick out one or two root causes, and work on those first, and in so doing clear up huge clumps of follow-on errors all with one correction go, but here I was flying blind. I had no idea which were Britt’s, which were Miller’s, which were mine from the work I’d done since I’d locked in, and which were inherent in the template itself. All I really knew was that, at some point, a team of the Coalition’s best pathologists had worked in secret to engineer an organism that the girl

Ahmed? Is that even a name? No, that sounds like some embattled Arab, ready to rebel against any government you could name, not a fresh-faced bio-tech from the heartland of the Coalition.

believed could neutralize the Haggarty, if it was customized correctly, and that with Miller’s help she'd somehow gotten something to cohere. Whether it was right or not, whether it had been adjusted the way the hacks that wrote the thing intended, or cobbled together bit by bit through the painful process of trial and error, I could only guess. I wanted to believe they’d done it right, of course. Certainly, the playback had made some convincing arguments. But this was the fate of the world we were talking about. I had to maintain professional skepticism.

If only I could isolated it, I lamented again. I needed to know what Miller had been working on, and how it differed from the template I had found. If I could do that, maybe I could figure out what the two of them had missed. Or, if Miller had already figured it out, carry it through to completion.

Allison? No, that’s way off. Wrong mix of vowels and consonants, emphasis on all the wrong syllables…wait a while, go back a couple. What was that last thing you said?

The worst part was, I knew what I was looking for. Sort of. I knew Miller well enough. He wasn’t what I’d call a stranger to women, but he was no Casanova either. He’d always been a romantic, who truly believed in the concept of love, and if he’d ever been asked, I’d’ve bet any money he would have said that every girl he’d ever been with had seemed like the girl, at least for a little while. Given the nature of the code and how the two of them developed it, and given the way he was starting to feel (whether it was the beginnings of something that could have been everything or just a case of cabin fever was anyone’s guess, but that hardly mattered now), there was only one thing he would have named it.

Ah-Melanie? No, that’s retarded. No one names their kid that. But it’s close. As stupid as it sounds, that’s the closest one yet…

If only I could just remember what that was! If I could do that, I could search the index and isolate the lines he’d written, and pluck them out of this labyrinthine mess that Britt had left…

“Ah-MEE-lee-ah.”

A voice behind me sounded it out. Slowly, syllable by syllable, enunciating each phonetic like a kindergartner learning to read. My voice. Speaking to me through my fairy.

Amelia.

It took a moment to register. I stood there, stupefied, trying to process what it said. It was all just so unlikely, so freaking impossible, that this mystery, which I had spent so much time building up inside my head, and these past few hours of torture I had put myself through trying to remember, could be over just like that…that those six little letters synthesized into existence by that shaking, probing, Number-Johnny-Five version of my voice could possibly have held an answer, that at first my mind refused to hear.

Amelia, you little shitbomber!

My fingers figured it out first. They swooped up, down, up, and down again, searching for it in the indices. Then the rest of me caught on, and flicked to activate the Seek.

“There,” I said, as it highlighted the relevant index. “The Amelia Determination,” it read. Just like it was supposed to. Good old Miller, my fairy whispered in my ear. At least someone’s doing what they should.

I tapped twice, drilling through to the code itself.