“What are you…”

“Sorry boss,” he said as he levered it up and over his head. The sterine flap that draped off the back dragged through his hair as he lowered it in front of him, picking up streaks of sweat from his sodden curls. “I just had to know.” He set the helmet on the console, resting it on the curve of its visplate to keep the gasket off the surface, and peeled the suit down one shoulder. He then grabbed the sterine covering one of his hands with the other, tugging the grips of each of its fingers until his arm was free of the sleeve. He lifted it up through the neck hole.

“The hatch,” he explained, as he turned it over in the air. “When Bergs and I heaved the lid. This sterine… it insulates well, but that was scorched titanium we were dealing with. I must have caught an edge.” He showed me his hand, palm to the ceiling. An ominous sear crossed three of his fingers, and the pad of fat at the base of the fourth, in a band about a quarter-inch wide. “It got me pretty good.”

“Ram, I…” But that’s as far as I could get. The sound of the atomic filled the silence while I tried to think of something else to say.

“It’s OK,” Ramsay said. “I’ve suspected for a while. It…it just wasn’t feeling right. Wasn’t healing the way it should.” He sloughed off the rest of his suit, shimmying out of it bit by bit as he pushed it down against his sides. Like a snake might shed its skin. “Like I said…I just had to know.”

“Ram,” I tried again. This time I at least found something, even if it was hackneyed and trite. “If there’s anything I can do…”

Then keep your fool mouth shut, because I’d already be doing it for myself, my holo finished. I stopped, not believing what I’d heard. It was so unlike me, so not what I wanted myself to think, but I turned my head and there it was, on the screen, in the same emotionless lettering the goddam thing had used from the start. My blood boiled with hatred for the thing.

Ram didn’t react in any way that I could see. He just kept peeling back his suit. “Just finish it,” he whispered. He stepped out of the pile of sterine, and, with a series of halfhearted kicks, shuffled it across the floor, where it nestled in a blood-smeared heap against the base of the console. One of its sleeves stuck in the puddle of Miller and dragged out behind the rest, like the chain of an anchor stuck in the ground. He bent, peeled it off the tile, handling it like a sock worn several days too long, and flung it towards the rest. “Finish it, and let us end this. One way or another.”

Two hundred and Twenty-seven errors distinguished, the display announced. Would you like to view the log?

“Fuck off!”

I pounded the console and stared at the screen. There was no way. That language had been right, goddamit! There was no motherfucking way!

Fury arced through frazzled nerves, taking over my

(you have to fix it have to fix it have to fix it have to fix it just one change so you can fix it have to fix it NOW!)

head and my holo. My first instinct was to re-set the call to the old, archaic language and reverse the damage it had done, but…no, the fairy had been right. The adjustment had been necessary. There was something else going on.

Tick…tick…tick…

It taunted me in my confusion, reminding me what we had seen. I scanned through the errors, trying to figure out the pattern, and understand why this one minor rearrangement caused such cataclysmic failure. I paged up and down at random. My eyes darted to every corner of the screen. I flipped back and forth between the list of errors and the code, as if one or the other might magically correct itself from that action alone. There were some similarities, I noticed, but…

(sigh)

I fought down some of the urgency, forcing back that tilting, needling demon of a presence that insisted it should be so easy, that kept asking what was wrong with me that I couldn’t fix the lot of them with another simple re-write of another couple of lines. That prevented me from slowing down and doing what was needful.

Tick…tick…tick…

I sighed again, and, one by one, began to chase them down. I tried my best not to think about Ramsay as I went about it. I tried not to think about the

(tails)

energy it took to scorch titanium, or calculate the heat that must have transferred, even through the sterine, when a couple hundred pounds of force pressed a corner into his skin, or guess at how much damage such might do at a cellular level. I tried not to think about that damage healing itself, about the damaged cells dying off, and making way for new. I tried not to think about all the little dents and dings a body accumulates over the course of a day, a week, a month, even in a job like mine. I really tried not to think about what I had seen on Miller’s holo, that last

(wriggling)

chilling scene that had both guided and scared the living shit out of me at the same time, and tried not to dwell on how few days – how few hours ago that scene had taken place. All these things I tried to avoid, because trying to avoid them all, even though I knew I

(like sperm at an egg)

couldn’t, was the halo of distraction I needed to ignore the thing that really scared me, the thing the outposts of my mind had to watch for, and keep away from the inner camps so they could focus on the code.

This one here, the first of the errors…it doesn’t look too tough…The results of their determination, now that the call was working correctly, had just created a language mismatch when it passed the resultant on to the next link in the chain. All I had to do was change the scope of this bit here, and invert the testament of this part there, and we should be back in business…

I especially didn’t check my fairy. I told myself it wouldn’t matter, that it had no reason to change its stripes, and was still showing text alone, as it had since it had first resolved into more than a degaussing blur. But I was sure it knew I didn’t believe it. I was sure it knew that sooner or later my resolve would tremble, when the code defied me, or something outside startled me, and I’d turn my head, just a fraction, and peek at it sideway from the corner of my eye. And when I did, I was sure what it would show me: Ramsay’s hand, plain as day. Ramsey, with his palm extended, showing the stripe across his fingers and down the pad at the base of his thumb…and I also knew, if I looked closely enough, or if it sensed a chance to do so, it would show me the whipcord flagella of pulsing crimson I had seen struggling from the edge of the wound.