“See!?” I screamed when it was over, pointing at Miller in his moment of extremis, praying for Banks to understand. “You see what we’re in for if we don’t try? You see what the world is in for? They got it wrong! They set the toggle backwards, and when they shot it into Miller all they did was make it worse! The virus is out there – accelerator and all – and it spreads!” I tried to read his eyes, to see if I was getting through to him, but the glare on his visplate obscured too much of his face. “These suits won’t stop it! They didn’t stop it for us, and they won’t stop it for you either!”

Banks was silent for a moment, and lowered his face behind the eyepiece of his gun, as if to make sure he still had me covered. Ramsay’s holo showed a replay of the scene in Miller’s lab (which wasn’t really Miller’s, I knew, but I was already starting to think of it that way. Sort of an ‘in memorium’ label, to recognize his heroism once this whole ordeal was over) that showed the moments of its genesis, long before Ram had left his suit. Banks watched it carefully, keeping one eye on his prey. “Maybe you were just careless,” he whispered, barely loud enough to hear over the drone of the bunker’s ventilation. And then, sparing a glance at Ramsay, “maybe you both were.”

“Hey!” Ramsay’s voice called out from the glow of his fairy. “I may have been exposed, but I am still commanding here. Show a guy a little respect, huh?” I wondered briefly why his fairy was doing all the talking and, if it was going to be so vocal, why it was so subordinate. Two more tchts! of metal fitting into metal caught my attention, and all at once I had my answer; Bergman had him covered from a position near the entryway.

And, despite the comments from his fairy, Ramsay seemed content with that.

My eyes darted back and forth as I tried to figure something out. No other pieces on the board here. I was on my own. “Imagine,” I pleaded, softening my voice, hoping tranquility might resonate where passion had fallen flat. “Imagine families torn apart as it works its way around the home. Imagine them turning against each other one by one, in whatever order it sees fit, choking, beating, gutting each other in jealous fits of rage. Imagine cities laid to waste as their populations are forced to see all their neighbor’s darkest secrets, hearts laid bare in pulsing blue, until mobs of them riot against each other, slaughtering themselves en masse.” Here I willed the holo again, thinking of reels and reels of towns, empty save for the dangle of corpses lying in their beds, their chairs, crumpled in their shower stalls, wherever they’d been when someone around them had seen something they couldn’t process and wigged out in a murderous rage…slumped over their desks, with pens or pencils in their necks, bled out from their carotid arteries after violent, screen-induced attacks, leaning on their steering wheels with bullet holes piercing their skulls, lying akimbo at the bottom of their final, fatal flights of stairs, shoved by someone they had probably trusted with their lives and the lives of their children before their fairies came to “help”…all dead by either each others’ hands or by some mutation of the vines. Here it showed a single home, where all but one of the family had died, and that one, a teenage girl with advancing symptoms, spent her final hours tending to the others, trying to heal the fatal wounds she presumably had caused. Here it showed the Holland tunnel, choked with wrecked machinery and death, the victims of road rage taken way too far. The drains had run with oil and red. Here it showed an old folks’ home, where two of the crowd had gone berserk and butchered their entire wing, and then, as they were turning on each other, stuttered to a drying-cement halt as the tissues in their joints gave out, and were replaced by swollen chords. In the scene they stood like stones, unable to raise their weapons even one more time, prevented from bringing about the end their holos showed they so desired. Instead they could only stare at the world from the prisons their bodies had become, their agony plain on their faces and holos, forced to endure excruciating hours until the virus made its claim. “Imagine the end of all things!” I yelled, “the extermination of the human race! All because you wouldn’t let us go off-script!”

I tried to peer through Bank’s visplate and evaluate the face beneath. Was I getting through to him? Hard to tell. He was a trained soldier, and not betraying his emotion. What about Bergmann? Maybe…was the muzzle of that rifle starting to droop every now and again? And did I see a hesitation when he re-focused in on Ramsay’s heart? Or had I already gotten so used to reading Ramsay through his holo that I was seeing things that weren’t there?

“Imagine your wife!” I screamed again, not remembering if either of them had one. “Imagine your kids, tearing at each other’s throats like Rauch and Miller! Imagine your brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, shooting themselves full of cytomorph just to rid themselves of it! Imagine them overdosing like Amy, their joints cracking, spine popping, spittle dribbling from their mouths!” I fought the urge to tear off my hood the way Ramsay had, just so I could speak more clearly. I probably would have, if the process didn’t take so long. “Is that what you want?!?” I asked, yelling ever louder. Animal rage clawed at me as my breath overcame the chillers and my visplate filled with fog. My voice cracked as I fought it back. “Imagine them going out like Miller? Their eyes swelling like balloons, skin draped on fissured flesh, arms flailing as those twisted tentacles wrap themselves around their tracheas, and choke them from the inside out! And you’ll just have to sit and watch, and tell them why you let it happen!”

“No,” Bank’s finger twitched again. He had to be putting at least four and three-quarters pounds of pressure on that trigger. “No, that wasn’t the mission. Observe, document, report…and above all, contain. You’re about to send another agent into the air. Another risk we can’t control.” He sighed, and some of his contention left him. But his rifle stayed right where it was. “I see why you feel you have to, but I…I just can’t let you do it.”

“But you have to!” Ramsay’s fairy protested. His voice still spoke with passion and fire, but his face showed none of it. His head leaned back against the wall upon which his body was propped, and his eyes were wide, vacant and glazed. His lips were parted as far as they’d go in an empty, shell-shocked grin. “You have to, and that’s an order! What will happen to us – what will happen to ME – if we just let it run its course?”

“That’s for HQ to figure out,” Banks said, not taking his eyes off me. “They make the calls on things like that. If they decide you’re one of the casualties, well, not saying I wouldn’t die a little inside, but that’s just the way things are. If you were still the real you, instead of the mutated marionette that thing has turned you into, you’d understand.” He swallowed. From somewhere deep inside his suit, I heard his chillers cycle up a gear. His voice caught when next he spoke. “More than that. You’d insist.”