"They haven’t figured out it was a Butcher yet," Andreas said, in the stunned silence. "Of course, they don't know about the data-sphere either. I added that myself. But the guy I spoke to was adamant this was true. Ink-man, he was, sent to the clean-up at the Terminal. He was drinking himself into a hardware crash[1] to forget about it. Lucky, that – I don’t think he was meant to tell anyone, but I bought him a few rounds and got what I could."

“You went to a bar?” said a disbelieving Anisa.

Andreas threw her a sheepish grin.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go, did I?” he said, one hand to the back of his neck in a rueful gesture.

“Well, it’s a good thing he did, isn’t it?” Eu cut in, with a look that subdued Anisa. “Now we at least have some idea what’s going on.”

The room fell into silence as each individual’s gaze was dragged towards the data-sphere in Anisa’s hand.

“Fuck,” said Cassandra.

There didn’t seem to be much else to add.

“So we upload it, right? We put it onto the spheres; there’s no way even a Butcher can smash every server farm on the planet, right? Once it’s out there, that’s it. It’ll have no reason to hunt us.”

This was Cassandra. Keri looked at her in surprise.

“I thought you weren’t a believer in the AI?” she said.

Cassandra stared right back.

“I’m not, but we never set out to destroy it, either. From what I understand, this thing is alive. Will be, anyway. We only wanted to see it, to understand it; we never wanted to kill the thing.”

"L-l-let me see it," said Kilgore.

He had been staring intently at the data-sphere ever since he realised what it was, stammering in his excitement.

Anisa shrugged and flicked the sphere into the air towards him, to gasps from the others. The artificer caught it easily, snatch it deftly from the air. Keri could just about make out his silver pupils, narrow and cold, irising smaller and locked onto the sphere. His corps flashed into life in front of him.

"Fascinating, fascinating," he murmured to himself, reams of data pouring down the display in beams of light, oblivious to the rest of the world.

The group stared at him, until Cassandra broke the silence once more.

"So that's what we do, right? Get this thing uploaded as soon as we can."

Kilgore's eyes leapt from the screen and towards her. He gave a derisive laugh.

"Impossible!" he said. "It's far too large, far too complex. This isn't some line of code you can inject into the data stream via a local port. In fact, I'm not even sure how they managed to fit it onto this data-sphere. It's no ordinary memory storage, that's certain. The compression rates are... well, the layers just get deeper and deeper! Some kind of quantum enfolding technique, perhaps, and enough to warrant years of study in itself, excepting that..."

Kilgore was by now once more staring at the flickering screen and mumbling to himself, murmured words growing unintelligible to the others.

"I guess not, then," said Cassandra.

They stared at each other for a while, at a loss.

"So we return it," said Keri. "We get it back to where it came from. Not the Terminal, of course, but we get it to some Ink-men and let them handle the Butcher."

Anisa nodded.

"That seems to be the best idea. Vista,[2] what a cluster fuck this turned out to be."

She sighed and held out her hand palm upwards for Kilgore to replace the data-sphere into.

Kilgore looked from the display to the upturned hand and back, blinking as if dazed.

"Uh, yes, of... course," he said, display winking out of existence. He slowly stretched the hand holding the sphere out towards Anisa, moving slowly as if forcing its way through thick gel.

Keri saw what was going to happen before the others. It was in the way Kilgore was shifting his weight, almost imperceptibly sidling around Anisa so that he had a clear path to the door. Still, she was surprised at his speed once he made his move. He was out of the door before Anisa had time to do anything more than blink at the space where the modder had been.

Cassandra perplexedly pointed a half-crooked finger in the direction the man had fled, mouth ajar.

"Did he just..?" she said.

"Shit," said Anisa, and sprinted away after the absconder.

She returned several minutes later empty-handed.

"You must be kidding," said Andreas. "Did we just let someone steal what may be the single most important thing on this whole damn planet straight from our goddamn hands?"

Eu was chuckling to herself, shaking her head in exasperation.

"Well, that's that I guess," said Cassandra, wiping her hands together as if in a job well done. "He's in the wind."

A growl made her look up in surprise.

"Didn't you just say you only wanted to see it?" said Keri, fists bunching at the end of arms taut with rage.

"Well, yes, but..."

"But nothing," Keri snapped. "This is your screw up - it's you who will fix it. The damned data-sphere wouldn't be in that nut-jobs hands now if it wasn't for you. All of you."

She glared at the rest of the group.

"Well, technically there wouldn't be a data-sphere if it wasn't for us. Technically, we saved the..." said an unwise Andreas.

His words trailed off as the glare locked onto him and increased in intensity.

"Ok, I guess we go get it back."

Keri nodded in approval and turned back to Anisa.

"So, where can we find him?" she asked.

Anisa shifted awkwardly.

"Well, that's the problem you see. He usually finds us. He's got his peripherals in all sorts of ports[3]; generally uses the public cams to keep tabs on where everybody is, and drops in whenever something catches his attention."

"You don't know anything about where he stays?" Keri said, shocked.

"Not as such. I'll put feelers out, see if any of the other modders can tell us anything, and then..."

Keri stopped listening, trying to keep control of the directionless anger building up inside her.

As if to help, her corps began to vibrate, gently, soothingly. She stared down at the softly pulsing glow, and forced herself to take a calming breath.

"Well fine," she said, voice under control. "You guys see what you can find out here, and I'll do the same online. There's got to be something."

"On the spheres?" said Cassandra. "Unlikely. Modders take pride in keeping their whereabouts hidden from the network. It's like a... a competition or something. And apparently Kilgore is good."

"Well, I've got to try anyway," Keri replied. "Someone may have encountered him, or know something about the modder community in general. I have to try."

“Well, do it in another room. We don’t need to hear you wailing away whilst you’re upstream.”

“She’s a singer?” said Eu, raising an eyebrow and looking at Keri in surprise and evident curiosity.

Keri left them to find somewhere quiet as the others gathered together and began discussing just what the hell they were going to do.

[1] in previous eras he would have said ‘getting blackout drunk.’

[2] There were gasps: even in the more enlightened of times this most powerful of curse words retained the ability to shock.

[3] A more culinary culture would say 'fingers in many pies.'