Alice had put her blazer back on and rubbed her hands together vigorously, trying to force sensation back into her fingers for a second attempt outside the cabin. Robert tapped away at his keyboard, preparing to write out the firmware update to the last portable drive in their combined possession. He stopped typing.

"Look, you don't have to go back out there. We tried it, you almost died, and so far all we lost is a thumb drive and a door."

"True, but our bad alternative has only gotten worse. Without the door, when this thing goes down it's going to sink. And then we're stuck in the middle of chilly water far from shore with no hope of rescue. I don't want to go back out, but I don't see that we have a lot of choice."

"Maybe I could try?" Robert choked out, voice faltering. Alice noticed he'd stopped breathing.

"I'm two inches taller than you, and it was already a reach for me. Plus I've been spending ten hours a week in the gym for the last fifteen years and it was still hard. No offense, but I don't think you're up for it."

Robert exhaled, visibly relieved. He ejected the thumb drive and held it out to her. She took it carefully, their last hope of survival.

"Also you're the one who knows the helicopter controls - if anything goes wrong we need you in the cabin." Alice shrugged off her jacket again and got back down on the floor. "Okay, same as last time, give me a quick tug on the leg when the install is done."

And with that, for the second time today Alice prepared to exit an airborne helicopter. Having already dropped her once, Robert seemed to have gotten over his shyness and was bear-hugging her legs.

She moved decisively this time, only moderately impeded by Robert's grasp. She quickly shimmied out over the edge, then contorted her torso to bring the port hatch in reach. She brought her arm around gently and felt the drive partially socket on the first attempt. Carefully and with a steady grip, she pushed it home. Over the whine of the rotors she heard Robert shout excitedly.

Back in the cabin output scrolled across the screen. Robert watched his script swiftly execute, transferring over the payload that would give them control of the aircraft. Done! He gave two quick tugs on Alice's leg to let her know she could come back in. Abruptly the install screen vanished and Robert was once again looking out over the English Channel.

Alice pulled the thumb drive and started working her body back into the cabin. It felt harder than last time, seemed to be getting progressively harder in fact. It was then she noticed a sound she hadn't heard in hours. Silence. The rotors had stopped spinning. Frantically she tried to scramble back, but the floor quickly became a wall as the combined weight of the two passengers tipped the helicopter on its side. And then they were weightless, a freely falling mass of inert machine and doomed coworkers.

The rush of air built to a roar as they picked up speed, wind from their descent whipping around them. Alice realized first-hand what it means to "brick" an aircraft while flying.

Then she remembered the emergency parachute Robert had mentioned. When did he say it would open? 2000 feet? 3000 feet? Either way not a lot of time. She needed to get strapped in pronto.

Robert was still hugging her legs - she kicked lightly and he released her. Then she doubled over, reached up, and pulled hard on the rope to hoist herself back into the falling craft. Alice had never spent time weightless. Other execs had gone up to tour the orbital extraction facilities, but she'd had a board meeting. Perhaps if she'd gone with them she wouldn't have overshot so badly in her current maneuver.

Without anything resisting her pull she shot up toward the opposite side of the helicopter. Panicked, she grabbed at the lap belt still wrapped around her legs, but there was too much slack into it. At least she got her left arm up before slamming hard into the glass door.

Smarting, Alice spared a glance back behind her. The water was closer now, she could even make out a few small craft cutting wakes in the distance. She maneuvered herself back into her seat and began the urgent and awkward task of buckling in under zero g. Finally her harness latched with a satisfying click.

Robert had grabbed on to her seat's safety handle and was clutching it with white knuckles, panic in his eyes. She shouted at him to be heard over the rushing air, "STRAP IN BEFORE THE CHUTE DEPLOYS" Robert looked at her like a deer in headlights, precious seconds wasting. "NOW!"

The spark of intelligence returned to his eyes. Alice held out a hand to help him back to his seat as quickly as safely possible. He fumbled trying to orient his body in the chair, straps never quite where he expected them to be. Then came a loud BANG from the back of the helicopter followed by the fluttering of fabric.

"Too late for him," thought Alice as she braced for the force of the parachute opening. It never came. She looked back over her shoulder. Rapidly falling up and out of view was the parachute assembly, a spider's web of raggedly cut chords trailing behind it.

Oblivious, Robert continued fussing with his harness, unaware of their impending doom. He had snagged his laptop and was clutching it to his chest like some kind of talisman, leaving only one hand free for the once vital act of buckling.

Alice stared forward in defeat, then felt an odd serenity wash over her. This wasn't her fault. With that defective parachute, her life was over the moment she stepped into the helicopter, all she'd done was to move the timetable up an hour. She had dutifully tried everything she could, and now she was finally out of options. In a way her imminent death was freeing; for the first time in years, there was nothing she should be doing. She watched with detached interest as the waves filling the right half of the windshield grew closer and closer.

A three chord chime filled the cabin, interrupting her reverie. The cabin lights blinked on and the display over the windshield sprang back into existence, blotting out Alice's view of the sideways rushing ocean. Rows of white text marched up toward the ceiling in a blur, then stopped. At the bottom of the output was a blinking command prompt:

Restart complete. Update Successful.

>

She looked to Robert, saw the glimmer of mad hope in his eyes. He pinned his laptop down with one hand and began frantically pecking away with the other. New words appeared on the screen as he hooked into the helicopter's controls.

Attaching to process...

Process attached, awaiting input

>>> rotors.update_speed_pct(70, true)

Gravity returned - Alice felt herself pressed back into her seat as the rotors sprang back to life. The craft was still sideways though, they were close enough now that she could watch their shadow skid crazily across the water. Robert tried another command.

>>> autopilot.stabilize()

At once Alice's weight shifted as the horizon tilted back into its proper orientation. They were falling slower now, and most of the lateral movement had stopped. More typing.

>>> autopilot.set_speed((0,0,0))

They finally stopped falling. Alice looked out her open door and saw lacing on the waves. They were hovering about 30 feet above the grey-blue water, by some miracle still alive.

"Can you kill the transponder?" asked Alice.

"Huh? Why would we do that? Now that we've got control we're going to want corporate to know where we land this thing."

"Are we? I think someone just tried to kill us."

"What? No. The firmware update forced a restart and it took all the systems offline. I should have anticipated that, but it wasn't -"

"Not that, the emergency parachute. I saw it deploy."

"Impossible, if it deployed we would have felt-"

"Someone cut the chords, Robert. Someone who knew we were going to fall."

"Shit." Robert turned back to his keyboard. "Alright, it's off, and I killed all our network links for good measure, we're running dark now."