Britt swiped away at the interface, digging deeper and deeper into the operating system. It did not go smoothly. Every other swipe brought up warnings of damage, or pop-up panels requesting confirmation that yes, he did in fact wish to proceed. He pecked his way through all of them. His holo showed the consequences of what he was about to do. With the tower offline they’d have to use the second station to develop and insert another kill, one that would, hopefully, be much more effective with the bots deprived of their evolutionary engine. They’d have to take a different tack, of course. Crack hacker he was not, but he knew enough to realize that. The original kill had actually relied on that evolution, tried to send it spiraling out of control, and use it as the agent of its own destruction. But there was more than one way to peel a grape, as a blue-haired lady I almost recognized in one of the random images that swirled just above his head might say. They would figure something out.

They’d have to.

Deeper he dug, peeling back layer after layer of the system’s defenses. The warnings grew progressively more dire, the requests for confirmation that much more imperative as he probed. Towards the end they were borderline insulting (are you SURE you want to disrupt the temporal memory stabilizer? Are you aware that deactivating the sambal-screen will leave the system unprotected against…and it went on to list a dozen or so cyber-threats Charles would have laughed at backwards) It was a long way down to where he needed to go. The programs that were linked to the bots weren’t the sort that sat near the surface, and could be flicked on and off. They were its very purpose for existing, helixed in with the ones and zeroes that made the Tower what it was. They took some heavy-duty finding.

He reached the final one. Warning: you are about to take STENTASYS offline. All data will be lost. Processing units will de-frame. Probability of hardware damage: 100%. Projected damage level: FATAL. Do you wish to proceed?

For long moments, his finger hovered over the yes option, and I started to hope he wouldn’t go through with it. Or that he had forgotten, or perhaps had never actually known, the way this last bit must be done. But no. He was only gathering nerve. With leaden ingots in my gut I saw him reach into his pocket and pull out a ring of keys. He fumbled around with it until he found the one he wanted. Short and fat, with a sensor glowing on its haft to read his bio-signature, and plastic bittings platforming out from a central core, like the shelves of a death star semi-built. He slid it into a keyhole that was hidden behind the power button, paused, took a breath, and then, with a determined look on his face, cranked it to one side. He tapped his finger on the interface a second later.

The system recognized the dual input and the request to override security. It idled for a moment, cross-referencing them against the clearance matrix and each other, then accepted the command. Britt’s interface minimized. The display dimmed. The lights on the console flickered and died. One by one, in descending order of predominance, the background applications halted, slept, and closed, then erased themselves from the operating system’s memory in preparation of the cleansing. Somewhere, secret breakers closed, and ten thousands volts of alternating current coursed through the Tower’s circuitry. It searched out any repository where program data might be stored and flooded them with all its power, re-initializing their orientation, and scouring away any vestiges of altered-states left behind. They sparked and hissed, and more than a few of them started to crackle as they reached, then exceeded their maximum voltages, leaving most of them melted or seared. The panel from the Tower’s display twisted, warping itself in random patterns, now contracting, now exploding, now bulging in one direction, now stabbing in another, as if struggling against the encroaching darkness. It inverted longwise, shortwise, inside and out, losing ground with every maneuver, until, when it was a tenth of its former size, it froze in place a final time, and slowly started fading to black. Before long all that remained were ghostly sets of afterimages that might have been printed on retina or screen.

In the space of a minute it was done. The display was vacant. The console was dark. Eddies of steam wafted from the vents as the cooling fans kicked into gear. Fluoros glinted off its steel. Its facets ticked as they contracted, its processors now dormant for the first time since the bunker had been brought online. Its framework seemed to almost sag. And, just that fast, a billion dollars’ worth of state of the art hardware, and easily as much in program architecture and software engineering, was so much silicon and scrap, rendered useless by the de facto self-destruct mechanism Britt had just unleashed.

Britt extracted his key and returned it to the pocket of his coat. He put one hand on the console and leaned on it, exhausted, as he wiped his brow with his other shoulder. His lips trembled as he rested. His holo boiled with justifications, most of them hollow, lacking in substance, and reprimands he could expect, all of which were anything but.

He kicked it for good measure.