A hand on my shoulder brought me back with a start. Ramsay’s. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s…” nothing, I wanted to say. But it wasn’t. It was my oldest friend, who I’d known since I was a boy, dead by his own hand, on a mission I’d assigned, crushed under a burden I should have been able to ease. And, after what the holo had showed, Ramsay knew it. “…part of the job.” The screen released its overlay of Britt’s face, creating a fraction of separation between the two. The Britt on the screen still sat atop the one in the lab, but the sensation of unity, that illusion that the image was somehow bonded to the corpse, liching it with the glammer of life, was gone. Just a body once again.

I sniffed back a tear.

“Yeah,” Ramsay backed off, and let his hand drift to the butt of his gun. He brought it to his side in a ready pose. “And…speaking of?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I gathered myself as the holo, having reached its final scene, phased back to pulsing blue. I considered playing it back again, in part just to see if I could, but I held off. There were more important things. I made my way over to the secondary station, and the chair where Rauch’s body sat. “I suppose we ought to check out that fix Miller was working on. See if we can’t finish what he started.” I touched a glove to Rauch’s cheek, feeling the smoothness of his skin even through the sterine, and pondered the cord around his neck, buried deep within its channel of asphyxiated flesh. Already the idea had started to form, you see. No, I thought to myself. I brushed a lock of hair aside. Not yet. Not until you have to.

Whoosh!

Through the door instead, on our way to the incubation chamber, our footsteps sharp and hollow in the quiet of the hall.

Whoosh!

We entered.

For some time I’d been wondering what the girl (A-something…Alexandra, maybe, or Aileen. But no, it was softer than either of those. Less severe…) had been thinking when she’d grabbed the cyto. It could have been any number of things, from the threat of our impending arrival to the weight of the monster they’d created, to the hopelessness that Britt had felt, that no-way out feeling of inadequacy that left him trapped, alone, and afraid. But somehow, none of that rang true. She was stronger, technically, than Britt had been. Not quite up to Rauch’s level, or even Miller’s, if I was being honest, but her training was current, and she, with her prowess in bio, would have brought a different focus. Together with Britt, or even alone, she could have put up quite a fight.

As we stepped into the chamber, I understood why she didn’t.

The hours had not been kind to Miller. The swelling had spread since he had passed, and now the entire right half of his body was covered in ropes of hostile red. They ran from the cluster that had popped his eye down his neck and back. They ducked beneath the neckline of his undershirt and reappeared at his waist, where his coat had fallen aside and the shirt had ridden past his belt, and again at his ankle, where the snugness of his socks presented them in sharp relief. Half his body had curled in rigor mortis, while the other half lay flat and stretched, held in place by the vines. The flesh beneath them had shriveled and shrank. Gone to feed their growth, no doubt. Gaps had opened in his skin, which draped across his disappearing flesh, showing blobs of greyish red clumped grotesquely on whites of bone. As a result, half of him looked almost normal, while the other half resembled something a year in the ground.

“But…why?” Ramsay whispered. He was visibly disturbed by what he saw. Maybe it was the gruesomeness of the deaths he had witnessed, or maybe it was all the time he’d spent peeping in on peoples’ minds, or maybe it was the threat the girl had made so casually before she’d died, or maybe it was something else altogether, but he was starting to break down. Becoming something more emotional, more human, than the soldier he’d been trained to be. “None of the others showed anything like this. None of them showed so much a scratch! Not from the bots, anyways. Why was this one so affected?” He poked at one of Miller’s legs, as if a probing toe through the boots of his suit could somehow help reveal the answer. The leg turned on its side, exposing a ribbon of ankle as the leg of his pants failed to follow. Skin split like rotten fruit. “And why the hell is it only taking half of him?”

“Why do some get leukemia and others don’t?” I replied, “or the common cold? Maybe he was predisposed. Or maybe it just acted faster on him than it did the others, because he’d worked himself so hard. Or maybe…” I thought back to Miller’s holo, when he and Britt were discussing this same topic. Miller hadn’t quite put his finger on it, but he might have been on to something, “…maybe it really was the gouge Rauch made in his neck. Maybe as it tried to heal, his immune system kicked in, trying to flush the foreign bodies, and they evolved to take control.” I stepped over the pool of fluids and locked in to the console. It was a familiar model. Current technology, intuitive interfaces. Very similar to what we liked to use at headquarters. Its processors paled in comparison to what the Tower’s had been, of course…

Still were, I reminded myself. Don’t talk about her like she’s gone. She still has all the horsepower she did, she just needs a few repairs. Give her those and she’s good as new.

…what the Tower’s were, I corrected myself…but still. The architects that designed the bunker had been told to spare no expense. I wasn’t shootin’ cap guns here.

“I’m not sure we’ll ever know. Haggarty shows what people are thinking, not what they are. If they don’t have a–” I scanned through a few blocks of code, and forgot what I was going to say.

Ramsay sidled in beside me. Noisily. One of his feet velcroed itself to the floor every time he took a step; he must have stepped in Miller’s blood. “Boss?” he asked. “What is it?”

“A nightmare,” I sighed, and shook my head. “Britt, you stupid son of a bitch…” And then, under my breath, “no wonder you offed yourself.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “He fucked it all up.” I threw a backhand at the screen. The system interpreted this as a swipe and sent the display careening towards the coda of the set. I halted it with a dot of my finger. It landed on a call I didn’t recognize, which didn’t seem to do anything critical. “His fingerprints are all over it. Dragging loops, clustered calls, inverted syntax in his definitions. All the shit that made me pull my hair out when we were kids. Look how much he’s reffed out!” I browsed through a series of blocks, which filled the screen with reference blue. “Did he really think Miller wrote that much useless script? Did he?!?” Ramsay just stood there, listening to me rant. The nuances were lost on him. “He must have been at it for hours, trying to figure out how this worked.” I tried to remember the time stamps the holo showed during Miller’s death and Britt’s, and calculate the time between the two, but I hadn’t checked them all that closely. “And balling it up all the while. This is going to take some doing.” I made as if to roll up my sleeves and started to untangle the mess, separating the code Miller had written from the ‘improvements’ Britt had made.

“That so?” Ramsay asked, with a tremor in his voice. “How long?”