“He's hiding something,” snarled Cassandra, slamming a fist down onto the nearest desk top. “He thinks he's got us fooled. We need to be careful in dealing with that thing.”

Keri was surprised. Of all of them, it was Cassandra having the most difficulty accepting what Keri had learnt in the spheres. Keri had expected it would be Anisa, but she only nodded thoughtfully and kept quiet. Cassandra had exploded the instant Keri stopped speaking.

It didn't make sense, Keri thought. Surely Eu had spoken about her past before…

“It doesn't matter what the history is,” said Cassandra, glaring at Keri as if reading her thoughts. “The thing in there has carved its way through person after person to get to us. It killed Jayme. However sorry you might feel for it, it's dangerous. We shouldn't be letting it just sit there, planning its next move. It told you it's coming for the sphere.”

“Hmm, we still don't know how it killed Jayme,” said Andreas from where he was leaning against the wall. “We don't have any idea how it could use a corps to do what it did to him.”

Keri cursed to herself. She hadn't asked, had she? There was just too much to think about, too many questions.

She turned her wrist over and stared down at the scar that ran along its base, the only sign that a corps lay beneath her skin.

“You know something interesting?” said the Programmer suddenly. “The Butcher may well be the only person on the planet who has literally no connection to the AI he seeks to destroy.”

“What are you on about?” Cassandra snapped.

“Well, every other person on this planet had at least some part in creating the code that will become Kai, even if it were an infinitesimal amount. He did not.”

“Some people chose not to either,” said Cassandra.

The Programmer looked nonplussed.

“Who would choose not to? Why would anyone..?”

Realisation dawned, evident on his face.

“You didn't?” he said to Cassandra in surprise, looking around at the others. “Why would she..?”

Something in the way Andreas shook his head made it clear that he hadn't either.

“You too? But why? Why wouldn't you want to have some part, no matter how small, in the shaping of our future?”

“Because it is small, and the cost large,” said Cassandra. “To interact with the code you had to enter the spheres, and we were not going to do that.”

Keri understood the Programmer’s surprise. She would have reacted the same, not so long ago, but she knew the others by now. Of course some of them had chosen to take no part in the great crowd-sourcing of the early AI code, an event that had at that time, in her world, been all that anyone would talk about. It was a point of pride to have added your own little line of code, to have modified a pre-existing one, to have created some small part of what would eventually be the first true AI.

Of course, the machines would then take that code and run it through sophisticated analytical engines that formatted and edited it to the point of non-recognisability, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that you had participated.

It sounded kind of foolish to her now.

“So what are we going to do?”

Keri muttered thanks to any deity that might be listening that Anisa had stepped in to bring the discussion back on track.

“The way I see it, we have two choices,” Anisa continued. “One, we let the aug out and take our chances that he doesn’t instantly rip our arms off and beat us to death with them; or two, we fry the bastard.”

Silence fell in the suddenly cold room.

“I vote for two,” Anisa said with finality.

“Kill him uh… it?” said Andreas after a long pause. “You can’t be…”

“It’s the only way,” said Anisa. “We can’t keep it in there forever, and there’s no way to guarantee it won’t murder us all the moment it breaks free.”

“But what makes you think we have the right..?”

“She’s right,” Cassandra interrupted, voice heavy and low.

“You too?” asked Andreas.

He looked to Keri for support.

What do I do? she thought, fighting the tight knot of panic in her chest.

She looked towards Eu without thinking, searching for some kind of answer there, but the other woman was sitting quietly with her hands folded and staring at the floor, listening intently but giving nothing of her own thoughts away.

“We need to end this,” said Cassandra. “That damn Butcher will chase us to the ends of the earth, and if you won’t give it the sphere…”

Keri couldn’t work out what to say.

Come on, come on. Anything… she thought.

“We vote,” said Anisa.

They looked at her.

“Come on. We vote. Our fearless leader is obviously lost; we need to make it clear where we stand, so…”

Anisa held up two fingers.

“…I vote we end this now.”

Keri looked from one to the other, seeing the brief moment of uncertainty before Cassandra too held up two fingers.

“I agree,” she said.

“This is crazy!” said Andreas. “He’s a prisoner; you don’t kill prisoners!”

“Vote,” said Anisa, cold steel in her words. “Vote, and we see who gets to decide that.”

Andreas threw up a middle finger in a time-honoured manner that made his anger at Anisa clear.

“I vote for the first option, then. We figure out what to do with him in a way that doesn’t involve us becoming killers.”

“Two to one,” said Anisa, turning towards Eu. “What about you?”

“Ah, I vote for the first one, actually.”

This was not Eu, but the Programmer, stood to the opposite side of the group. Anisa spun to face him in surprise.

“Nobody said you could…”

“He can,” Keri cut in, locking eyes with Anisa. “Without him we could never have caught the Butcher. It’s as much his choice as ours.”

A flash of rage passed across Anisa’s face, but with a deep breath and lowering of her shoulders she stepped back.

“Fine,” she said. “Vote.”

“A-a-as I said, I vote we don’t kill him.”

“Fine. And Eu?” said Anisa, turning back to the older woman.

Keri involuntarily drew a step back as Eu looked up. If Anisa’s face had shown flashes of anger, Eu’s face was a raging thunderstorm of fury. Anisa jumped back in surprise.

But it was not Anisa who Eu looked at.

“You idiot,” said Eu, glaring at Cassandra. It seemed impossible that such anger came from such a small frame. “So stupid. You think this is a game?”

“A game?” said Cassandra, and Keri had never heard her sound so unsure. “No! That’s why I…”

“Why you what? Decided you could be the judge? After everything…”

“Yes!” shouted Cassandra, and this time there was force in her voice. “I have to. We have to. That thing down there, we can’t take the risk. I’m doing this for us. For us all.”

“What is your vote, Eu?” said Anisa, stepping in front of the woman and staring down at her.

Eu matched the stare without blinking. She seemed to have grown.

“And you… I thought you were better than this,” said the older woman.

With a sigh the anger drained from her body. Eu shook her head and began to walk away, stepping past Anisa as if she weren’t there and heading for the door that led out of the room.

“I will not vote. That is not something you can make me do.”

With that, Eu was gone. Cassandra wavered, making to go after her.

“Wait,” said Anisa firmly.

Cassandra stopped, though her eyes continued to flicker towards the way Eu had left.

“We decide this now.”

Anisa turned to Keri.

“So, it comes down to you. What will it be?”

She knows, thought Keri. The knowledge was in Anisa’s eyes.

“Come on Keri, just say you won’t do it,” said Andreas.

But Anisa had realised, and Andreas hadn’t.

Keri didn’t know what choice to make.

“Come on,” said Andreas.

“I…” she began to say, but the words hitched in her throat.

“You don’t know?” said Andreas, stunned.

“She never has!” said Anisa. “She hasn’t from the start of all this, that's obvious. She’s a brain-drained tech-head who’s never questioned a thing in her life. The only reason we’re still alive is that for every damn mess she gets us into some unknown… somebody… gets us out, and who knows why the fuck that is. She’s being used, and we’re being used through her.”

Keri's mind raced, a flurry of thoughts and emotions mixing together so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

“You don't get to avoid the responsibility,” said Anisa, advancing on her. “You don't get to float through life inside your tiny soap bubble, not giving a shit about anything besides your own miniscule concerns, and then expect to be able to fix everything when you realise the world outside has gone to hell.”

Anisa was standing directly in front of her now, a physical presence so strong Keri had to fight to keep her legs from buckling. She felt her fists clench, unsure what she was going to do next.

Anisa sighed, shaking her head.

“It's not your fault, I know,” she said, still towering over Keri but somehow abruptly less hostile. “You were born into it, but it's not as if the truth was ever hidden from you. All the answers were there if you had chosen to look. So, now, it's finally time to make a choice: do we kill it, or do we let it go?”

The air felt thick, hot as if the temperature regulators were glitching. Keri felt sweat drip down her brow.

“I…”

Keri would always wonder, in the future, if she truly knew what she had been going to say.

“Why doesn't it move?” said Cassandra suddenly. She was staring at the display on which the Butcher sat as motionless as always.

“What? Who knows? Who knows what that thing is thinking?” said Anisa. “Focus. We need to…”

But Cassandra didn't seem to be listening. She stretched up and forward to look more closely at the screen.

“It's completely still. You’d think you were looking at a picture if you didn't know…”

A gasp from the Programmer.

“What? What is it?” asked Andreas.

The Programmer was pulling up screens of information on the display on his lap, running a finger along line after line of code.

“But if it had done that there should be some kind of recursive pattern in the code…” he muttered to himself as he scanned the data.

“Done what?” said Anisa.

The Programmer looked up, face pale.

“He was in the stickscreen network OS. He rewrote it perfectly, without interruption. That shouldn't be possible…”

As his words trailed off the Programmer selected a single function on the screen in front of him, and the footage of the generator room flickered. The image on the screen remained unchanged, save for one thing.

The Butcher was gone.