Miller made as if to argue. His holo, certainly, wanted him to. Why should I listen to you? it asked. What’s your rank worth here? With the com-lines smashed, with no HQ to back you up…what difference does it make who they put in charge? But the girl grabbed him and led him away, with a glance at Rauch’s bulging eyes.

Miller lost his balance as he wobbled through the whoosh-ing portal. The girl, looking less and less like the sanguine go-getter from the start of the mission and more and more like the strung-out scarecrow that had cytomorphed herself, caught him, and with some effort managed to keep him from falling. He looked worse than ever here. The redness had crept further up and down his neck. It now bridge the space between the collar of his shirt to the corner of his eye, and it had swelled with a malevolent heat. She helped him down the hall.

Both of their holos showed them caring for the other, nursing each other back to health with chicken soups and mugs of tea, and both were filled with the gratitude-cum-relief of knowing that whatever was going to happen here, at least they were together. Miller’s even showed hints of arousal, that crude, instinctual urge to procreate that never quite leaves the mind of males. But it was faint, buried deep in the baser portions of his consciousness. Every other part of him knew he was in no condition to act on them.

Britt watched them go. If the interplay disturbed him, he didn’t let it show.

My hand shook as it hovered over the screen. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to see what I knew was about to happen…what Britt was about to do. But I had to. I had to know what he had tried, if there was one more measure he had taken, one last desperate heave before he let himself collapse.

With Britt’s cold, lifeless eyes staring at me through the holo, I swiped one final time.

It showed me Miller, oddly enough. Miller, not Britt, in the incubation chamber, slaved over an unkempt pile of coding panels scattered about the station there. He was barely recognizable now. The redness from his swollen flesh now covered half his face. It wrapped around one of his eyes like some sort of hideous mask, puffing it to nearly shut. The rest of his skin clung like papier maché to the framing of his skull. The fluoros seemed to shine right through it, illuminating tendons and veins, showing them pulsing in sharp relief within the translucence of his skin like a sort of living X-ray. Hair scattered about the floor in strands and drifts where it had fallen from his scalp. I could see the discs of his spine even through his shirt and coat.

“I told you to get some rest,” Britt’s voice said, from somewhere out of view. “You’re killing yourself.” He said it without emotion, a simple statement of fact.

Miller touched the redness around his eye. Tenderly, as if it caused him pain. “No,” he croaked, as he studied his reflection in the steel of the console. “I’ll press on. If we don’t figure out this switch, I’m as good as dead already.”

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“You don’t know that,” Britt said. “That swelling…it could be anything. It could just be infected…”

“It didn’t respond to treatment.” He fingered bandage, still showing traces of green from the ointments that he, or perhaps the girl, had applied. It looked pitifully undersized, now that the wound had swelled beneath it. “We tried everything in the kit.” He coughed into a balled-up fist.

“Thrombosis, then,” Britt offered, “or some kind of allergy…”

Miller’s good eye stared directly into the fourth wall. Really? That stare seemed to ask. The pupil of his other eye danced around inside its slit, trying to make itself useful beneath the twitching of its lid. Don’t make yourself stupid.

Britt seemed to accept that. “But no one else is showing symptoms,” he said softly. “Why would it only come after you?”

Miller turned his palms up, slightly, and shrugged as best he could. His range of motion was impaired noticeably on his affected side. “Just lucky I guess,” he said, with a smirk, and sidelong glance at the fairy on his shoulder. It showed a couple of his theories. He had been exposed the longest, of those still alive, anyways, so it had had more time to work on him than it had the others. Or maybe something about the gouge Rauch had given him accelerated its advance. Took advantage of a window created by his body’s own defense mechanisms as it tried to heal the wound, or something like that. But they were only theories. In the end, it didn’t really matter why.

“Well,” Britt said, voice gathering a shred of the authority he had lost over the past several hours. “That doesn’t mean you have to help it along. You should rest, and let us figure this thing out. You’ve got to be half mad by now.”

A crescent of white opaqued the bottom of the holo, as if fogging over from his breath upon a visplate. Was he wearing a biosuit? The view yawed slightly as Britt leaned forward, then back again. Glares from the fluoros arced across the screen in ways only plastic could have caused. Yeah. I was pretty sure he was.

Looking at the swelling on Miller’s face, I could hardly blame him.

“No,” Miller coughed again. He turned his back to Britt, hunching over the station like some sort of gargoyle, when his abdomen convulsed in another fit. It lasted longer this time, and it sounded raw. He checked his fist when it was done, as if he thought there might be something on it. There wasn’t. “No,” he choked when he had breath, “it’s got to be me. I was there when it was born. I’ve been working with it longer than either of you, and diving deeper into the code. If there’s any chance at all, it’s mine.” He fingered the interface, moving some of the lines around in a way that was almost nostalgic, after all the work he’d done with the advanced interfaces of the Tower. “Besides,” he said with another smirk, “being half mad…it might be the only thing that works.” He sent up his latest change with a wiggle of his finger. The system whirred, and its not-quite-state-of-the-art circuitry incorporated it into the sequence. “So I’ll keep at it, if you don’t mind. So long as they will let me, anyways,” The display updated to reflect the request. The new code nestled in amongst the old, fitting into the gaps that had been created as neatly as a key in a lock. Miller nodded, satisfied, and brought up another section. “I think they will,” he mused as he scanned the new block of text. “They’re really not malicious, you know. I…I still believe that. Deep down.” He touched his face again, tracing the tentacles of red with a ragged fingernail. He didn’t seem to know he was doing it. “Even though I’m trying to neutralize them, and there’s no way I can keep that secret, I still think they’ll work with me. They’re agent of change, at the heart of things. No more, no less.” He found what he was looking for on-screen and hunched back over the interface, queuing up his next modification.