I paged through the rest of the scene. Britt spent some time at the console, possibly trying to finish the work that Miller had started, possibly just trying to understand it. I couldn’t quite tell, because the view had shifted, and now showed Britt from far away, too far away to make out the code he was flitting through. I wondered how the bots had managed that. And how they chose which view they’d show.

“…agent of change. Nothing more, nothing less…” Miller’s words echoed in my head, followed closely by Rauch’s from the preceding days, “…it’s just trying to do a job…a job that we told it to do!” I studied Britt’s waxen face through a clear spot in the holo. Must be what they thought he would have wanted.

It didn’t matter, I supposed. They had shown what they had shown. And it didn’t really matter what the Britt on the holo was trying to do. He was a powerful wrangler of men – there was no one else I’d even considered to lead this team – but he hadn’t kept up with the science the way I had. He still coded like we did in school. Anything Miller had started would have been beyond his abilities.

My skepticism proved justified. Britt grew more and more frustrated as syntax errors and compatibility whiffs buzzed him from the console’s screen. According to the time stamp skipping along in the corner of the playback, he lasted less than an hour before he gave up, spine hunched and shoulders sagging, and tromped away in disgust. A trail of bloody heel-prints followed him all the way into the hall.

I moved to swipe the holo forward again, but this time, I didn’t have to. It skipped ahead on its own, once, twice, three times, four, pausing briefly between each jump, letting the playback queue itself up just a little bit. Almost like it was probing for it, testing to see if it got it right, before it skipped ahead again. It settled on the next part of the scene I felt I had to watch.

That sent a chill running down my spine.

The playback started.

“…of course I do,” a voice was saying. “Every hour of every day. That’s what they pay us for, after all.”

That voice.

For the second time running, Britt’s holo caught me flush with a hard right hook. I expected to see Britt as he prepared to take his own life, and perhaps to learn a thing or two about what he and Miller had accomplished, but that voice…that voice was mine.

“Yeah…” Britt chuckled. “But do you ever really think about what we’re doing?”

“You mean cybernetic weaponry?” I asked. “Britt, you old snake! You’re not going candy on me are you? Not after all these years?”

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“No,” Britt said, “nothing like that. I’m sure anyone who gets in these things’ way deserves everything they got coming. I just meant…”

I remembered that conversation. It happened three, maybe four months ago, early in the bunker’s life, shortly after one of the team’s first real wins, when they had stabilized a smallpox/nano-cyborg that had been de-commissioned the previous year for being too unpredictable. Things had gotten kind of broad. A few celebratory pours of bourbon may or may not have been involved.

Britt was re-enacting it. He was speaking his lines to the emptiness of the lab, and letting his holo fill my side.

“…I just meant, what gives us the right, you know? To play around with stuff like this? We take these things that have shaped themselves over thousands, sometimes millions of years, and cram our tech right up their asses.”

“Yeah?” I leaned in closer on my conference table, goading him to carry on.

“I dunno,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t help but think that if it was meant to be, it would already be, and we should just leave well enough alone.”

“Go suck yourself off!” I hooted, “you are going candy on me! This is science, not theology.” I took a sip from my latest pour. “Take a look around you,” I gestured at him through the holo, and the Britt in the lab actually did, even though the lab was not where he’d been sitting when the conversation actually happened. “All of that stuff you use every day of your life…this com-line, for instance, or the interfaces in your office. Or hell, even more basic than that, how about your tools, your clothes, your shelter your food…how much of that was ‘meant to be?’”

“That’s different,” Britt said. “Those things are dead, lifeless. They were meant to be shaped. Meant to be used.” Here he mimed taking a drink, as he had in real life at that point, even though there was nothing in his hand, and his visplate was in the way.

“Not your food,” I argued. “That was alive. Most of it, anyways. Clothing too.”

He set down his tumbler / glassless hand and nodded, conceding the point. “Still…this feels different, somehow. These things are alive now, while we’re working on them, pumping them full of primordial ooze and changing what makes them what they are. Sometimes…I don’t know. It just feels strange sometimes.”

“Ha!” I downed the rest of my drink, and slammed the glass back on the table. The thwack! it made as it clapped against the marbled oak echoed through the interface. “Then it’s a good thing they put me in charge! If it was up to candy sons of bitches like you we’d still be squatting in our caves eating the fruit that falls from the trees!”

Britt sighed, and traced a finger around his imaginary glass. He hadn’t done that in real life. He had laughed, I remember. Laughed sipped again, I thought. “But, honestly,” he asked, “when you think about it…would that really be so bad?”

“Not at all!” I chuckled as I reached for the bottle, and poured myself another finger. I never was the type that liked an empty glass in front of me. “Just do me a favor…let me be there when you tell your wife. No, no, actually, let me save you the trouble…let me be the one to tell her!” I made as if to holoscreen her, smirking coyly at Britt as I did.

“Ha,” Britt chuckled. “Very funny. But seriously, what if that’s…right? I mean, what if that’s how things were meant to be?”

I shook my head in an exaggerated arc. “Nope,” I snapped. “No way. Don’t give me that, ‘meant to be?’ bullshit. Meaning is relative.”