It appeared, and I said a silent prayer of thanks. It was short. Shockingly so, for something as momentous as the two of them made it out to be. It filled less than half a pane under the system’s default settings. Just a few variables defined, a like amount of dubs and calls, and one logical test to help direct them. There was actually more text reffed out than there was active, documenting Miller’s notes, or perhaps the girl’s, as well as a smattering of arguments that must have only almost worked. And (I said another thanks for this), just a line or two that smelled of Britt.

I got to work. Fingers flew. The display slued sickeningly up and down. My eyes scanned the rows of text, reffed out and otherwise, trying to connect the dots before…well, I wasn’t sure what, exactly. Just before it got too stale.

“Aren’t you going to make a copy?” Ramsay asked.

“Soon,” I said, brusquely, as I swiped through the repositories. I was looking for the original download of the program – the one we would have loaded when we first installed the chambers. It would have been tucked in a pretty out-of-the-way hole in the directory, but I knew where to look. A few swipes, and the right responses to one or two security checks, were all it took to get me there. I opened up and compared it to Britt’s working copy.

Tick..tick…tick…

I fought against the rising panic as I scanned both sets of code, reading, analyzing, using pictures in my mind to imagine them overlaid on top of each other and searching for the differences. I ratcheted back the couple changes Britt had made. “Once we understand it a little better,” my fairy whispered, as I delved into the calls. Its tone was equal parts explanatory and apologetic. And, like me, just a little rushed. “We need to study it in context, see what all of these calls are pulling, and where the dubs are taking it, to know what the switch is trying to do. Then we can transplant it to a host that isn’t terminal.”

It took longer than it should have. Or at least, it felt like it did, as impatient as I was. After a year in administration I had more rust than I’d expected, and I struggled to tap back into that blackhat mindset. Every leap I had to make, every bit of theory or technique I had to try to remember from the time I actually did this stuff, made me want to beat myself, and knock some of the answers loose. Every minute that passed unused, every second I had to waste tagging up to my mnemonics, hit me like a barbed-wire jab. A series of singsongy pinprick needles in my eyes, my ears, my orbital bones, reminding me that I wasn’t good enough and everything was all my fault. My holo actually calmed me down at times, tracing a put I was struggling with, or interpreting a syntax I only knew from deep within my memory, so I wouldn’t have to stop and look it up.

They’re really not malicious, you know…

Then, finally, it was done. I queued it up and scrimped out another portion of the biologic, and transported it to the incubation chamber. In my haste I took more than I should have, drawing jeers from the voice in my holo at my lack of experience with this sort of thing, and questions over how long it would last if used it so extravagantly. I did my best to ignore them, and focused instead on transferring copy.

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“Not much left now,” I said, giving Ramsay an update, more as an excuse to break the silence than anything. I’d been at it for a while, and he’d been waiting patiently.

I ran an integration check. Come on, come onnnnn…

Nine errors.

“Down to single digits!” I announced. I tried to hide my disappointment, and put a spin on it for Ram, but he only nodded vacantly. Something on the hands of his suit had the bulk of his attention.

“Not bad!” my fairy chimed. “We really have to hand it to them. They made more progress than I thought. Miller, in particular, seems to have almost figured it out before he…ah, before the virus took him. And look! He even left some notes on how he’d planned to finish it!” It was getting stronger now. Speaking with more confidence, losing the cautious, probing style of one who barely knows the language. I spared it a look, wondering what images might have accompanied this latest diatribe, but there were none. Just the text of the words it had spoken, overlaid on a field of nothing. That’s different… I wondered, briefly, if mine had not yet evolved to the point of using images. Or perhaps, a darker part of my subconscious thought, if it had passed the point of needing them.

“We’ll just have to be a little more specific when defining the variables, and a little less so when disseminating one of the calls. That way it can…”

“There!” I exclaimed. “That should do it. Let’s run an integration check, just to make sure.”

I swiped the screen with crossed fingers. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseohplease

Seven errors.

Dammit!

I masked my disappointment as best I could, “Well, at least we’re improving. Better is better, am I right?”

Ramsay nodded, but once again it was absent, and wan. I skittered through the code, trying to figure out where they were.

“Check out this argument here,” my voice intoned. It was now a dead ringer for the real thing. No static, no probing, no guess-and-check hesitation that had marked it from the first. It even mimicked the effect of listening to myself internally versus externally, and gave the lines it spoke of mine that rich, melodious quality I heard in my head every time I said two words but never quite showed up on playback. That scared me as much as anything. “The dubs that it results in are loose. It doesn’t know what to do in those scenarios.”

I picked one of the dubs at random and followed it. Everything looked fine. I picked another, and it was the same. I felt the panic rise again. Deep breaths to calm myself, and I tried to find a better way. I failed, and resigned myself to picking through them one by one, following each in turn until I found the one that was out. I cursed myself when I saw it. There was a dub that carried the determinant from the toggling translation, but the variable it tried to deposit back into was defined to hold a different type of data. I made the correction and kicked off another integration test. Part of me knew it was a waste of time – only two of the errors looked like they could have been caused by the overdub – but I couldn’t help myself. “Focus on progress, not perfection.” The voice of my old CoSci professor tiptoed through my holo in its guarded Northern accent. And then, from even further back, the voice of my father, shouting one of those senseless phrases he liked to use, often at the strangest times, “No steps back!”

Five errors distinguished, it read this time. Would you like to view the log?

I nodded, satisfied, and began to ponder how we might address those five. We were on a roll now. I scanned the remaining messages and picked one that looked like it would be an easy fix. Just a couple tweaks to some of the syntax here in one of the calculations, aaaaand…

Click! Click!

Two sharp raps of plastic on plastic interrupted the whir of the console, followed by the faint Ssssst! of air pressures merging. I opened my eyes. Ramsay, holding his head in his hands. Twisting free the helmet of his bio-suit.