At first I wasn’t sure it took. The girl had been able to do it. Even Britt, in his playbacks, had somehow managed some control. But I had no idea how. Part of me scoffed at the notion that I might be able to play it back by merely wanting it to happen. Part of me screamed that there must be some trick, and that the Haggarty, as bitchy as it had been thus far, would never let me take the reins. But, as I lay there on the tile, staring up at Banks’s rifle, I didn’t see another way. So I willed with everything I had.

It dragged for a moment. I’m not sure quite how to describe it…even though it was static text, changing only when another thought or another memory forced itself into my head, it somehow slowed, and skewed, then caught itself at choppy intervals, as if deciding whether or not to accept this new source of input. Rifts opened in the screen. Not blanks, or spaces, but tears in the display itself. Only not really tears, because I couldn’t the lab behind them. They were simply gaps of nothing, places where the world just wasn’t. Like seeing through to time itself.

Then it caught, and scraps of scene began to flow. The rifts began to knit together, healing like a time-lapse wound. Before long it was fully rendered, and the words began to come. Banks, Ramsay, and Bergman’s eyes drifted curiously towards its image. Banks’s rifle wavered as his focus was diverted.

Easy as they made it look, I thought, as the playback began in earnest. Those same six words ghosted their way across the background.

I felt a twisted sort of pride.

“You really think it’ll work?” Miller asked.

The girl – Amelia now, I supposed – kept swiping, but her holo shrugged for her. You got a better idea? it seemed to ask. “It might.”

Miller fingered the bandage on his neck. Just a bandage this time. The wound had not yet swelled or reddened as it had in later scenes. “Remind me again…how?”

Amelia pulled another sequence and began reviewing it in detail. “They really didn’t tell you, did they?” She smirked over her shoulder, a hint of flirtatious one-upmanship in the gesture.

Miller smiled a fraction of his beatific smile and shook his head no.

“Ha!” she gloated. “Didn’t think so!” She highlighted one of the longer passages and rearranged several of its arguments. “Don’t feel bad. They didn’t tell me either. But in my line of work, it’s always kind of on your mind, you know? Back in school we couldn’t get through more than a couple of rounds without the topic coming up at least once.” She traced her finger back and forth over a section of text, excitedly, as if she might have found what she was looking for, then frowned, dropped it, and moved on. “I thought they might send it down it us. If the rumors are true, anyways. It’s part of the reason I took this post, actually.”

“You had a choice?” Miller asked. Also with a hint of flirtatiousness…but just a hint. They both appeared to understand that that part of their relationship was on hold at the moment.

She started to say something in response, which looked be of course I did, or something similar, but she caught herself. “Well,” she said, with a nervous flick of her eyes back towards her holo, “that too.”

“So?” Miller asked. “Is it what you were hoping for?”

“I think so.” She paged down another block of text and resumed her study. “I haven’t found the smoking gun yet, but…”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“But you don’t know?”

“No. I don’t.” She eased away from the interface and rubbed the back of her neck for a moment, turning her head this way and that and working out some of her kinks. She sighed. “You always think it’s going to be so easy, you know? You’ve spent so much time talking about it, heard the theories and the origin stories, and had this idea in your head for years how the thing would have to look, maybe even argued over it with your roommates after a couple pitchers of sangria,” a subtle tilt of her head let Miller know there was nothing hypothetical about that last comment, “and you just think you’re going to know it on sight. But then they you see a thing like this, and everything about it looks so strange, and all of a sudden there’s this doubt. But I think this is it. The language is so foreign, and the coding is so…so gapped…I can’t imagine what else it might be.” She traced another line or two, then shook her head and snapped her fingers. Miller’s holo couldn’t help but show how cute he thought that was. “It’s not another bot, you see,” she said, and she resumed her scan. “Not just another bot, anyways. There are mechanicals involved.” A few strands of hair had fallen into her eyes; she blew them aside, and then, when that failed to clear her view, brushed them back and secured them with the clip from which they had escaped. “The rumors on their origin are rangy. Some say they were another top-secret projects, not unlike the one we’re on, where a handful of carefully selected Participants found themselves cloistered away in some hole in the ground, not unlike the one we’re in, and they pounded it out day and night for months, or some say years, on end. Some say they were a random thing that happened in a lab one night, when a tech or a hack or someone like that had worked themselves too hard and slipped, dumping just the wrong code into just the wrong petri dish and whammo! Someone’s miracle was born. Some say it was just some guy in a basement, not of the Coalition at all, tinkering around with specimens he’d picked up on the black market…though these, I think, are just attempts to explain why the cover-up was ineffective. No one less than pissing drunk ever spoke of them with credence. But one thing all the rumors agree on: the result was the world’s only true cybernetic organism.”

“The world’s only?” Miller asked. “But how can that be? The things we’re doing here…I mean, we’ve made some incredible leaps since we’ve been down here, don’t get me wrong, but the concepts have been around for years. What do you call those?”

“Hybrids,” she said. “Forced conjugations of opposites that, while they may never realize their potential without their better halves, can exist just fine on their own. These are different. They aren’t coupled with their viruses, they are their viruses, and their viruses are them. The rumors, at least the ones I chose to believe, had them laying code and helix side by side, zero by zero and one by one, nucleic acid by nucleic acid, in such perfect tandem that the finished products had no host or insert, no ‘bot’ or ‘virus’ halves, but instead were single, cohesive organisms, as integrated as you or me.” She drilled down another layer, giving Miller a chance to process, but he wasn’t getting it. “Think of our stuff as a cluster of single-cell organisms,” she continued. “They can accomplish much more as a team than they ever could alone, but they are, in theory, free to choose their actions, and strike out on their own if they think it will help them thrive. Now think of this new type of organism as the cells of, say, the fingers on your dominant hand. Assimilation is all they know; they are integrated into the organism of you. There is no sense of self for them, zero thought of thriving solo. All their programming and all their structures meant for individual survival-slash-reproduction have been suborned, and replaced with supportive, cooperative aims. That’s the kind of transformation we’re talking about here. And that’s why there are so many gaps in the code…they’re placeholders, sockets waiting for the plugs only the helix can provide. Without them, this whole thing is just one big hanging call. That’s why were in the inky instead of the lab.”

“Ah,” Miller realized, because our sample’s already been inoculated.”

“Bingo,” she tapped a finger in his direction. “And…there’s one other thing the rumors agreed on,” she said. ”They can’t infect living flesh.” She paged through several blocks of text at once, far too quickly to be reading, letting that one dangle for him. He took the bait.

“Then what the hell good are they?”

She paged back up, apparently realizing how much she’d skipped over, and buried herself in the first few lines. “That is, they can’t infect flesh directly. They infect other viruses.”