The woman next to him smelled like bread. Splayed across the armrest that divided her chair from Viral's, her elbows pinned Viral's little wings to his chest. He felt like a guest in the woman's house.

He picked at the gunk collecting beneath the nail of his thumb. His tongue ran up against the stale grime on his teeth. It'd been a minute since he had showered, he realized.

He heard the woman's stomach growl at his left. "Excuse me," she said.

Viral offered her some pretzels from the snack pack he'd gotten from the vending machine.

"I thought you'd never ask," the woman said.

Her name was Delorean and she came every other weekend to see her son at the Howie Young Correctional Center. Viral hadn't known the etiquette of jailhouse waiting rooms so he let his stomach knot around the question of what her son had done to run afoul of the law. Delorean must have been able to see the anguish in his face of a question unasked because she offered without prompt that her son was in for selling Powerade outside the Walmart on Route 9.

Viral hadn't known that was a crime. He'd sold lemonade once at a white friend's house in Aurora when he was 9 years old; heck, he had just bought cookies from a Girl Scout outside a Kroeger in the fall. Delorean laughed softly, smiled, and then frowned. She told Viral that some rules just kept changing for some people.

When Delorean had finished the last of Viral's pretzels she let a little hiccup burp escape. Viral was becoming impressed with her body's capacity for music. "What are you in for?" she asked him.

"Oh, I'm not...I'm..." How had she known he was a held man? Viral looked at his hands, he tried to smell beneath his arm pits. What was it about him that spoke as loudly as Delorean's G.I. that he was no longer an upstanding citizen with a record as pristine as a wash basin in a high end hotel?

"It's just a joke," Delorean said in her best Octavia Spencer. Her elbow nudged Viral in the pectoral.

Viral relaxed, smiled. "Oh, right. Because we are on the outside of the..." Viral motioned toward the metal door that separated them from the inmates.

"You don't have to explain it, hun. I said it."

Viral nodded. "I'm here to see my roommate," he said.

Delorean shook her head; she understood. "Your first time?" she asked.

Viral told her about how he'd been interrogated the day before.

Delorean grinned and snapped her finger. "Oh shit," she said, "The Prisoner's Dilemma."

Viral told her he didn't understand.

"You said you're in college, right?" She asked.

Viral told her yes, that he was a freshman.

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"And you don't know the Prisoner's Dilemma? What are you studying?"

Viral told her computer science.

"Okay that makes sense then," Delorean said. "You're one of those types that doesn't take the social science classes then writes the algorithms that are racist because you don't understand the history of structural oppression."

Since he didn't know what the last four words she said meant, Viral had no choice but to agree. Guilty as charged.

Delorean sighed and scratched at the roots at her forehead. She shifted in the plastic seat, hugged her white leather purse closer to her hips, and cleared her throat. "The Prisoner's Dilemma is when the police bring you and your boy in for questioning, and they tell each one of you that they know you did the crime. All you gotta do to get off scott free is to admit to it before your buddy does."

She looked down at Viral waiting for a sign that he understood. When none came she asked, "Do you understand?"

Viral didn't. "I get the prisoner part," he said, "but what's the dilemma?"

Delorean squinted. "Wha?" She said.

"The dilemma. What's the hard choice?"

"Well, I mean, if you rat on your friend he goes to jail."

"And?"

"Well, the dilemma is that if you don't rat on him and he doesn't rat on you then you both go free."

"But regardless I go free?"

"Okay, I see where you're confused. No, if your friend rats on you before you rat on him then he goes free and you go to jail."

"No, I get that part," Viral said. "I just don't understand the moral quandary. I rat on the friend then I go free. My skin's too soft for prison. I don't think I'd be allowed to moisturize."

Delorean touched her chin. "Shoot, I think you're right. It's not that you go free if you snitch, it's just that you get less time. You still go to jail if you snitch because you admit, by ratting on your friend, that you are an accomplice, ipso facto," she said.

Viral considered what she was saying more deeply. Had Monica brought him to meet Lron to force some sort of conspiracy charge? Would she be listening to their conversation? Was there anything he could even trade in exchange for his freedom? What was freedom, anyway, when he had no home to go to and his only friend, Lron, was behind bars? Smooshy, Monica, Allen, Gyn, and her jugs were really all he had since he couldn't travel back to Illinois. Were they his sentence or his salvation, he wondered. What if there wasn't a difference?

Delorean's whistle pulled Viral from his revery. "Ooo boy, that is one heavy question," she said.

Viral apologized for thinking out loud.

"It's okay," Delorean assured him. "I thought you were going to be one of those booksmart dummies but now I'm seeing that you're one of those overthinking neurotics who either cures cancer or blows up people with bombs after writing a treatise about technology ruining humanity."

Though he felt her comments were oddly specific, Viral could get behind the germ of her conclusion. He was crazy, his father's son after all, and could go either of two ways, both extremes with no reasonable center. It was either kill or cure. Viral thought the choice his gut would make when faced with such stark options would be quick, decisive. It bothered him that he wavered.

"Well, is there?" He asked Delorean.

She looked off toward the wall, chewed the inside of her cheek. "I don't know, grasshopper," she said. "I think you have to ask yourself whether you want to give or get."

Viral followed her eyes to the wall. He saw a clock mounted above a glass panel where he'd given his name. The clock's second hand moved smoothly, there wasn't any tick tick tick. It was a hot knife through butter. A shark stalking, sliding through the sea. Time indeed was a killer.

A buzzer from the metal door sounded. A guard in blue nodded at Viral. His time was up. It was time to face the reaper, the reaper he called his friend.

He pushed himself up from his chair, careful not to nudge Delorean's elbow. "What are you feeling scared of?" She asked him.

"That he'll be mad," Viral said.

Delorean whistled again. "Oh shit, you been had made up your mind. Ain't no dilemma here. Cold-blooded," she said.

Viral smiled the smile of the damned. Maybe he was a dead man walking or maybe he was just a dead man dead, but one thing had become as clear as the 125 fps on his Tomb Raider 2 download from Steam. It was to kill or cure, and Viral had the sinking feeling that to do one may require him to do the other.