"Paper beats rock," Smooshy whispered.

"But rock beats scissors," Alan said, hushed.

"And scissors beats paper," Viral added.

The three of them stood outside Agent Treyna's hotel room on the third floor of the Ramada. It was Smooshy's idea to play rock-paper-scissors to see who had the misfortune of waking Monica in the middle of the night.

"This is why I proposed a round-robin," Alan said, "You can't play this game with three people."

"A best of three round-robin between the 3 of us would have taken us until sunrise," said Viral.

"Oh, and this is so much more efficient," Alan countered.

Smooshy stomped her foot and hectored in a stern shush, "Will you two keep your voices--"

"What the duck are you doing?" Agent Treyna asked.

She stood in the doorway wearing a periwinkle men's pajama suit buttoned to her neck. Her hair poked sideways from a short ponytail fastened near the back of her head.

"We were hoping not to wake you," Smooshy said, apologetically.

"You came up to my floor to get handsy outside my door at 2 in the morning NOT intending to wake me up?" Treyna asked.

"Well, we hoped to eventually wake you..." Alan sputtered.

"But we were too scared--" Smooshy started before Monica cut her off.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," she said. Pointing to the three of their hands still gathered between them, she continued, "Paper beats rock but scissors beats paper. RPS protocol says comparison proceeds clockwise from paper."

"RPS?" Alan asked.

"Rock-paper-scissors," Smooshy clarified.

Monica put her hand up. "Score one for team XY," she said. She removed her hand before Smooshy's could meet it, turned to Viral and said, "Scissors, talk."

Viral cleared his throat, looked from Smooshy to Alan, both of whom encouraged him with widening eyes. "Um, is it all right if we come in?" he asked.

Monica stared back with a stone face. Finally, relenting, she said, "Don't say I didn't warn you."

Monica closed the door to her room behind the three of them. "You can come out now," she called.

From inside the closet, Viral heard Officer Avril's voice. "But they're still here," he said, plaintively.

"Stay in or come out, it's your call," Monica said, "But they're not leaving."

"I'll wait," Avril said.

Monica dropped herself back into bed, propped a pillow behind her back, crossed her ankles and opened her arms. "The floor, it's like yours and shit," she said.

Viral, Smooshy, and Alan shared a look. Smooshy nodded her chin toward Viral. "Scissors," she said.

Viral sighed, then inhaled deeply. He relayed to Agent Treyna the details of Gyn, Aleph, and Plank's discoveries -- that the Wuhan 1 strain of what had come to be known as Covid-19 was most likely an amalgam between two previously known zoonotic coronavirus strains, one from humans and one from bats, and that the Wuhan 1 spike protein contained 3 mutations which may make it decidedly more effective at infecting human cells.

Monica stared back blankly. "So?" she said.

At Smooshy and Alan's encouragement, Viral continued. "So there's reason to believe a) that this pandemic is not the product of a naturally occurring virus, and b) someone out there open-sourced a sick ML algorithm that Plank just happened to find."

"I'm hearing only good things," Monica said, checking her vape for juice.

"What Viral's suggesting," Smooshy said, "Is that someone may be playing Plank to spread misinformation about the spike protein's topology."

"Because..." Monica said.

"To throw us off the scent," Alan said.

"Avril, time's up," Monica called, still lost in the details of her vape."

"But I can still hear their voices." he said from the closet.

"Too bad. You're on the clock."

"Son-of-a..." Avril said as he pulled open the door to the closet. Smooshy covered a grin with her hand as Avril stepped out wearing booty shorts and an ironic t-shirt that read foxy.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"What the--" Alan began, but Avril cut him off.

"Don't start, Tianemen," he said.

"Escort Alan and Emily here back to their respective quarters. I need to have a word with Chodha," Monica said.

Avril asked, "Can I change first?"

"The bet was for the whole night," Monica said.

Clenching his jaw, Avril motioned for Smooshy and Alan to follow. As the door to the hallway closed behind them, Monica said to Viral, "Have a seat."

Sitting on the tossed comforter of the bed beside Treyna, Viral asked, "What'd you mean you were only hearing good things?"

"What's that," she asked, reaching into the drawer of the nightstand.

"I said a) the virus may not be organic, and b) Plank found a suspiciously efficient ML algorithm that cross-referenced the virus with others of its kind, and you said you were only hearing good things in that news," Viral said.

Monica stuck the tip of her tongue out the corner of her mouth as she measured the salt-nic pineapple Juice Head into her vape pod. "Are you familiar with the phrase 'need to know'?" She asked.

Viral nodded.

"Well, you don't," she said.

Viral's shoulders fell inward. He wrung his fingers together in his lap. "Well, what did you want to talk to me about then?" he asked.

Monica slipped her vape into the chest pocket of her pajamas. Tenting her fingers, she exhaled. "How are you holding up?" She asked.

"What?" Viral asked, taken aback my Treyna's candor.

"Your spirit, your self-esteem," she said with air commas.

"I mean, I'm fine, I guess," Viral said.

"Feeling okay?" Treyna asked.

"A little tired," Viral said.

Monica nodded. "Yes, it must have been a couple twenty-fours since you got some rest," she said.

"The adrenaline's been good for that," Viral said.

"So you're scared?"

"More excited," Viral clarified.

"That's good because I'm going to need you to step up now," she said.

Viral cocked his head, unsure of what Monica meant.

Leaning toward him on her hip, she said, "The AI is out of the bag. If what you're saying is true, that Plank used an open sourced machine learning algorithm to verify mutations on the spike protein, then we have even less time than I had planned for."

"Less time for what?" Viral asked.

Monica leaned forward over the edge of the bed and removed a folio from under. Unwrapping the thread around its body she pulled out a deck of papers dog-eared at their edges. She tossed the stack toward Viral who caught them at his knee.

"Those are the logs we could salvage from Tyler's hard drives and SSD's after he doused all his gear, " she said. "As you can probably tell we haven't been terribly successful."

Flipping through the ream of pages, Viral recognized bits and pieces of python code from various libraries. He couldn't find any comments in the code that a third party could use to make sense of the architecture. Here and there he saw calls to functions he recognized, some to transform matrices to tensors, others to flatten arrays. But the holes in the text were too significant to deduce any larger framework or intent.

"I brought you here to fill in those gaps," Treyna said.

Leafing through the pages, Viral shook his head. "Not possible," he said.

Monica tapped her ear, as if to ask him to repeat himself.

"I mean," Viral went on, "What's left is the most basic, the boilerplate for any kind of system. The heart of Tyler's algorithms have been cut out."

Treyna reached for the papers, Viral handed them back. Licking her finger, Monica began to turn through the stack. "Nothing in here can point you in any kind of direction?" She asked.

"I wouldn't say nothing. What could help would be knowing what problem Tyler was trying to solve," said Viral.

Monica pinched the bridge of her nose, sighed. "You know the history of Tyler's family?" she asked.

"Vaguely."

Monica unspooled the saga of the Osterhauf family tree. Starting with Tyler's grandfather, who emigrated to the United States from Germany between the great wars. A humble plumbing business in Providence grew to include trucking and iron casting throughout the Northeast. Tyler's father, upon graduating from Harvard in the late sixties, assumed operating jurisdiction of the family business. While working he earned a masters in Chemistry from Princeton, and following America's withdrawal from Vietnam, pivoted his family's company to the manufacturing of the herbicide purchased by the CIA to cull plantations in Central America used by guerrillas to fund Marxist militias.

The windfall from the operations, Monica continued, ingratiated the elder Osterhauf to the military industrial apparatchiks, who had become enamored with the freedom struggles of a tiny group near the Hindu Kush called the Taliban. The elder Osterhauf had watched with ignited rage as heroin swept through America following the return of troops from the fall of Saigon. However, in the endless poppy fields of Afghanistan he recognized a fiduciary imperative. The psychopharmacology wave had been mounting in the West, and in his expertise in chemistry, the elder Osterhauf saw his company's next gambit.

In close concert with the defense department's own scientists, the elder Osterhauf tendered an under the table deal that sent arms to the Taliban in exchange for raw opium specially earmarked by the military for experimental use. The supply became the base of the Osterhauf family's generational gamble, to go all in on the manufacturing of a proprietary opioid pill called Roxydol.

Unfortunately for the Osterhaufs, another family business from New York had managed to corner the market on prescription opiates through an unprecedented, direct to physician marketing campaign of their proprietary pill called Oxycontin. The gamble came up bust for the Osterhaufs and the family business declared bankrupty in 2005, just as the young Tyler was matriculating for his freshman year at Brown.

"So Tyler was a student at our college?" Viral asked.

"After 15 years he had yet to finish his thesis for his doctorate in mathematical computing," Treyna said.

"Why would you be watching him?" Viral asked.

"Because he was a top recruit by the Pentagon to join their next-gen engineering initiative," Treyna said. "It was my job as an FBI rook to vet Tyler for preliminary clearance. He needed a background check to even show up for the interview. He failed spectacularly."

"Was it drugs?"

"Yes, but his recreational use of propanolol attracted less attention than his obsession with ransomware. The dude could not keep from locking federal employees out of their accounts."

"That seems like an arbitrary fetish," Viral said.

"It was all fun and games untill he started asking for crypto and peddling his services to the Russians. Something about solidarity with Edward Snowden," Treyna said, dismissively.

"Why the need to come in guns blazing?" Viral asked.

"Tyler provoked the wrong people when he hacked into Joe Biden's Twitter account. A couple of memes and he would have been fine, but his drive to legitimize Tulsi was just too much for the higher-ups to stomach. When his malfeasance tripped an internal bureau alert, I jumped on the assignment because I had an ear to the ground that told me Tyler had machine learning models connected to synthetic ribonucleic acid polymerase."

"Artificial RNA?"

"Yes, and the technology to mutate codons"

"I don't understand," Viral said.

"In dum dum terms," Treyna clarified, "Tyler Osterhauf had the tech to edit viruses without access to biological stock."

"So what, he could just make a disease out of math?"

"Boy George," Treyna said, "I think the freshman's got it."