Dr. Reese didn't reply to me. It had been twenty minutes and still nothing. He was a lone researcher with a heavy focus on computer technology and electrical engineering. The idea that he wasn't the type to be glued to a terminal at all times seemed unthinkable to me. Fuller's news that some of the researchers had been abducted by Foundation echoed through my mind. I worried that he had been one of those unlucky few. He had downloaded and analyzed a lot of data directly from my implants, after all. Perhaps he'd seen too much. I hoped that I was wrong, that he was simply so immersed in something that he didn't have the presence of mind to reply right then, but I had a bad feeling about it all.

I had checked the packet traffic, and the message was still sent to Venus's relay node and accepted by a target machine, so his terminal was still there, but was he?

Staring at the empty messaging application wasn't getting me anywhere. I sighed silently into the core lubricant and decided to go on to my most anticipated check-in. Agatha, the teenage core tech genius, was probably my favorite friend I'd made on Venus. I hesitated though. If she didn't reply, did that mean they took her? Would they disappear a minor, even one as knowledgeable as her? She would be a valuable asset for them if they got their hands on her...

There was only one way to find out. I typed out, 'I don't suppose you're up for a match?' and sent it along.

I breathed a sigh of relief when less than a minute later, the typing symbol appeared at the bottom of the chat history. 'MERYLL!' popped up on the screen, followed quickly by 'Holy shit, I wasn't sure if I was ever going to see you again!'

I smiled wide, glad to see her safe, 'Do people expect me to go down easy or something?'

'Yes! You're a fragile wimp! At least without your big old starship. I'm pretty sure I would win if we got in a fist fight. Fuck, I think a stiff breeze would win.'

Ouch. Blunt as ever, it seemed. 'I'll have you know, I've endured a few windstorms since we last talked.'

'Ooh, tough girl. Where did you go?!'

'Somewhere between worlds. I might be confident in my encryption, but I'm not gonna leave a record of exactly where I'm at on anyone's device, especially yours. We're not exactly the most popular group to the people in charge right now. I heard you had it rough for a bit back there too.'

'A little.' She started typing for a while, and I glanced over to the network traffic manager to watch Aisling and Shaw going about their business for a few minutes while I waited. 'Things got scary when gunshots started going off. Hope all your friends are okay. I heard some of the security crew died. Mostly assholes, but they still died, you know? Then Foundation came poking around. I had to delete the data I got from you, and then you know what I had to do? They came knocking on my lab and I had to think quick. I hid in a growth tank! Filled it up and everything. I guess they thought I was just a developing clone. It's really floaty in there. I'm sure you get that feeling all the time, though.'

'We had some injuries, but none of our crew died. Barely. And I'm in the core module right now, actually.' I smiled a little. She was too clever to be caught. 'Did you have to breathe liquid?'

'Hell no! I had an oxygen mask on. Growth tank's different from core module, liquid's not breathable. Also isn't supposed to be something you want to soak into your skin unless you're a developing clone. Thankfully I didn't have to be in it long enough for accelerated cell development to kick in, but I did have to break the tank to get out. Expensive machine. Worth it, though. Knowing what they did with you, they probably wanted to 'recruit' me.'

'I was thinking the same thing. I was afraid you weren't gonna pick up.'

'Bah, I'm tougher than you are, that's for sure. I'm not going down that easy.' She was a firebrand. Tougher than I expected, and I already had an idea that she would be a fighter before all this. Maybe not a soldier, but a tactician and survivor.

'Well, I'm glad you're safe. I've been through some shit since then, too. I met a couple of my sisters, and they are... dangerous.'

'For real? So like... more living clones?' she asked eagerly.

'Yeah, it's a really REALLY long story, one I still haven't completely remembered. Bits and pieces of it are falling together, though.' I paused for a moment as I had an idea. 'By the way, do you know if it's possible for a core to manipulate a machine network without an implant?'

For the first time, there was an awkwardly long pause, the typing indicator appearing and disappearing several times before she answered. 'Technically?' There was an even longer pause just the same before she continued, 'I mean, if they're already coded to operate as a machine core, they could send junk data into their network, but none of its going to make sense to its machinery. They're also not coded to try without the implant, that would probably just break something. Why?'

I guessed that that made sense? With my limited knowledge of the tech, anyway. 'So what exactly does the implant do for us cores, anyway? I mean, I know it lets us network, but like... how?'

Another thoughtful pause. 'Well, in layman's terms, it's a translator. It's an interface that translates neurological interactions to machine code and vice versa. It lets a brain communicate with computers by acting as a middleman so they can make sense of each other. I'm surprised you haven't figured this out, how much you use it.'

That didn't quite answer my question, though. I rephrased what I was after, 'So theoretically, if my brain could perform that translation for itself, it would be possible?'

'I... guess?' She answered immediately. 'But no, that would be impossible, though. The human mind can't process data like that alone, we're just not built that way. Or are you saying you can do that?'

'I don't know. Like I said, I'm still piecing some things together. It's not like I can just take it out to try. Long story short, there's a lot more to psionics than anyone thought there was. Like, things that should be impossible. One of my sisters could literally see the future.'

'You're fuckin with me.' She declared immediately.

'No, for real! She used it to find us in wild space! Several times! We were way out of range of any kind of comms and they Just dropped in right on top of us like we were a gravity well sending off an emergency broadcast!'

'Yeah, that's actually not possible. Once is a highly improbable coincidence, twice makes no sense. You're making shit up. They must have tracked you some other way.'

'I think you can appreciate just how sure I am that there were no 'tracking devices' in my systems. I wish I was making this stuff up. Another of them can move stuff with her mind, no physical contact needed, and I'm not certain yet, but I think another one I haven't met yet can do something to manipulate emotional states.'

There was no response for a few minutes, not even a typing indicator, then suddenly she sent 'You're serious right now, aren't you? You're seriously trying to tell me magic is real now?'

'Please don't call it that, it's already ridiculous enough as is.' I sighed. 'I'm sure there's some kind of rational scientific explanation to it all, something to do with the psionic resonance field, but I know that's a poorly understood scientific principle in the first place, and it's all way over my head already, so... I'm not about to make any advancements like that or anything myself.'

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

'Alright... cool... a secret new branch of psionic resonance field theory that gives clones magic. That's definitely something I expected to hear from someone who's not a raving lunatic when I woke up this morning.'

'Yeah. I get it. It's a lot. I was asking because I'm starting to wonder if my competency with computers isn't just a knack. Something one of my sisters said... along with some inconsistencies I've noticed, it makes me wonder what exactly I'm doing to the things that I hack into.'

'Hold on a second.' Agatha said nothing for several minutes, and I took the moment to watch Ray taking her stabilizer in her room. I was already hopelessly enamored with this woman before we'd actually done anything, and now here I was spending a few stolen moments staring at her from the sensor array, smiling fondly at her as she took medicine.

Finally, Agatha's reply came in, 'So... that's a very good question. Do you remember what systems you hacked while you were here?'

I'm not sure where she was going with this, but it didn't hurt to play along when she was already giving me so much trust for my own absurd truths. I had done so much with the machine network on Venus, it was hard to remember too many specifics, but there were a few memorable things, especially during our escape. 'Uhh... maybe? I kinda did that a lot.'

Another long pause, this time with a typing indicator that kept moving. 'Okay, this is a hell of a long-shot, but there's been this weird kind of communal mystery going around the colony for a couple months now. It started with a monitor in the concourse that just started displaying... nonsense. Static, visual artifacts, just a ton of EM noise, basically, and no one could figure out why. It got replaced cause like, you know, sometimes machines just break, whatever. But a couple people toyed around with it cause... science. And it wasn't just a broken display, this thing's entire firmware system was just... fucked. Like, it was crazy corrupted somehow. All we could figure is that it was a freak errant radiation bit flip that cascaded into something way worse or something. You know, one of those kinda flukes of computer hardware that you'll never duplicate, so it's not worth worrying about, and we wrote it off. But then a terminal in security started having weird issues, and when we looked into it, data corruption in key system files. A couple more devices have had the exact same issue since then, just like, popping up out of nowhere, and when we compared them... same exact patterns of corruption.'

That sounded really weird, but I didn't see what that had to do with me. 'I dunno what's going on with your network, but I haven't been there for way longer than that. I'm not screwing up your computers.'

'Yeah, I know, like I said, it's probably some new problem, but like... If it was because of something you did, I thought you might know. They're not like any kind of system malfunctions I've ever seen. Just hear me out here. Look.' A moment passed, and a directory full of log files transferred through the app.

Popping one open at random, I furrowed my brow at what I saw. It looked... familiar somehow. It was nonsense, of course. It was just random data being spat out by a confused computer; digital static that didn't actually mean anything. As I opened another file, though, I saw what she meant about it forming a pattern. The corruption seemed to have hit in the exact same way at several of the other devices, like the junk data had been copied and pasted from the same larger repository. Not always exactly the same beginning to end, but the pieces of it could fit together perfectly, overlapping into a complete picture that was... still nonsense. It was as if a stamp of bad sectors were pressed directly into the more sensible and readable bits that were left over in the original code. It was all corrupted in the exact same way, or at the very least by the same method.

'Maybe Foundation left some kind of listening bug in the station's systems, and it's gone haywire?' I asked.

'I guess that'd make sense for the security terminal, maybe? But some of these devices weren't on the same network. Some of them were on lines just made for output, like the displays. The computer running that network itself is fine, and I don't know why Foundation would care to mess with that. A bunch of the stuff that's been affected have been completely unrelated. That's one of the big mysteries. The errors are connected, but the devices aren't. And every other week some new device comes down with this... illness.'

'That's an interesting word for it.' There was no connection between the devices... except that at one point, they probably had been connected, with me as a conduit. I was starting to think maybe she had a point. 'Yeah, they are definitely all related. It's... uncanny.' I shook my head. 'Like I said, though, I haven't been in range to connect to those systems for a lot longer than two months.'

'Yeah. I'm just throwing ideas out there. We're kind of at our wit's end figuring this out. I mean, it's not like everyone's scrambling over it or anything, but the comp sci guys have been tearing what little hair they have left out over it. There's this big forum thread about trying to piece it together. A couple people think it might be some kind of ARG someone's orchestrating, but I don't buy that, they wouldn't break equipment for something like that.'

I mulled it over for a few moments, fidgeting with some of my interfaces while I thought it through, then mimed snapping my fingers. 'Has it affected any new equipment since I left?'

'Ohh, good point.' I looked over the logs in front of me while she did things on her end, but they didn't have any long-term data in them to determine the devices ages. It didn't take her long. 'I mean, it's not like the older stuff isn't gonna fail sooner anyway, and it's not like we overhauled any large parts of the station's infrastructure recently, but yeah, all of the equipment affected is at least 8 months old. They were built at different times, too, so it's not that. But nothing newer than that's gotten sick.'

'Again, Interesting way to phrase that.' The analogy was as ridiculous as the magic one, but I guessed that it fit. I typed while I tried to let the idea sink in that I might actually be responsible for this equipment failure somehow. 'I'm trying to think of what I might have done to have some sort of... delayed effect on the computers, but I just used them like I would any other piece of tech. I swear I didn't write some kind of time bomb virus.'

'Weren't you just saying you were wondering if you were doing something to the computers you hacked? What if it's just something you do to every piece of tech you interact with?' Agatha asked. 'Can you show me exactly how you do that? Like, give me a sample of your source code or something?'

I supposed that couldn't hurt, but she'd probably be just as confused as anyone else that looked at my code. I grabbed a couple of my scripts: the brute force method I used to break into most networks, the ping system I'd developed, and a few of the system files from the internal private messaging service the crew used. I packaged them and sent them over the relay.

After a few moments, the typing indicator lit up. 'Meryll, what language do you code in? This isn't familiar.'

I rolled my eyes slightly, 'Yeah, I know. I've been told that before. I couldn't tell you, though. It's what I learned in the simulation, and anyone I've shown it to hasn't been able to tell me what it is. It works, whatever language it is. Maybe I can do some more research on it now that I'm back on the relay.'

'It doesn't even feel structured like any code I know. If I didn't know better, I'd say it's short-hand pseudo-code. Can I get the compiler?'

I couldn't help but chuckle. 'I am the compiler.'

'You know what I mean, like, the program you use to assemble it.'

I looked at the message, confused, for a few moments, and ran a few simple timer scripts I had made, just as a way to trace the flow of data as it did its thing to make sure, but I wasn't sure what she meant. 'I just execute the code.'

'Huh?'

'Yeah, I just launch the code as written. There's no middleman program or anything.'

The typing indicator flashed on and off a few times, disappeared for a minute, and then asked, 'Are you trying to tell me that these files, the ones you sent me, are executable as is?'

'Yes? Is that bad?' I wondered if perhaps I was doing something wrong this whole time. Something that might somehow corrupt machinery I've infiltrated down the line, perhaps? I started to pore over the log files again.

'It's... puzzling, I can say that much. My terminal doesn't even know what to do when I try to run it. It's like if I tried to launch a data file, all I can do is view it in plain text.'

'That's strange. All I do is call for it on a system level and it does what I wrote it to do.' I replied as I stared into the corrupted data. There was something so... eerily familiar about it, but I couldn't place it. I knew I'd definitely seen it before, though.

'Maybe it's a firmware thing. I'll get a core to try to run it.'

A core. Something clicked. Something I'd forgotten in the rush of the last few days of activity. I hurriedly replied, 'Don't!'

'Huh? Figure something out?'

'No. Yes. Sort of. Maybe? Just don't run that code on... anything yet. Especially not a core. I need to think for a minute.' I remembered where I had seen it. This data corruption was exactly the same. I had seen the pattern before.

In the psyche evaluation of Morgan Collins.

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