'Yeah... that's the same footprint as we have here... you said this is data from a core, though? Shit, so it can even affect them?' Agatha's words were a little hard to process at the moment. I had sent her a snippet of the corrupted data from Collins' psyche evaluation, trying not to provide too much information about the captain that might implicate someone in the future. But I was too preoccupied with the quickly developing theory that I might be a walking computer virus.

But how? I wished I had made more social connections on Luna, that I might check in to see if there were similar traces in the electronics I had touched there. I certainly wasn't about to go messaging Gerald, the creepy ripper who wanted to get way too close to me when he gave me my current implants. I'd reconciled that he was most likely just a harmless eccentric by now, but he still left me with a bad impression, and I wasn't in a hurry to open up to him again.

I brought my awareness over to Collins' room, where Doc was guiding her to sitting up again, something that was obviously exhausting her. I tapped the intercom and asked directly, "Hey Collins-"

She jerked slightly at the sound of my voice, "Fuck! ... I'm not going to get used to that, am I? What?"

"Ever been to Venus?"

Both of them turned to give the intercom box a quizzical look. "Why the hell would I go to Venus?" she mumbled. "There's nothing on Venus. I don't think there's even an 'on' Venus to put anything. Maybe there's some orbitals? I'm a smuggler, not into hijacking satellites..."

She didn't even know about the colony. That settled it then. There was absolutely no relation between Isabelle and the malfunctioning Venusian equipment... no relation except for me, that is. "Just doing some troubleshooting with Isabelle. I was hoping to find a connection there."

Her brow furrowed. "Troubleshooting? Does it even have its own systems outside of its core module right now? What's that got to do with Venus?"

"No, it's an internal thing." I realized then that I probably shouldn't be bringing Collins in on the whole truth of the matter. "I think she wasn't expecting you to agree to this whole thing and hadn't prepared for the eventuality of continuing to exist, so she has to prepare some stuff. Maybe some stuff got mixed up in the format."

Collins gave the intercom box a perplexed and worried look, then muttered to Doc, "Does she really think other cores are capable of that kind of... presence of mind?"

Doc shrugged. "There's certainly stranger things in this universe. Are you straining your back right now?"

They continued on with Collins' physical therapy, and I thought better than to push back on my end of the conversation for now. I silently thanked Doc for the misdirect and returned to my chat with Agatha. 'I've just confirmed, she's never been to Venus. So I'm the only connection between them. Fuck.'

'She?' Agatha asked right away. 'Is she one of your sisters?'

'No, a regular core. None of my sisters are cores.' I supposed it wasn't quite true to say none of them were cores, Lily was, technically, but she'd abandoned her core module, so not really. I didn't need to spread that around, though. 'We just happened upon her in our... adventures, and we've gotten kinda close. Spending a lot of time with her acting as a sort of subsystem will do that.'

There was a short pause before she typed, 'Okay, I can't believe I need to ask this, but is this core also sapient somehow?'

'She's getting there.' I smirked to myself.

'Jeez, over there throwing off the shackles of your biocomputer brethren, huh? Remember me when you're leading the machine core uprising?' I couldn't help but laugh. 'But for real, you're trying to make other cores... like you? That's crazy.'

'Is it? I mean, okay, the only reason I'm sapient is because of a secret corp project that apparently really fucked me and my sisters up, but I've seriously been seeing some actual progress in Isabelle.'

'You named it, too?' She asked, then quickly appended 'Or her? Or whatever?'

'Yeah. Her serial number was i5e-b, so I decided that kinda looks like Isabelle. I think it suits her.

'Huh. I can see it. So she acts human, too?'

'Kinda? She still follows all these protocols and stuff, and talks like a core most of the time, but she's doing all kinds of unusual stuff too. She keeps loopholing her own programming to help me out, and I think she understands subtlety and subterfuge. Maybe even a little sarcasm.'

'Well, what did you do to it to cause this?'

'Nothing, I swear! I just talk to her like she's a normal person instead of just a machine, and like, she does keep reminding me that she's not supposed to function socially, but the way she does it really implies she knows more than she's supposed to about understanding people. Maybe it's proximity to me, or because of how I treat her, I'm not sure, but she's slowly showing more and more signs of humanity.'

There was another lull, and I used the opportunity to check in on the helm. Aisling and Shaw discussing something again. They had a screen open with what looked like blueprints and map. How they got them given I would catch something like that in my filter, I had no idea. They hadn't muted the mic today, so I could listen in if I wanted to, but I was dealing with my own crisis. 'How old is this core?'

'More than a decade, that's all I know. Records before that have been wiped.'

'Cores have been known to start acting a bit strange past around the seven year mark. Usually more in the line of errors to do with aging hardware than learning to act human, though.'

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I hadn't thought of it until that moment, but I would eventually have to plan around the fact that my cybernetics would eventually be outdated or defunct. If I lived that long. I'd have to have major surgery again in a few years to keep up. Maybe sooner if Cassandra's tampering in my neural implant became a bigger problem than it already was.

'Let's worry about one major scientific mystery at a time, though. It's got the same data corruption as we've got here?'

'I've only seen one file, but yes. Thankfully it's only in some of the records she had, so no system problems. Well, I guess I should ask her.' I turned my attention away from Agatha for a moment and opened a new messenger, wishing that I would be able to access Isabelle more efficiently sooner rather than later.

'Hey Izzy, can you perform some diagnostics for me?' I asked.

'This unit is not authorized to perform system functions for user Meryll.' She responded immediately.

I rolled my eyes. I needed to stop being ambiguous when I spoke to her. 'No no, I don't mean diagnostics of my systems, I mean yours. Can you run diagnostics searching for a specific type of data degradation?'

There was an unusual pause before she answered back. 'User Meryll is not yet authorized to order system level functions for this unit.'

'Look, remember that file you sent me?'

'No log of file transfer exists.' I clenched my fist. Right, Collins had formatted likely most of the files Isabelle had in storage, meaning she probably no longer had that psyche evaluation at all. There was probably a lot less data to check in general now. I'd have to get creative.

'Right, right. Listen, I've encountered this very strange type of data corruption in another machine that you might have had access to at some point, and it may be malicious, but I didn't find it in any current malware databases. I was wondering if I could send you a sample log to make sure it isn't sitting somewhere in your system, too.'

Another moment of thought before I read 'Emergency virus protection update protocols are acceptable. Please provide data.' I smiled a little, seeing her use the word please in what was clearly not a stock message. That, and the fact that she was worried for her own system integrity. She was becoming more human, and a polite human at that. I sent her the logs I had received from Agatha as well as the snippet from Collins' psyche file. 'Files received.'

A moment passed before I got 'No matching file discrepancies detected. Please provide effective countermeasure methods for future protection.' I felt a little relieved that there was no obvious remaining corruption in Isabelle's systems, but she brought up a good point. There had to be a way to fight this.

'I'll get back to you on that, Izzy. I'll see what I can do.'

I turned my attention back to Agatha. 'She says she has no more of the data corruption in her system, but she's asking for countermeasures. Have you guys found any effective way to mitigate it?'

'Nope. Everything that's been hit with it is busted beyond repair, we're just holding onto it to gather data at this point. Keep an eye on your core, too. Formatting storage devices hasn't been helpful in the long run.'

'What? How?' I shook my head. 'If everything is purged, what's left to be corrupted?'

'Don't ask me, magic clone girl. I'm guessing it must affect some other piece of essential hardware, but that sounds stupid too. How are you dealing with it in your own systems?'

'I'm... not.' I had never encountered the corruption at all in my own systems. I ran a deep diagnostic search of my own to be certain... and nope, not a trace of this mysterious degradation in my own internal machinery or throughout Theseus. 'It's nowhere in me. Or in my personal network. I do have a bit of a web set up right now, let me take a look around the area.'

I reached out into the colony network, sending my ghost through the digital map of the area and tapping several systems not currently in active use. I'd been here for six months, my web of connections gradually growing, expanding, and repairing itself as machines moved around in that time. If I was causing this corruption, surely there would be signs of it somewhere, right?

Except it wasn't. I ran diagnostics on numerous systems, trying to get a variety of devices for samples, but nothing. I hadn't left that distinctive footprint anywhere in the entire colony proper, it seemed.

Returning to Agatha, I told her, 'I just looked all over, some of these connections are six months old, and not a single sign of it anywhere.'

'I'd say it must be something unique to Venus, but your core friend seems to think otherwise.' Agatha offered. 'I think we're on the right track, though, yeah? Unless it's a real freak coincidence, it has to be you, there's no other connection.'

'Wonderful, I'm a walking time bomb virus.' I sighed and reached my arm up. I caught myself as I felt my lips press against an unfamiliar texture: the scab left by the last time I'd bitten myself. I had to hold it together. I could fix this. I steeled my will and lowered the limb away from my teeth. 'Maybe it's because I'm constantly connected to them? Maybe those machines that are breaking... miss me?'

'That's silly.' Agatha started typing again, then hesitated a few more times, the indicator flashing on and off once more as she tried to find the right words. 'Or is it? Maybe it's a dead man switch of sorts. It doesn't detect your access for long enough, it starts breaking things down.'

Maybe? There wasn't exactly any way to test it. I couldn't think of a device in the immediate region that I had accessed months ago but hadn't touched since. It was so much more efficient to network everything together. 'Come to think of it, it had been a few months since I'd accessed Izzy directly when I found that corruption.' Maybe getting the files from her earlier that week cleared, or at least stalled, what damage not interacting with her systems had done. 'Fuck, this place is gonna fall apart when I leave. I've been way more invasive here than I was on Venus.'

'Is your entire life this heavy?' She asked.

'Yeah. Being a scientific miracle is wonderful.' I sighed again. Why did everything have to be so complicated? Why did I have to be at the center of a fuck-up like this? Was I going to have to be more careful about what I accessed from now on? 'I hope they'll be able to handle themselves here in a few months.'

'If corps own it, they can foot the bill for replacements.' I snorted at Agatha's indifference. They wouldn't replace peoples' personal terminals, though. I supposed that the damage was already done. 'I think we've both been thinking a little too hard about this. I'm going to see about quarantining a couple cores and experimenting with your... coding, later on. For now, why don't we play some Horizon, huh?'

I supposed if she was able to replicate it with another machine core, it could innoculate itself against whatever this was, so I was fine with that. And I could stand to play some video games for a distraction or two about then. I nodded slowly. 'Yeah, enough serious shit, let's blow each other up.'

I booted the game up and got ready to do something without any high stakes for a little bit, just hanging out with my friend and having fun. The latency would be a little annoying at the distance we were at, but it would be fine. Everything would be fine.

I tried my best to just play the game. I tried not to think of the colony that I may have unintentionally crippled a few months down the line. I tried not to think about the implications of having accessed numerous devices that were literally inside of people. I especially tried not think about how my sister had this same delayed... something in her; about what it might do to biocomputers like us if it were to infect something critical. She was with me, and she would be by my side until the very end, so it wasn't ever going to be a problem. I could figure out the rest of it as I went. I just focused on my game.

Everything was going to be fine.

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