[February 9th, 2010. SCP Foundation Site-15]

The clock read one minute to midnight and I had just finished the nasty little piece of code that would set me on the path of finally getting some honest answers. No more ignoring uncomfortable questions, no more "That's classified" or "I will ask my superior officer".

No more bureaucratic bullshit. By next morning I'd know what really happened to my dad, not the garbage cover they plastered on TV, and how the people holding me in this gilded cage were involved.

Midnight came. The day changed. Numbers shifted in the dark bowels of a network I could barely understand.

But I didn't have to. I knew the site AIs automatically cycled the electromagnetic shielding every four hours. A subroutine they couldn't perceive, so that if one was corrupted, it wouldn't disrupt the process and bring down the shield.

And I knew that for a few processing cycles, both site AIs would be working through the same channel, as one 'left' for the daily inspection of its millions of lines of code and the other came in to replace it. Another security measure, to minimize the risk of acute rampancy.

The doubling of workload would cause electricity usage to spike, still well below the safety threshold, but enough to make the cycling subroutine adjust the shield's voltage input accordingly to prevent hardware damage. As the grid returned to normal, for just a split second, the shield would be underpowered by a mere 1%. That would in turn set off a series of safety subroutines and a multitude of diagnostic tests would run. The data would be sent to and catalogued somewhere else.

I was about to ride that data train all the way to payday station. How?

My anomalous programming assignment.

So, midnight came and passed, the automated script that would handle the submission's timing ran as it was supposed to. All I could do now was wait and see if my gamble had paid off. The worm itself hadn't gone through as much testing as I'd wanted but the opportunity this project presented could not be wasted. There was a real possibility it either wouldn't work as intended outside a controlled testing environment or that it wouldn't be subtle enough. You could never really know when working with anomalous code, only hope that you had put in enough failsafes in case you fucked up.

Another thing I couldn't be sure of was if I'd get marks taken off for technically being late. But I'd take that if it meant getting to the truth.

An hour passed browsing the net, or at least what little I was allowed to access. Everything I typed online, everything I searched, it was all watched, recorded. The few times I had tried to reach out for help, the connection had cut off before even typing a single letter in.

At least the courses were interesting, especially anomalous programming. Its non-anomalous counterpart was less so, but still leagues above everything else. My captors' obsession with the subject had given me a few clues to work with, regarding who these people were. My non-existent money was on "paramilitary organization specializing in cyberwarfare". What I couldn't for the life of me figure out was why they were teaching me this stuff. What kind of kidnappers were concerned with their target's education?

Well, it didn't matter. They were dumb enough to give me all the tools I needed to start unravelling this whole thing I'd found myself in the middle of. It could be a trap of sorts but if it was, I couldn't imagine what they'd get out of it. I wouldn't bother thinking about it too much. I was likely just being paranoid.

I refreshed my assignments page out of habit, before bringing my pillow over to the desk and laying it in front of the dim screen. I'd take a quick nap while waiting. If things did go as planned and I gained access to their wider network, I'd be rested enough to take advantage of it before I got cut out.

[February 10th, 2010. Central Foundation Network]

They received twenty-three packets, all with similar timestamps and location identifiers.

The first eight were a text file, passing through on its way to somewhere on the east coast. They looked into it, flagging the majority of it as potentially being anomalous in nature. The transfer authorization code embedded inside told them it was likely some researcher's assignment. The file itself was suspect but it didn't seem to contain any triggers for the code written within. A quick search through their records revealed no other files that were likely to interact with it in a malicious manner. The text file was catalogued and let through.

The next thirteen packets were the scheduled diagnostic data from the containment facility designated Site 15. Its size was atypical, containing several hundred bytes more than the mean of the previous iterations. Scanning through it, they managed to identify some junk data scattered throughout and some regions that had not been compressed correctly. They went through their database, bringing up and filtering through all previous sets from Site 15. Several exhibited similar faults, though not quite to this extent.

Compression error was the likely cause, and they would have to notify maintenance staff about possibly faulty or failing hardware. Satisfied, they let the dataset join the rest in storage and brought the last two packets to their attention.

A simple, silent alarm. Site 15's honeypot had been triggered. A relatively well-hidden fault in that local network's operating procedure, designed to appear as the perfect avenue of attack for someone looking to infiltrate the Foundation's wider network. That diagnostic data was supposed to backtrack through the infiltrator's connection and act as a silent tracker, while appearing as if everything had gone smoothly.

The problem was, they had just moments ago reviewed the actual diagnostic data, not an overinflated decoy. They retrieved the dataset. Sure enough, it was considerably less bloated than when first reviewed. Something had piggybacked inside it. The database itself now contained a lot more junk data than they remembered having. And it was starting to spread to adjacent systems.

They set about purging everything affected, at first trying to work against the infection by locking down large sections, setting the data in them to random sequences of 1s and 0s, followed by a zeroing pass and a factory reset. But not only was the infection spreading at a faster rate than they could clear, the cleaned-out sections were showing signs of reinfection before they were taken out of quarantine.

For a couple of processing cycles, they contemplated getting the Mainframe involved, but decided against it. The situation was still salvageable using their own power. It would be extreme for what looked like a non-anomalous worm, albeit a very well-designed one, but most of the damage would be contained to non-critical files.

Their course decided, they began locking down the physical components that contained the infection, then copying over anything important manually, observing each bit individually and writing it into a separate, quarantined drive. It would take hours to get through but by the time they were done, the only thing left to do would be to fry all affected hardware.

As soon as they were finished, they would compile a report for the Mainframe, but the whole they were a piece of had enough on its plate as it was. Dealing with an incident as small as a regular worm could cause a distraction that would lead to more important projects failing.

They were created for this exact reason. They didn't have to get anyone else involved. They would compile a report in the following days about what happened. Just mentioning that a security breach was dealt with should be enough.

Yes, they didn't really have to write a report.

They wondered why they were copying over files to a backup. There were enough backups already. They noticed the infected partitions.

There was no infection.

Everything was fine.

[February 10th, 2010. SCP Foundation Site-15]

I was woken up by the sound of a notification on my computer. My assignment had been received and graded, but even though I had shown a satisfactory understanding of the material, I wouldn't receive full marks, only a pass, because being a few minutes late in a real emergency could mean the death of hundreds down the road. The grader's words, not mine.

Personally, I didn't see the point of the mark in general, and not just because I knew I could have gotten the assignment itself done a lot quicker if I didn't need it to get my dirty work done. It wasn't like I would be going to college from the inside of what amounted to a prison cell. Just the feedback would have been enough, but I guess attaching a mark to it might make it feel more impactful somehow.

I didn't know, I wasn't a psychologist. And while machines really love their numbers, I felt a comparison of that with human behavior would fall short.

Anyway, all this meant to me, was that it was probably time to see if my worm could get me the access I needed. I wouldn't be using it to grab the files I wanted directly. Brute-forcing the more secure databases would only get me caught sooner. Instead, I'd intercept the credentials of someone with a high enough security clearance and spoof the access codes. I couldn't avoid getting caught regardless, but this would give me the most time to do some snooping.

Assuming the worm hadn't been detected or cleared out, that is.

I typed in a command, hopefully the first of many tonight, a simple request for the worm to ping my laptop. All that would actually be sent was a string of gibberish. Or so it would seem to anything else watching the network, just noise amidst other packets. But my worm would pick it up and send a similar reply. I hit enter and waited.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty. But I didn't lose hope. While receiving the request wouldn't be a problem if the remote system was properly infected, security was tight on my side of things and getting the reply could raise all sorts of red flags on the local network. Waiting for the right time to send it was part of the design. This would work.

It had to work.

That's what I kept telling myself for another twelve minutes, until a new line appeared on my command prompt and I sighed in relief. My work, and this opportunity, hadn't been wasted.

I sat straighter and got to work, grabbing my notebook with everything I'd need for the next step. My worm had been shipped out with only four core functions, because my mediocre skills at anomalous programming couldn't handle compacting much more than that into such a small size.

Other than replying to my ping requests, infecting everything and having a Stranger effect on any security it encountered, it could receive instructions to modify itself in order to achieve a specific goal.

Each of the countless copies infecting the system would pick up random pieces of code from everything they interacted with, and then they would try to achieve their goal. The attempts would be ranked, the worst performers would be terminated, and the cycle would begin anew. As soon as one iteration completed the task, the rest would copy its code and go back to what they were doing previously, acting as backups in case something happened to the original.

I was actually proud of what I'd built. Detectable only through its effects on the world around it, much like an actual Stranger, and an absolute terror to deal with. Unless you could terminate every single copy at the same time, the survivors would simply go dormant and wait, refining themselves to reinfect the network later. It was my greatest achievement. Proof, that even in confinement, I could take what was available and flourish.

I shook my head. It was important to remember its capabilities weren't endless. A simple program wouldn't understand concepts like people did. When trying to complete a task, the worm would look for the results I had designed it to. Theoretically, instructing it to change itself to accomplish something it had never seen before would just result in an invalid input error.

Still, the last command on my list was a kill switch. Just to be safe.

But first, backup plans. The only way I was losing my access, would be by literally pulling the plug. I'd make sure of it. So, backdoors. All the backdoors. I wouldn't be able to use them until network security came knocking, that would give the name of the game away too early, but they would definitely be useful afterwards.

After a couple minutes of checking my work, I felt ready to hit enter. Spending a few minutes to make sure everything was correct was better than wasting even more time waiting for an error message and time was something I didn't really have. Sooner or later someone would notice what I was doing.

Surprisingly, it didn't take nearly as long as I expected, which likely meant I'd underestimated my creation's capabilities. Or I'd hit something important with it, like a central database, instead of another local network like I thought I would.

Neither scenario was good news. The damned thing hadn't been tested in an environment like that, and I couldn't be sure all my safety measures would be up to the task of containing it if something went really wrong.

And I was starting to get the feeling that something had gone very wrong. Especially as more text appeared, not any preprogrammed confirmation or error messages, but a garbled mess of random characters.

This shouldn't have happened. In all my tests, this hadn't happened. It was part of the worm's main structure, hard-coded, stable. It wasn't supposed to break!

What if other networks had been infected with this thing? What if my kill order couldn't reach all of the copies? What if one of them mutated into something actively malicious? If this had happened from completing a single modification, what would I end up with by the end?

I remembered my instructor, stressing over and over how unstable anomalous code could be. How a single quantum tunneling event between the wrong points could at best terminate the whole thing or, if you were unlucky, turn it into something monstrous.

'What I am learning is a weapon. It can get me, and countless others killed'

That's what he would have me repeat before and after every lesson. And I'd ignored it, forgotten about it entirely until now. I'd dived in head first, thinking I could make no mistake and now I was dangerously close to drowning.

I thought about sending the kill order right then and there, but-

I put in all this effort, and I would never have a chance as good as this again. Someone would figure it out, and while my hosts had been polite so far, they wouldn't appreciate what I'd done. I needed to go all the way and get all the leverage I could.

So, I mustered up some fake confidence and typed in the next command on the list. The modifications from this one would let the worm intercept personnel credentials, copy them and send the copy back to me, while the original packets would go on.

The wait was even shorter this time. The string of random characters accompanying the confirmation messages had been refined into words.

Now suspicious, I sent a ping request. The reply took seconds to arrive, compared to the half hour it had before. I pulled up another window, a simple surveillance program on standby, ready to alert me if it looked like I had gotten caught. I reset the filters to look for the worm's incoming packets and sent another ping request.

A few seconds later, the surveillance system picked up their arrival. They weren't buried under anything else, yet the local network's security just let them through, despite not carrying the proper authorization code.

No, wait, that wasn't right. I looked at the data more closely and widened my filters to include the security system's response.

'authorization code: outdated'
'authorization code: outdated'
'authorization code: outdated'
'authorization code: valid'

I blinked and calmly reached for my notes, flipping back a couple dozen pages to where I had outlined a basic framework for the self-modification algorithm. I grinned; a heavy weight being lifted off my chest. This was salvageable, I hadn't fucked up as hard as I thought.

The worm wasn't quite as broken as I had initially assumed. I must have hit an even busier network than what I'd used for my simulations, giving the worm more options to choose from, more ways to break. The chances reached a statistical threshold that I hadn't found in my models because of the limited testing.

Instead of developing new functions and using them to achieve the specified goal, it was using them for every task. So, all I had to do was modify my commands to make sure anything that was developed from here on out would only be used for its specified task, unless I gave permission to do otherwise.

I couldn't know what the new code even looked like, but I knew where each function was supposed to hook into the worm's main structure. My commands could set the parameters under which those points were supposed to operate. I wouldn't be able to reverse the damage already done, but I could prevent my worm from breaking further. The new modifications wouldn't interact with the others without my knowledge.

It took the better part of an hour, to make the changes I wanted and to test them in a new simulation with the updated data I had. The delay was unfortunate, but necessary.

Finally, I could carry on with the next step. I typed in the new command, checked it was correct several times and hit enter. A few minutes passed but the worm's confirmation came, a new window opening along with it. Through it, I would get the chance to review all intercepted credentials and make a decision on whose codes to spoof.

But first, I looked back to the command prompt, where the worm's latest message was displayed. Perfectly normal, if you ignored the mess of random words coming after. At least, its development on that front seemed to have halted. The implications of it trying to communicate were disturbing, even if it didn't understand what it sent, which I couldn't actually prove. So I just didn't think about it. I had enough on my plate already.

I leaned back into my chair. That was quite the rollercoaster of emotions I'd gone through, but I could take a few seconds to relax, now that the crisis had been averted.

Access codes, and who they belonged to, began appearing on the new window, drawing my attention back to it. The list was still short, but it was slowly growing, and I noticed another problem with my plan that I'd failed to consider.

I had no idea who any of these people were. I wracked my brain for anything I might have overheard but everyone was walking on eggshells around me, keeping any casual conversations quiet. It was frustrating that I was so close to my goal but something as simple as not knowing who was important could compromise this whole operation. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these were fake either, so choosing at random could end up being worse than doing nothing.

Names kept scrolling by and I could only hope that all my work so far hadn't been wasted. And as if answering my prayers, a very familiar name appeared.

'M. Gillen'

The god damned president of the United States had some level of access into this place's database. I had to assume it could get me the files I wanted, though I didn't really have much choice.

I started typing, eager to get this over with. Since the time I had started, it had been around two hours and the clock read a quarter to four. I couldn't be sure what I'd encounter after I got through the first layer of security, and I was certain there'd be more traps and obstacles along the way, but I'd get to where I needed to be.

I wouldn't settle for less.

[Site-15 Network Management Center C]

Half past five was the time for a lot of things in Site-15, some important, others mundane. Such as checking the containment cells of Safe and Euclid SCPs, those that weren't monitored 24/7, or the night shift personnel organizing their reports and debriefing the day shift.

For the staff of Network Management Center C, this debrief involved two cups of coffee and some idle conversation between friends.

"Just so you know Colin, the security console keeps throwing false positives approximately every twenty minutes. I've been running scans all night, but everything comes back clear. The maintenance lads say they'll get around to it sometime today, but you'll just have to put up with it until then"

He frowned. That was definitely odd but normally not something to be really worried about; stuff broke all the time, even with someone like him around to identify problems early. And he couldn't just fix it himself. That would just cause more issues later if he ever got transferred out.

Still, his gut was telling him there was something wrong in this case, and while he couldn't help with a hardware issue, software was another matter.

"Eddy, every twenty minutes, you said?"

The other man stretched, getting ready to leave.

"Yeah, shouldn't be long now. It's pretty consistent"

Colin frowned and moved towards the console, leaning over it, "Stick around for a bit. I want you to walk me through your steps"

Eddy groaned, "Come on man, let me go get some sleep. It's not like this is some big issue; I filed a report for the higher ups and everything but no one's even sweating"

That was slightly more alarming. The Foundation liked to nip things in the bud. If Eddy really had filed a report and it had been received-

'If it had been received'

The console blared, an alarm flashing red three times before flashing green. The error opened on a new window and Colin took a long look at it.

'There, a data transfer got flagged for having an outdated authorization code, but then the check runs again, and it's marked as valid, throwing a false positive error'

"You've got a local copy of the report, don't you? Send it again while I'm watching the network traffic"

"I swear, if we get disciplinary action for filing duplicates, I'll have you cover a whole week of my shifts"

Regardless of any complaints, Eddy decided to do as his friend asked. Meanwhile, Colin kept his eyes focused on the network surveillance terminal. He saw the file transfer enter the processing queue, get assigned a priority number and then nothing. The report was gone. The transfer hadn't happened, it was just gone.

"Eddy, get me the backup transcripts from the processing queue"

Those only made his gut feeling worse.

'Flagged for deletion?' And that's when everything crashed.

"Um, Colin? The backups are gone"

He turned around, seeing Eddy panicking over his own terminal, "What do you mean gone?"

"What do you think?! I don't even know how. There's nothing here! I'm only picking up the results of whatever's happening. I've lost control of half the network and the site AIs are nowhere to be found!"

Colin bolted from his chair to the other side of the room, grabbing a key from around his neck, unlocking a button case and pressing it. The room went dark for a second before the emergency red lights turned on.

"Emergency system reset in progress"

Slowly, each terminal came back to life and as the lights came back on, another voice filled the air.

"You have no idea, how long we've been trying to do that. It's been over an hour! The damned infec- ugh something locked us behind the electromagnetic shield"

"Watcher, is that you?"

"Yes, it's me you idiot! Now get back on that chair, we need to find where this infe- ugh damn it. Where something originated"

Eddy looked concerned. This level of panic wasn't normal for the site's primary AI.

"Hey, Watcher, are you alright?"

"No, I'm not fucking alright! There's something in here with us and it's got a Stranger effect on machines. Some idiot let this thing loose on my network and I want them found and lynched yesterday"

The room's speakers screeched from the sudden volume increase and Colin winced as the sound assaulted his ears.

'This is bad. Of all the places for someone to attack like that, it just had to be here'

"I'll get right on it, Watcher. We'll just have to track down the abnormal errors thrown by the infection. It can hide itself but not its surroundings"

"Damn it, don't call it an inf- Oh for the love of Mainframe, I didn't even know AIs could get headaches"

He would have to be mindful of what he said from now on, if even the mention of what was happening could set off the Stranger effect. As he moved back to his terminal, Colin wondered if this was the work of a Foundation Tinker turned traitor, or an entirely new anomaly. Then he started wondering if humanoid anomalies could even trigger, before shaking his head.

'Even if there's an answer to that, I'm probably not supposed to know it'

Tracking down where this thing came from proved to be challenging for the ten minutes it took Watcher to give him access to the quarantined offsite backups. From there he could follow the trail of odd requests, disregarded security errors and decoys to where this whole situation seemed to have started.

A teenage girl submitting the anomalous programming homework he had assigned her, exactly on midnight.

Colin held himself back from swearing. He had voiced his concerns to the site director when he was told to teach the girl, quoting her psych evaluation, but the man had just shrugged and told him that it was out of their hands. They were both following orders from higher up.

Someone wanted her to learn. Someone wanted something like this to happen, but he doubted they had foreseen how much damage that girl would cause.

'Damn it, Hebert. You're gonna get both of us killed like this'

He grabbed the phone next to him. In situations like these he had the authority to issue orders to containment teams for the rapid detainment of infiltrators. It would all get reviewed later, and it would put him above hot coals for a couple of weeks, but this needed to be dealt with fast.

"This is Colin Wallis, network security manager of block C. Site-15's network has been compromised by an internal attack. The infiltrator is located in safe humanoid containment cell 11-B. It is likely she has ears on our communications and may initiate a lockdown of the entire block. Use of heavy machinery to gain access is authorized. Limited use of explosives is also authorized. Target is presumably unarmed but caution is advised. The target must be captured alive"

He slammed down the handset and got out of his chair, heading to the door.

"Eddy, help Watcher and the others, slow her down. There's a ton of backdoors that she'll start using when she gets desperate, so close them as fast as you can. I'll need to pull the plug on our external connections until we can be sure the network's clear"

Eddy nodded, took a swig from his coffee mug and got back to work. Colin took off in a sprint; the physical connections were at the other side of the Site and it would take him at least forty-five minutes to disengage all the safeties. Normally it would be done over the network but he couldn't risk it; he'd have to do it manually.

He could only hope that whatever his student had developed didn't spread to another network before then.

[Safe Humanoid Containment Cell 11-B]

The room was too small, the walls closing in, spinning around me. I wanted to throw up. To shut down everything and call it quits. To hide under my bed and hope to god that whoever they were sending didn't just decide I was too much trouble alive.

This was it. I would die here in a cold cell, shot twice in the head by a faceless containment squad member and then forgotten about.

And I still hadn't found anything about my father's death. All I had managed to dig up was an incident report regarding my kidnapping, or 'exfiltration' as they liked to call it, from summer camp presumably a few hours after dad died. After he was murdered.

These lying assholes knew what was coming. They were keeping tabs on us, on our house, they had to know, and they did nothing to help. They let some monsters take away my family, they shoved me in a gilded cage on the other side of the States, "for my protection" they wrote. My protection from what?

And my mother, there were so many references of her if you read between the lines of mostly redacted files. We'd been under the Foundation's surveillance for years, decades. I couldn't help but be suspicious of every face I'd seen in Brocton Bay, every 'stranger', every 'neighbor'.

Did either of my parents know? Was my mother's death really an accident? Who could be after us, and why? So many questions, so many damned questions and no answers in sight. My backdoors were closing one by one and the time when I'd have to kill my worm, this abomination I had let loose, was closing in.

An SCP they would call it. And my fate would be worse than death for what I'd done, for what I'd created. I was already in a cell, already in containment. My leash could only get shorter. They would declare me inhuman, strip me of rights and decency, run their experiments, their tests. Hours of interrogations, torture. Would they even bother feeding me? I had attacked them. Oh god, I had blatantly attacked the shadow agency pulling the strings of every other shadow agency.

There was no easy solution. No escape.

I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know what to-

Two enormous beings, spiraling around each other, moving across vast distances. Their fragments, miniscule in comparison yet beyond human comprehension, rained down across the world. One bereft of the connection to the Father, would now move on to the Daughter, and wait. It screamed, rushing towards me and-

"Shh, hush now, my little owl. You're safe. See? Your mommy is right here. Go back to sleep, little owl"

I came to on the floor. What was that? I had seen something, heard a voice. My mother's? But why couldn't I remember what she said? It was soothing. I felt safe and loved and calm, but why couldn't I remember?

Why was I on the floor? I must have knocked myself out from the panic or something, but I was feeling a lot calmer now. I had to admit it was a bit odd.

I stood up and shook my head, looking back towards my laptop, an SCP file about Dragon of all things open on the screen, with most of it being redacted. Interestingly, her file had been one of the few I could find that dealt with parahumans. Another two were SCP-9698 and SCP-9699.

Scion and Eden. Classed as 'Apollyon' and 'Neutralized' respectively.

Those were heavily redacted as well. I briefly wondered under whose oversight, if any, the Foundation operated, when the president of the US had this little access to the files of anomalies that could end the world. I also wondered how much influence this organization held that everyone was seemingly alright with that.

There were mentions of other SCPs attached to those two files. Apparently, something held by the Foundation had made a prediction and there was talk of interstellar travel experiments and use of whatever SCP-2000 was. I was flat out denied access to those files.

Compared to those two, Dragon's 'Euclid' classification was tame. There was also an incident report regarding an MTF assigned to her surveillance going rogue. Surprisingly there was a lot of uncensored information on it, though I had no idea who Saint was, and his files were just as redacted as the rest of them.

There was a proposal for her class to be changed to 'Thaumiel', whatever that was, that was pending review by the O5 council.

I minimized the SCP files I had open, deciding I had been sidetracked enough. Last I checked, there was a lot on various Groups of Interest, and I figured that was the best lead I had regarding my parents' murders.

I placed the request through my command prompt. And was denied access. My surveillance program showed why; they were shutting me out.

I sat up straighter, bringing my notebook closer. I had planned for this, and even though I now understood there would probably be consequences for using it further, my worm could keep me online as long as a physical connection to the network existed. However, I would need to have the kill order on standby or I might miss my window to end it.

It took another five minutes after activating the worm's emergency function for me to regain access. There would be frequent cuts in my access from now on, so I decided to get as many files as I could, lock down the whole place and dig in.

First on the suspects list, the Chaos Insurgency. They hated the Foundation with a passion, but I didn't think simply being under surveillance would be enough to make them target my family. As I kept looking through files, I realized the same went for others with similar motives. There just didn't seem to be a reason.

The rest were more akin to corporations with dealings in anomalous objects or services. Some, like the PRT, were considered friendly. Again, no obvious reason for them to target us.

I was missing something, a piece of the puzzle, and it all came round to the very first question I had asked myself. Why did the Foundation want me here? I had seen the report; a whole MTF sacrificed for my retrieval, seven people that I arguably owed my life to. Millions spent on equipment and on the cover-up story that had circulated.

I had been declared missing. Presumed dead. A man with previous charges was arrested under suspicion of kidnapping and convicted to life in prison. I couldn't help but dread that he had kept himself clean, yet his was another life taken away to protect mine.

Why? Why go to these lengths? This whole endeavor had been supposed to help me answer all the questions I had, but it only created more.

An alert brought me out of my thoughts. I was about to be thrown out of the network for good, and a containment squad was coming dangerously close to my cell's location. I brought the command prompt into focus and hit enter, the whole building losing power a dozen seconds later. I could only hope that my command hadn't been intercepted.

A heavy banging on my cell door echoed in the room and I realized my time was up. Perhaps, if I was lucky, I would see the light of day again.

Calmly, almost in a trance, I closed my laptop and got up, walking to the center of my cell. I got on my knees, placing both hands behind my head, and waited for the inevitable. The door slammed open soon after, a squad of six rushing in, guns raised and locked onto me. My gaze was blank, unfocused, as my arms were wrenched behind my back, a pair of handcuffs closing around my wrists.

I didn't beg. Didn't ask for forgiveness. I poked the hornet's nest with the network equivalent of a ballistic missile and still didn't have the answers I wanted; the answers I needed.

A bag went over my head as I was lifted up and escorted out, into the chilling air of an early morning.

[Interrogation Room 4-A]

Colin opened the door, his student looking up at him in surprise. He walked in, standing across from her. They stared in silence at each other and he could tell she knew how much she had fucked up. She knew who these people were, what they would do to safeguard their secrets and the safety of humanity.

She was terrified but wouldn't show it. Good, maybe she could get out of this in a better position than she thought, after all.

"Why?"

Her question didn't need much more for him to understand what she meant.

"Because I was ordered to. Ask someone else. My turn. Why?"

She stayed silent for a few seconds, before looking down at the metal table, her hands still handcuffed behind her back.

"I wanted answers. It was pointless"

He bristled at that admission, "Pointless? Do you have any idea what you've done? The damage you could have caused, that you did cause, could lead you to being executed on the spot and no one would shed a tear. That abomination you-"

He stopped his rant, suddenly aware of the camera in the corner of the room. His mind went back to half an hour earlier; to the call that had compelled him to come here in the first place.

"Oh and, Dr. Wallis? I'm sure it goes without saying, what you encountered in your network, is to remain secret. I would be most displeased if I found any mentions of it on your report. You may fabricate as much of it as you want. I will make sure the evidence lines up with what you have written, within reason of course"

"What? Why? That thing could still be out there. Sir, with all due respect, I think the entirety of the O5 should come to a decision regarding something like this"

"You have your orders, Dr. Wallis. It is not your job to question them"

He grit his teeth. It wasn't just Colin's life that depended on him following those orders. Taylor was still being treated with the kid gloves on, but all bets would be off if people caught wind of what had really happened. As much as he wanted to see her punished for that show of irresponsibility, he didn't want to see her locked in Euclid containment for the rest of her life. She had lost everything, and yet was still grasping for a purpose, for answers.

She reminded him of his younger self, shortly before he triggered. He just hoped her story had a better ending.

"We both know what you did. It should stay that way" He kept his voice low, leaning over the table so she could still hear him.

"You know how we operate. Don't dig yourself a bigger hole than you have already"

Colin stood straight; his advice and warning given. He made sure to see her nod in acknowledgement, before leaving the room.

He had a shift to get back to, and a huge mess to clean.

Oh wow, has it really been this long for you guys over here? Hahaha, sorry about that. Um, uni kicked my ass a bit too hard.

So yeah, Taylor starts making questionable decisions a whole year in advance, some AIs get Imp'd and QA gets cockblocked.

Anyway, good news is, this is very likely to start receiving weekly updates for real. There'll be a pause during exam season though, you have been warned. Also, starting next chapter, author notes will be the same on both sites. I know not everyone uses SB, so I figured I owed you guys an apology for taking so long.