Chapter 21: Critical Mass — Part 4

Ferret choked, taking a moment to regain his composure, before continuing. Shadow felt overwhelmed with his remorse. She rocked a little, and then relaxed.

“Do we need to know this?” Didi asked, feeling uncomfortable.

“One of my orphans was found dead, her body still cooling. It looked like an accident; she’d taken a fall down several flights of stairs during the blackout. When the police autopsy report, which was quite thorough, confirmed it as an accident, I let the situation go, though part of me was already trying to figure out how she fell. Weeks past without an incident, the Chran had stopped their virus attacks to adjust their strategy. And out of cycle with the Chran, I found myself hit with another virus. It caught me off guard because the Chran had been so predictable before that. Sector 200G had a door that wouldn’t open, and I was unable to access emergency channels again. It took me four hours and twenty-three minutes to eliminate the virus. This time, the virus had not been modified or adapted with typical Chran efficiency. The next time, I would be able to disable it even quicker. This time two boys were killed. Evidence indicated that they’d been electrocuted while tampering with the door’s activation mechanism.

“I got scared then — if the door wasn’t opening, it shouldn’t have had power. If the door had power, I should have had cameras, recordings, and data. I should have had something to show what happened to them, to show that the door had jammed. Somebody was lying to me, and my children were dying because of it. My first thought was that the Chran had a spy in the city, and that it had somehow managed to evade my sensory equipment. But if that was the case, why was the person targeting children? And there was the concern that the virus had implanted false memories, and that there might be an even bigger threat to my children. I began scanning the police files more thoroughly. The police had made no connection between the viruses and the deaths of the children. The reports treated the deaths as unrelated to the power outages, as if the two hadn’t happened simultaneously.”

“The police responded to hundreds of thousands of calls a week, accidents with three kids in two entirely distant sectors so many weeks apart seemed to be pure coincidence. The children had been killed in areas of the city where I had no observation of them. I don’t know what exactly prompted me to do it, as it isn’t a part of my subroutine, but I scanned the personality matrixes of every child and formed resonant prodigy crystals, storing them just in case another ‘accident’ happened.

“The process took several days — because I did it nondestructively while they were sleeping. I hadn’t gotten Ferret’s data as easily as the others. The boy was always running around, and didn’t trust sleeping with others. For security reasons, I followed him with one of my video balls — we’d hold incredible conversations because of this — so I knew who he was willing to be, and I had gained his trust enough that I knew I would have his data stored away either that night, or the night after. He was on his way back to his lair when a virus hit me — once more it wasn’t consistent with the standard Chran attack cycle. Ferret had been sealed in an air vent, and I knew that he wasn’t coming out alive.”