"What?"
"There's something up with your nanites. They aren't dormant any longer. Pull yourself off to the side, and wait here till the check in is complete. I'll clear you and then we'll help you get to the bottom of this." Her voice was barely a whisper, but she had to take her voice that low, knowing that just about any other volume would be heard by any of the other cyborgs in the room. In a normal tone she spoke up. "You're clear sir, move over."
As they finished the check in routine she had paged Yoshitsune and together all five of them, Yoshitsune, Talina, Briarios, Deunan, and Tereus went back to Yoshitsune's lab to figure out what was going on in their friend. "I need to get one of the nanites to get a sample of its program to see what it thinks its doing running around in your head." The reassuring smile that she gave was reassuring indeed as her tone of voice was one of experience and complete professionalism.
Using the scanners and pulling one of the removable panels off, she inserted a grabber and nabbed at least three of the nanites for her use before replacing the plate. "Just in case they decide to be difficult." Was her explanation.
With Yoshitsune's help she got them hooked into a stand alone computer system and downloaded the program payload. Scanning through it it didn't look like much until the software analyst looked for the footprints that she knew. They started leading to the other nanites, quickly she downloaded their program payloads into the computer and with the three of them she had enough of the program to be able to tell what it would do to the cyborg. "The nanites are active but not harmful to you Briarios. They're waiting for you to hook up to a terminal so they can get out and infect a host terminal. And this bug's both nasty and purposeful. I wonder...." She trailed off as she started typing at a rapid pace, the clicking of the keyboard making a strange racket in the room.
"Ne, Yoshitsune, what's with the clicking?" Deunan asked.
"Oh, that's the only way we've been able to get her to type without destroying the keyboard from putting too much pressure on the keys with her new body. The click lets her know that she's pushed down far enough to enter the data and to release the key. All the keyboards have been changed over, in fact its noisier, but its saved on a lot of wear and tear on the keyboards, not just from her." The explanation came, enlightening the squad members, and giving them all a chuckle as they all knew some squad members that didn't like typing up reports so they did it with more pressure than was necessary.
"Now that I know that this isn't going to hurt Briarios or anyone else as long as he stays away from terminals, he can leave if he wants. This is going to take me about a day. But come in tomorrow afternoon and I'll have a cure for it, though be warned, you'll be flushing "dead" nanites out your ports for a couple days after. The good part is you won't ever have to worry about ever getting infected or controlled via them again." Talina's voice sounded like she wasn't all there.
Yoshitsune smiled indulgently. He had been witness to her marathon programming sessions before and wasn't about to interrupt her this time with a question knowing that this time it would help a friend. If she said it would work a certain way, it would do just that. "You can trust her on that. Go home, or to the gym, I'm sure you guys had enough stress today."
Deunan and Briarios decided to leave, but Tereus found what Talina was doing fascinating. It was so different from what he was designed to do. Sitting behind her, not so close as to intrude on her personal space, but close enough to be able to read what was on the screen. All he could see was lines and lines of code scrolling up as a phenomenal pace sometimes pausing to have a line edited, or completely deleted, sometimes to have a line or six entered in. Yet from what he could read he could not make heads or tails of what she was doing. This was Greek to him.
"I know that you're there behind me, what I'm doing is I'm reprogramming these three nanites to 'infect' the rest of the nanites in Briarios with a self destruct code. Its not harmful and they won't "explode", its a shut down and don't ever turn back on again code. With them being dead waste in his system like that, his body will reject them, and flush them like they are just that. Previously they were in a "sleep" mode, which allowed them to stay in his system. I don't like the idea of foreign objects that can be used to take over someone, so I'm taking care of the problem." Talina wasn't speaking completely clearly, instead muttered most of her speech while she focused wholly on her work letting the pages and pages of programming flash by as she worked on them her hands and fingers working more than her mouth during her dissertation on what the program was going to do.
"I see." Tereus kept his tone quiet in respect for her concentration. Anyone who was willing to put that much effort into keeping his partners safe had his respect. The fact that she was one of the best software analysts on the force, even before she had left on her medical leave of absence had his attention now that she was working with them on this new development in their lives.
Soon the pages of old programming stopped coming and he soon got to see just how fast she could create new programming off the top of her head as lines of the new programming came into being. She was typing as fast as he could come up with combat combinations, and considering that he was created for combat, that was pretty darned fast. Yoshitsune chuckled softly in the background at the look of amazement on Tereus's face as he watched her program. "She's going to ignore the both of us all night and well into the next morning unless she needs something. I'd recommend you go get some rest."
"You mean she's done this before?" Tereus was amazed at the implication that the woman had done this as a human.
"Yup. Her last marathon was a 48 hour stretch to patch the ES.W.A.T. cyborg anti-virus so that they wouldn't be affected by the Halcon system. She came out with the patch days before the company that provides our network security did. When she belts down to do something she tends to ignore everything, including her own needs. The best thing to do is catch her now as she's sinking into her work and get it now so she has it at the ready." Yoshitsune explained, remembering what the woman looked like coming out of the lab with the disk that they needed to patch the software. He had played the gentleman and made sure that she had gotten to the showers on the gym level and then to one of the spare cots so that she could sleep off her exhaustion in safety. There was no way she was going to be able to get home in her condition.
"I'll do it then. She's going out of her way to help my partners, I might as well do what I can to help them." Tereus replied. "Talina, you need anything?"
"A Caffeine IV Drip?" Came the muttered reply, fingers still flashing over the keyboard.
Tereus looked over at Yoshitsune for a translation. "Steady stream of Mocchachinos. About one every two hours, liter bottles of water as well to go with them. She'll go through them about that fast, and if you think she can't hold all that? Think again, she's got scary bladder control."
"Will you two stop talking about my bladder and just get my damn coffee?" The voice at the computer spoke up, clearly this time and clearly irritated.
Tereus held his hands up in surrender with a smile, "Going!" And with an about face left to get said water and Mocchachino and leave and order with the merchant to have one of each brought to the room every 2 hours and a sandwich brought every 5 hours to be credited to his account.