00011111

Answer A… call Turbo. We used a vidwindow so the rest of the crew could listen in. I read Copeland's signal through the link, but we pretty much sat back and let the guardians have their chat. It felt both good and bad to be support again. I miss being proactive but at least it wasn't my responsibility to keep Bob from deleting 800x600.

"I'm sending a Viral Incident team immediately." Turbo announced. "They'll be there in nanoseconds."

"No!" Bob put an end to that option. Matrix seemed outraged. The renegade never saw merit in saving viruses. Sure it wasn't really my function to decide who should live or die, but after all we've been through I've become a little partial to getting rid of viruses when we have the chance. Not only regarding the past few cycles, but in the careers of all my guardian partners before these… Dixon coming to mind first… how many had been deleted by viruses? Bob's theories were radical (and Turbo said so) but risen out of a strict translation of guardian protocol and the compassionate heart he had for any and all processing persons.

I was always the one to choose the revolutionary guardians….

"I don't care what you think of my ideas anymore," Bob said, "if we'd done it your way, if we'd deleted Hex when she first arrived, the entire net would be destroyed by Daemon."

Turbo didn't like this little insubordination, but he couldn't argue with facts. Not to take sides, but it was and remains to be impossible to forecast future events. Hex turned good under unique circumstances and it worked out in our favor. She's the only virus in the history of the unified systems to ever come clean. Somehow I felt Megabyte wouldn't succumb to Bob's good looks and charm.

"If we need your help, we'll call for it." Bob said icily. He hung up. It was kind of mean of him, but who am I to say anything, he was in a bad mood.

"Okay, Bob, its your show now," Matrix conceded, "what do we do?"

"First what do we know?"

Megabyte's succeeded in ruining everything we had ever planned and hurting everyone we've ever loved for a second time. Sorry, I'm being pessimistic again. I guess I'll never truly grow out of the lessons I learned in Bob…bitterness can sometimes be helped with a dollop of sarcasm, and other times you've just gotta tell it like it is.

The others bantered over stuff I already knew. He had my code, must have grabbed it from me back on that spammed platform, and used it to slip easily past our guard. He was now running free in the guise of no one in particular and preparing to bring our home down around our ears… again.

Mike the TV opened up a channel to release a special news bulletin to the people. News to Mike must equal 'scare the public out of their wits' because that was the result. Still it was the only news report I've ever parsed to end with "Panic Now! Like only you know how to do!"

Bob was on top of it. For once this cycle. Yeesh. "That's not Mike! Its Megabyte!"

"Yes!" Phong saw the logic. "Panic only helps him and causes us nothing but trouble."

"But how do we catch him?" AndrAIa asked.

Wellman Matrix, the null in the robot suit, spoke like the scientist he used to be. "Perhaps we can devise a test, a way of identifying him. Then we can determine who's real –"

"But Dad," Enzo spoke, "when he was Bob, he fooled us all!"

That's little Enzo being smart again! I guess I never noticed last time how useful having a kid around was. It seems like the youngest of us always recall the obvious at key situations.

AndrAIa must have missed her childhood days as she added to the info dump. "And even Phong's scans couldn't tell the difference."

"Right," Bob determined, "so if we can't ID him, we'll just have to outsmart him."

A tad ambitious for this crowd. Heh, I'm kidding, we always find a way out of sticky situations, why should this time be any different? Still we'd need a plan. A good plan. A plan that would work.

Bob's one track mind comes through in the clutch. "Where's Dot?"