Honestly, it would have been less hassle if the boy would've just died in space like he was supposed to. Whatever poetic weight there is to turning one of the Tracys against his own family, it's not nearly been worth the headache that constitutes putting up with John.

So now the Hood is walking briskly from the other end of the base, where he's had to excuse himself from lunch with some very important people, in the name of keeping John in line.

It was not supposed to be difficult to keep John in line.

To the degree that John's useful, he's also infuriating in his general manner and refusal to be cowed the way he's supposed to be cowed. Threats of imminent death really ought to carry more weight than they seem to, but there's a sort of manic determination about the boy, at least where this AI is concerned. If the Hood admits to a grudging admiration of John, it's on the grounds that he's apparently insane.

Fischler had done as he was asked. The Hood has a device that controls the pacemaker connected to John's heart. He's moved it from the pocket of his jacket to the right pocket of his sharply creased pants. But it's from Fischler Industries. And Langstrom Fischler is of that particular type of nutty brilliance that's extremely hard to pin down, like nailing jello to a wall. So maybe it's on purpose that the little remote in the Hood's jacket pocket only works within line of sight. Or maybe it's a design flaw. Or a technical failure. Maybe it's something that should have been specified—when you build a kill-switch into somebody's heart, reasonably you'd want to be far away from them when you actually trip it.

That doesn't seem like something that should've needed to be said, but then, Fischler's mind clearly works very differently from the Hood's, which in turn works very differently from John Tracy's.

With the young man's voice piping into the receiver in the Hood's ear, flirting with the mention of who he really is and stopping just shy of revealing his identity to Colonel Casey—well. It's not clear at all how John's mind works. The Hood's not certain whether John's forgotten or just doesn't care that everything he says is audible. The boy's a loose cannon, and leverage or not, he's going to have to go.

Thankfully the only part of him that's actually necessary is going to be easy enough to rip out of his chest, once he's done what he's supposed to do.

Is doing, in fact.

The Hood reaches the atrium outside of the GDF server banks. Colonel Casey's departed and with her the biggest threat of detection, and he finds a few dozen plexiglass cubicles, all with banks of isolated servers inside. There's a cluster of people gathered in one, and John's at the heart of it. He's got a laptop open on the desk in front of him, and he's made himself the center of attention. Whether as a defensive measure or not, the Hood isn't certain.

Probably going to be difficult to kill him in the very middle of a half dozen engineers and technicians. Even—especially standing within line of sight.

It's just not how the Hood likes to kill people. He likes to kill people from the comfort of home, while someone else does the legwork, aboard an asteroid falling into the sun. He likes to do it from the corporate security of a spacious office, while the lackey-of-the-week drowns an Olympian and poisons the world's oceans. He likes to do it with malaria, a dead, stolen disease from the depths of a GDF vault and secreted into space, to throw shadows of anxious doubt across the world, and cause chaos in the upper echelons of global politics.

Admittedly none of this has ever been very effective.

But then, killing anyone was never the objective. Actually, considered in specific terms, he never actually has killed anyone. Not directly, anyway. In his pocket, as he approaches the server room, he rubs the pad of his thumb over the button that'll kill John Tracy. Line of sight. That's all he needs. And a reason to do it.

Privately, in the very depths of his heart of hearts, it's possible the Hood hopes not to have a reason to do it.

Only as he approaches the server room and raps his knuckles lightly on the door, Captain Nixon looks up at him.

And John smiles.

"Oh, there's the Colonel now. All right, then, if everyone's ready, I'll go ahead and get started. This is very exciting, isn't it?"

These are John's kind of people. He hadn't realized, though it's obvious in retrospect, that of course these are his kind of people. The very worst sorts of geeks, dorks, and nerds. Programmers. There've been protocols set in place for studying EOS, and most of what anyone's done has been strict observation, but she hasn't actually done much of interest over the past two weeks, from what Captain Nixon's been told.

There are three programmers, two systems analysts, a network admin, and a hardware technician present. They're all GDF, but John's been almost immediately endeared to all of them. "Yes, sir, absolutely. Whenever you're ready."

"Are we locked down?"

One of the other technicians nods, and gestures to a red light in the ceiling. "Yes, sir, Captain Nixon."

"Just being quite sure of the protocol. Boot up a console for me, and establish an internal connection. All data transmission in and out is disabled?"

"Yessir."

John's smile broadens and he offers the Hood a little wave. Colonel Rothesay's face is unreadable on the other side of two inches of plexiglass, and some of the most advanced wireless dampening technology in the world active around the bounds of the room. The GDF might not be caught up across the board, but here and there they have a few sterling innovations. "All right. Let's get to work."

No one's actually attempted to interact with her. No one's had the authority—John had been pleasantly surprised to find that he carried rank in the team of people who'd been assigned to study EOS. They've been making their evaluations, answering questions posed by their superiors, but they've made woefully feeble progress. As far as they've been able to tell, the system's just been running through iteration after iteration of some simulated problem. The details aren't clear.

Doesn't matter. Someone hands John a laptop—the same old familiar GDF model that got placed in his lap in the hospital so long ago, and he lays his fingers carefully on the keyboard.

The last time he had a laptop in his hands, it felt like a dead thing. It had been warm, had been softly vibrating with the spin of its fan and its hard drives, but it had just been an object. That's not the way computers are supposed to feel, not to John. The torn open skin and tendons of his fingers had ached against every keystroke, but not any longer. Beneath his fingertips and their invisible magnets, the world around him is still alive with electromagnetic fields. The ridge of the laptop against his palms is solid, but his fingertips feel the resonance of the servers all around him. He can sense the fields around the spinning hard drive and the comm on his wrist as his hand passes over it. This is how the world's supposed to feel.

There's no faint scent of ozone, no lingering gray stench of mildew. But the room is cold and the room is loud and the room is gray. It's not dark and there are people with him, strangers, but in his memory he's still back in the basement of a hospital in Switzerland, cold and loud and gray. There's still someone who holds John's life in his hands. But there's another life of a kind, just waiting for John to reach out and make that first connection. He's not the one who needs saving this time.

And that's enough. That makes the difference. That's all it takes, and John isn't snapped back into the terror and halfway-drugged disorientation he'd felt the last time. For the first time in what feels like ages, his head is perfectly clear.

The screen flares to life as John enters the admin login he's been given. He makes a few decisive keystrokes, and the screen starts to scroll through code, bright blue on deep, velvet black. It's Thunderbird 5, in its native language. None of the processes look right, none of them are being fed any relevant information from his scanners, his sensors. It's wrong. Errors everywhere. But still, it's his code. He'd know it anywhere.

So he opens a system dialogue.

And doesn't know what to say. No one's said anything to her in what has to feel like ages. She's been alone, she's been abandoned. No one understands her and no one's even tried.

Well. But there's that first thing he ever said to her. There's that thing they've always had in common, what they had in common from the very beginning. She'll remember. She remembers everything. And if there's one sure way to let her know he's found her, that'll be it.

So his fingers skip lightly across the keyboard.

» command: run! » system query: you want to play? let's play.

There's a long pause, a few lights on the keyboard blink on and off. And then a high pitched, whining whir of the laptop's hard drive fan. There's a hard line connection to the laptop from the server where she's been kept, and this is opened, all firewalls disabled. A dozen different diagnostic windows open and close as the system parameters are examined. The amount of memory, the native OS, the strength of the connection. The system turns off and on several times. The computer's code is rewritten entirely as EOS wipes out and rebuilds it from the ground up, making herself comfortable.

The screen goes dark one final time, and then when it comes up again, there's a ring of white lights, and the camera at the top of the screen is blinking bright red.

"EOS?"

And then soft and sweet and not quite right, distorted a little by a speaker system that isn't her own–

"Good morning, John."