“Wyatt,” Tom gasped, “don’t do it!”
Yuri drew forward a step, and his massive boot careened down, knocking Tom back. His head smacked against the wall, and he stayed there, crumpled, trying to heave in air. He was vaguely aware of Vik straining to work his sleeve up his arm, to get to his forearm keyboard. Hope reared inside him.
“What . . . are you . . . doing?” Tom managed to whisper to him.
“Getting . . . help.”
Tom tore his gaze away from Vik, not wanting Yuri’s attention to go there.
“Why are you doing this?” Wyatt asked, tears choking her voice. “I don’t understand.”
“Do as I instructed you.”
“So you can do to me what you did to Tom and Vik? No! I won’t!”
And then she shrieked out in pain when Yuri’s large hand twisted her wrist. Tom felt a surge of rage and tried to launch himself up, but agony twisted him back to the floor, his head beginning to spin violently.
Vik finished typing on his forearm keyboard, and then curled up in pain, impotent fury on his face, as he watched Wyatt struggle with Yuri.
“Do as I instructed you,” Yuri repeated.
“NO!” Wyatt shouted.
Yuri hurled Wyatt, hard, toward the chair beneath the census device. She tried to bolt, but he caught her. “This culling begins with you, then.” He snared the restraints around her arms, and reared up to seize the census device, pull the metal claw down right over her head—
And then the door slid open, and Blackburn barreled in and wrenched Yuri away from Wyatt. She cringed as Yuri slammed his fist across Blackburn’s face, crashing him to the floor. Blackburn found his feet in a flash, his hand jabbing at his forearm keyboard.
Yuri started toward him and then seemed to think the better of it. He backed up one step, another.
“Who’s counterhacking me, Sysevich?” Blackburn snarled at him, when whatever program he was trying to deploy failed.
Yuri said nothing. There was an unsettling blankness to his face as he edged back as far as he physically could.
Blackburn lowered his forearm keyboard, giving up on taking Yuri down with a program. Instead, keeping his careful eyes on Yuri, Blackburn reached down and yanked Wyatt free, then shoved her toward Vik and Tom.
“Help those two,” he said.
Tom sat up painfully as Wyatt retrieved her forearm keyboard, then hooked a neural wire into Tom’s access port, and set about removing the program gripping his muscles, sending pain riveting through his body.
Neither Blackburn nor Yuri was moving. Blackburn seemed at a temporary loss, and Yuri had taken shelter from him on the other side of the computer consoles controlling the census device.
“So Ashwan’s net-send was right,” Blackburn said, breathing heavily. “Someone dismantled the filtering program.”
Wyatt’s head shot up, terrible comprehension on her face.
“It’s gone,” Vik confirmed, sprawled limply across the floor, his head tilted back. “It’s been gone for a while. Since before Capitol Summit.”
Tom’s every muscle tightened. It was treason. He felt himself beginning to shake as he dragged his gaze up to the census device. He’d spent two days under that trying to keep this from Blackburn.
For Wyatt.
For Yuri.
For nothing.
Wyatt still stared at Yuri, horrified.
“Well, that limits my options,” Blackburn remarked, half to himself. “There’s a very able programmer in Obsidian Corp. right now, making sure I can’t knock Sysevich out.”
Wyatt neutralized the virus keeping Tom and Vik down, her hands trembling. Tom heaved himself upright, his legs shaking. They discovered that Yuri was still holding his distance, across the room from them, an alien look on his face. There was nothing of Yuri there. Just this cold, sharp blankness.
“What’s happened to him?” Wyatt’s voice was a quavering whisper. “Why is he acting like that?”
Blackburn kept his eyes on the large boy. He seemed to be thinking carefully, trying to figure out what to do. “Because that’s not Yuri Sysevich, Enslow. My guess is, you triggered a semiautonomous security daemon. The process runs in the background of his system until it perceives a threat. Then it launches and assumes neural sovereignty—full control of his mind—and attempts to neutralize that threat. In this case, the three of you.”
“Wait, so it’s like an artificial intelligence, then?” Vik said, his voice hoarse. “There’s some AI in control of Yuri?”
“There’s no self-awareness.” Blackburn walked to the side, to survey Yuri head to toe. “It’s a preprogrammed response system, though since someone was counterhacking my attempts to get into his processor and knock him unconscious, I’d guess there’s a remote administrator paying attention to this situation now. . . . What were you three doing when it triggered?”
“We asked him if he’s been spying for Vengerov,” Vik admitted, “and if he’d let us rescramble him.”
“Rescramble,” Blackburn repeated, acid in his voice. “And here it is, then. The source of the breaches. Sysevich. And you three. Did you think I put that program in his processor for fun?”
“I only wanted to help him,” Wyatt mumbled.
“I trusted you with my encryptions, Enslow,” Blackburn snapped. “You are the only person I shared those with. Do you know why I never suspected Sysevich? Do you? It’s because you’re the only person in the world who could have done this without me noticing.”
Wyatt grew impossibly more pale. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s too late for that now.”
Wyatt was visibly shaking, the adrenaline wearing off. They all hung back as Yuri, or whoever . . . or whatever it was, regarded them steadily from the other side of the darkened Census Chamber.
“Why isn’t the security daemon doing anything now?” Vik whispered.
“Because,” Blackburn said, a strange note in his voice, “it’s been programmed to adopt a new set of behavioral algorithms if it perceives itself at a disadvantage. It’s determined its former approach to physically overpower you won’t contain the situation anymore, and I’m sure it has more encoded instructions ready to trigger, depending on what we do next. Perhaps it’s even awaiting instructions from its remote administrator.”
“So let’s wipe it out,” Wyatt whispered. “We have to get that program out of him.”
Blackburn shook his head. “Can’t be done.”
“If it’s some sort of virus, we can take care of it! I can do it!”
“This isn’t rogue software. I have told you many times, Enslow, how many backdoors I found in this system when I took over the installation. I patched those security vulnerabilities, one by one—except this one. This one, I couldn’t fix.”
He paced back in the other direction, still moving very slowly, and Yuri’s searing gaze followed his every move. Blackburn said, almost casually, like they were in Programming, “Tell me, Mr. Ashwan, given how vast the solar system is, why are we able to communicate instantaneously with satellites, say, thirteen light-hours away?”
Vik’s brow furrowed. He seemed as thrown by the question as Tom was. “Quantum entanglement, sir.”