It only took Tori ten minutes to find the first sign of Mr. Gao’s infection. Tori erased the modified code, replacing it with the original (well, the original with a few of her improvements.) As soon as she was done, she moved on, hoping that was the last of it.

It wasn’t.

How could that program have replicated itself so often in the brief time they’d been running the energy transfer? She found copies everywhere—in executable files, in storage—it’s a wonder the program had functioned at all.

She worked as fast as she could, removing and replacing the bad code, but for a long while, she worried that the invader was too fast for her. More than once, she caught it trying to reproduce itself while she was stamping it out.

Her fingers flew as she rushed...

Please subscribe to keep reading.