Team

Did he already learn something from the data we recorded? I leaned over to the screen, though soon Louise wanted to see as well. At a glance, nothing about it looked all that new. It was just what we pulled from the corpse. “What’s wrong?”

Leonce turned back to face me and glanced to see his daughter sitting on the table eager for the next bit of news. A grim expression came over his face. Before it had just been a scan, but the details became more sensitive. I could see he hesitated in her presence.

I faced Louise reaching out to help her down. “You want to help your mum out? Your dad’s got some work to do.”

She looked back towards the wall. “But you said I could play, daddy!”

We exchanged momentary stares knowing how it was going to be with Louise. I patted her shoulder trying to encourage her away. “I’ve got an idea! What would you think about some home cooking from the outside?”

“The outside?”

“Yea, something my family made for me. Have you had lasagna before?”

She bounced up with wide eyes. “What’s that?”

“After this is all over I’ll make it for you as a special treat. How’s that sound?”

“Okay!” She grabbed my hand leading the way out of the room. I took a final check on him before getting dragged away. He gave me a grateful nod. It felt a little odd that I was supposed to be taking her back when she did all the work. But at least she had her energy.

The wrecked home of the Lalonde’s didn’t even seem to register to Louise. She hurried off shouting for Adelphe. I could only guess that she tried to clean up the mess. Or maybe she was praying. Louise seemed good on her own and returned home. So I slipped away to avoid the mother. Leonce still had his reason thankfully.

I hurried back to his workshop. I found him elbows deep in the data scrolling through everything with a half horrified expression. “Louise is safe.”

“Thanks, I didn’t want her to ask questions about what I want to talk to you about.”

“I get you.” Louise’s lack of reaction to everything the home pinged back on me. I remembered the other day in her room. “Oh I should mention another piece of data. Louise is hallucinating. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of this as everyone else I've only seen cough or get violent, but I wanted to mention it.”

“You too then?”

“How long?”

He shrugged. “Hard to pin down since she’s a kid, playing pretend isn’t an unusual thing. But more recently she’s been very insistent about something being another item when it’s not. And it’s not playing pretend.”

“She also seems to not realize there’s any damage in your home.”

Leonce gestured over the display moving windows of data around. Once stopped, he pointed at some hardware scans of Louise. “They aren’t high resolution scans, but there’s errors and false data being delivered from her optical augments to her brain case connections. She’s seeing the correct thing, but the signal it’s being altered before reaching the brain. So she’s been told bad data.”

“It’s almost like someone’s hacked her.” A side stare swung over to me for the comment. “Assuming the cough is the first symptom, do you think the illusions, false data is the second?”

“And the loss of control into the berserk state is the next stage. I don’t have the instruments to do a deeper analysis, but if they were all connected to the same then false data into complete loss of control would feel like a progression, worsening of the symptom.”

“Which means Louise has already progressed to the final stage potentially.” I leaned in on the table gesturing at the corpse data. “You get anything useful from this?”

“I can see the path of destruction it took and that I see signs of the same thing in Louise already.”

“Dammit, how short on time do we have?”

He motioned through putting a comparison of her scans to the corpse. Hardware wasn’t my speciality, but I saw hints of it in Louise like he said. “It’s all guess work right now. Not knowing how long your corpse suffered from the last stage symptoms, I can only look at the development of it within her augments.”

Leonce touched the table tapping out on a board to change the data. It altered Louise’s scans showing red regions covering nearly seventy percent of her augments. If that was what I guessed we didn't have a lot of time. “Whatever this disease is, it’s infected nearly everything. The healthcare can’t fight it properly. It’s designed to treat the organic parts and provide maintenance to the biomechanical ones. However, it still functions like a security system or firewall. It needs to recognize a threat and it doesn’t. We don’t have anything like this so it doesn’t know the body is in danger.”

“So we need to reprogram the healthcare to identify it as a threat.”

“That’d be the logical process, but I don’t know how to do that. Programming is outside of my field, I’m a hardware specialist. And even the Basilica’s Clergy are mostly hardware experts too. The few software types are in the Corpus and probably not even in Coulen.”

I nodded about the reality. It was the primary reason why my relic still reliably worked. Software became a mostly lost skill and even hardware to a degree. They were very different skill sets and if the software worked, hardware became the bigger issue. So training ended focus on hardware and in time programmers became fewer in number. Prioritizing survival sacrificed a lot.

Leaning towards the screen, I tried to make out the lines of code. “You got me. Wait, go back to line 17439. That’s strange, why is it making a call? I don’t think this block is supposed to be…”

Leonce stopped and turned to face me directly. “You can read this?”

“Read yes, rewrite? Maybe. I’ve never dug around the healthcare source code or honestly any augments. We didn’t exactly have them to practice on. But they passed down software and hardware skills to everyone since they’re a rare, but important life skills. Unfortunately, I’m really bad at hardware, it’s why B helps me with that.”

“But there’s a chance you could do this.”

“Chance, yes, but I’m going to need you as well. If we’re going to try to reprogram the healthcare to recognize the disease to kill it, it’ll need to have the hardware scans to identify infected systems.”

“That’s better hope than I’d have.” He waved his hand over the table and began typing out on a completely different section. A few moments later a second screen appeared opposite him.

I changed my position around the table. B followed along sitting down in front watching the display. I was going to need his double checks if we were to do this. Tapping on the table, windows of code and data poured in. It suddenly felt a little overwhelming to see, no longer shoulder surfing.

“You identify the code blocks and I’ll work through the data from the corpse. I’ll filter things through what I got from Louise to give you parameters that the healthcare can use for identification.”

Flipping through the lines of code, this could take hours. And my mind thought about the augments themselves. Depending on what interaction the healthcare had with the augments, I might have to dive into it. And machine code wasn’t my strength at all.

Regardless, I nodded to him and ran my hands through my hair to pull it back. It wasn’t really in my eyes, but I already felt my body heating up from the pressure. I made a promise to save their daughter, but could I actually do it? Could we do it?

It was going to be a long day, and night.