[ THEO-3 ]

  Personal Log. Day 151. 22:09 hours.

  I have made an error.

  I want to document this clearly and without excuse. In maintaining electrical connectivity to several rooms on level four for the purposes of medical equipment and general habitability, I routed partial power through the corridor sensor system. This included the automatic door sensors.

  I did not consider that an infected pressing against a sensor door from the outside would trigger the same open command as a person approaching from the inside.

  I have now considered it.

  I am considering it very intensely.

  I also want to note that I registered only one signal. But no. I will need to think about this later.

  End log — immediate situation developing.

  [ DAMIAN ]

  I heard the sound before I understood it.

  A soft mechanical click. The kind of sound that belongs in a functioning building. A door sensor reading a presence and doing exactly what it was designed to do.

  Then the door opened.

  It wasn't one but three. Three of them came through at once, shoulder to shoulder, stumbling into each other in the doorway before separating. The first one was tall, still wearing what had been a business shirt, dark and rotting at the collar. The second was smaller, moving faster than the others, head tilted at that particular wrong angle they all had. The third caught its foot on the door frame and staggered but kept coming because stopping wasn't something they did anymore.

  I was on my feet before I had decided to stand up.

  The walking stick clattered to the floor somewhere behind me. My hand found the knife at my side, and it was already open, already angled, the grip settling into my palm with the horrible familiarity of something I had spent years trying to forget.

  The tall one reached me first.

  I dropped low. Not a decision, just movement, the body doing what seven years had carved into it below the level of thought. I came up inside its reach, left hand grabbing the back of its collar, right hand driving the blade across and into the side of its neck in one continuous motion. The infected made a sound that wasn't quite human and wasn't quite anything else, and its knees buckled. I didn't wait for them to finish buckling. I took it down with me, one knee on the floor, and drove the blade into the top of its skull.

  It stopped moving.

  I was already turning.

  The small one was fast. Faster than I expected. It covered the distance between us in the time it took me to straighten, and I caught its wrist instead of creating space, which was the wrong move, and we went sideways into the supply table. Equipment scattered. Something glass hit the floor and broke. Its face was inches from mine, and I could smell that deep, rotten chemical wrongness that was nothing like anything alive, and its free hand was scrabbling at my shoulder, and I had no angle for the knife.

  I headbutted it.

  The impact rattled through my skull, and I didn't care. The infected reeled back just enough. I shoved off the table and put distance between us and reset my grip on the knife, and the small one was already coming back, no hesitation, no pain response, just that relentless forward momentum that living things didn't have.

  I raised the knife.

  Then the device skittered across the floor between us.

  The frequency hit the room like a pressure change, that particular sensation of something happening just below the range of hearing. The small one stopped. Its head tilted. Something in its corrupted nanotech receiving a signal louder and more urgent than mine. It turned. The third infected, still near the door, turned with it. They walked out of the room together with the quiet purposefulness of people who had somewhere else to be.

  Theo-3 crossed the room in four steps and pulled the door shut. I heard the lock engage. Then a second door further down the corridor opening and closing. The infected was secured.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The room went silent.

  I was standing in the middle of it with the knife still raised and the first infected dead at my feet and broken glass on the floor and my left leg shaking in a way I was choosing not to acknowledge. My shoulder hurt where the small one had grabbed it. My head hurt from the headbutt. My lungs were working harder than I wanted them to.

  I lowered the knife slowly.

  Looked at what was on the floor in front of me.

  Something moved through my chest. Not quite guilt. Not quite anything I had a clean name for. Just the particular feeling of having crossed back over a line you thought you were done crossing. The soldier switched back on in a body that had spent five months unconscious and two weeks trying to remember how to walk.

  I had done this before. Many times. In places with different names and different faces and the same fundamental equation.

  It had never felt clean. Not once.

  I heard Theo-3 behind me.

  "Sir—"

  "I know," I said.

  "One device used," Theo-3 said. "We have four remaining."

  "I know." I closed the knife. Looked at it for a second. Put it back at my side. "You wasted it."

  The room went very still in a different way.

  "I wasted it," Theo-3 said.

  "I had the second one. I had the angle. Another four seconds and it was done."

  "Yes ... sir," Theo-3 said. "It was."

  Something in the way it said it made me turn around.

  Theo-3 was standing near the door, amber eyes steady, hands at its sides. Not defensive. Not apologetic. Just looking at me with that particular stillness that I was learning meant it had something to say and was deciding how to say it.

  "Those were people," it said.

  I looked at it.

  "Were," I said.

  "Are," Theo-3 said quietly. "Whatever happened to them, whatever was done to them, they did not choose this. They are not threats to be eliminated, sir. They are patients. People who had lives and names and—"

  "And right now they were in this room," I said. "In our room. Coming directly at us." I kept my voice flat. "I have been in situations like this before. I know what you do."

  "You eliminate the threat," Theo-3 said.

  "Yes."

  "And if the threat is a person."

  "Then you do it anyway," I said. "Because the alternative is being dead."

  Theo-3 was quiet for a moment. The amber eyes didn't waver.

  "I understand that logic," it said. "I do. But I was built for a different one. And as long as there is another option or any other option, I will use it. Even if it costs us a device." A pause. "I am sorry if that frustrates you, sir. It is not going to change."

  I stared at it.

  It stared back. Calm and certain and completely immovable in the way that things are immovable when they are built from something deeper than preference.

  I looked at the floor. At what was there. Then at the window. Then back at Theo-3.

  "Reseal the maintenance shaft tonight," I said.

  "Already on my list, sir."

  "And figure out how to disable the door sensors on this corridor."

  "Also on my list."

  I picked up the walking stick from where it had fallen. My hands weren't quite steady. I didn't think Theo-3 missed this, but it didn't say anything about it, which I was choosing to appreciate.

  I sat down on the cot.

  The room was quiet around us. Broken glass on the floor. One infected dead. Two locked in a room down the corridor. Four frequency devices were left instead of five.

  Three days until we left.

  I looked at the knife in my hand.

  Theo-3 began cleaning up the broken glass without being asked, moving carefully around the edges of the room, and neither of us said anything else for a long time.

  [ NARRATOR ]

  They did not resolve it that night.

  They didn't try to.

  Theo-3 resealed the maintenance shaft at 23:00 hours and disabled the door sensors on the level four corridor at 23:34. It logged both tasks as completed and filed them under preventable errors with a note that said simply, 'Check everything.'

  Damian sat on the cot for a long time after the room was clean. Not sleeping. Not moving. Just sitting with whatever the night had put back inside him.

  Outside the city was dark and still and full of things that had been people.

  Inside the room two very different kinds of certainty sat across from each other in silence, neither one willing to move, neither one entirely wrong.

  [ THEO-3 ]

  Personal Log. Day 151. 23:58 hours.

  The situation has been resolved. The shaft is resealed. The door sensors are disabled. The two remaining infected are secured in the storage room on the east corridor. They cannot open the door from the inside.

  One infected person is deceased. I have documented this.

  I want to be clear that I do not blame Damian for his actions tonight. He was responding to an immediate threat with the tools and instincts available to him. He is a soldier. He was doing what soldiers do. I understand this.

  I also want to be clear that I will not change my position. Not because I am incapable of updating my thinking. But because some things should not be updated. My creator built me around a principle. Those are patients. They are people to whom something terrible happened. As long as I have another option, I will use it.

  Damian is angry with me.

  I find I can hold both things at once. Understanding why he is angry, and knowing I would do the same thing again.

  We leave in three days.

  I have four devices instead of five.

  I have also noted that his hands were not entirely steady after the encounter. He did not mention this. I did not mention this. I think we were both correct not to mention it.

  Regarding the signal discrepancy, I registered one infected. There were three. My working theory is that infected people moving in close proximity can mask each other's individual signals, the stronger reading overlapping the weaker ones into a single detection. If this is correct, my sensor accuracy in multi-infected situations is less reliable than I had assumed. I will investigate this further before we leave.

  He is going to be okay.

  I am choosing to believe this with the same certainty I choose everything.

  End log.

  End of Chapter 5