Winter, 2016.

  “—and it does what, exactly?”

  “Less you know about that the better.”

  Sid slurped the last dregs of her sprite through a cracked plastic straw. She shook the cup empty and clicked it down to the desk—scattered with split ramen packets and broth-spotted bowls—tapped her hello-kitty painted acrylics on the thumb drive beside it.

  “I just need to know what it is I'm looking at.”

  She hated coming here. Bugs' apartment was barely a box-room and it stank like over fermented apples, but he was the best sys engineer she knew (though it pained her to say or even think it). Besides, he wasn’t exactly the i’ll come to you type of guy.

  “Sid—you’ve spent a whole summer spamming me about persistent simulation kernels. Now you’re in my bedroom with a bin, asking me to plug it into my own machine with zero context.”

  Bug looked at her and smiled.

  “No.”

  “Okay—okay… OK,” Sid huffed and sighed.

  He must have really felt the lull in her voice, because he fully took his headset off, out of respect, of course, as he wheeled his chair out and spun to look at her.

  “This thing at work. They just pushed it to pre-alpha and the playtest stuff has been weird, Bug. Like they're flying QA in, but they're not flying them out. You get me?”

  Bug creased his brow in the LED glow.

  “No, Sidney. I do not get you.”

  She sighed again and dropped with a thud on the bed. The spring clanged on the mattress as if to punctuate her annoyance.

  “Listen. I can't do the shit that you do. I've been rigging pigs 24/7 for a year solid. It's been destroying my brain, dude. I thought this gig would be my dream gig, but I have zero idea the shit I'm building.”

  Sid paused as she looked down at the thick, blue carpet. At least she thought it was blue; everything looked like a deep cornflower hue in Bug’s abode.

  “So I took some stuff…”

  He arched back in his chair with a heave, the cable on his headset catching and clattering against the keyboard.

  “You took some stuff?!” He huffed. “You took some stuff and you brought it here? What stuff? Code?! Sidney, Monolith are like S-Tier ghouls. They kill guys for modding decades old IP. They will fire you—then they will kill me—then they will kill you!”

  Bug stood up from his desk and then paced over to the window. The curtains were already drawn—they always were—but he pulled them tighter as he craned his neck to the cityscape below.

  “Christ, Sidney. This is real shit.”

  “Listen,” she started. “I eat lunch with a guy on the ML floor. He said it's neural stuff—emergence thresholds. Self modelling loops. Architecture that's built for decades. Live your whole life in that stuff.”

  Bug paced and then sat back down, pulled a bag of Cheetos from the debris scattered on his desk and munched the last few with a crunch.

  “It won't be built for us though, Bug. You know that. At least not in the long run.”

  He scrunched his face. Still angry, half frightened.

  “He gave me the stick. Said it's just a fragment, but just enough there to build a piggyback. Something small… just a nugget.”

  Bug looked up at her. Eyes sheened in a pale blue glow. He scrunched the packet with a fist.

  “For fucks sake, Sid.”

  Bug didn’t touch the stick. He just sighed, rubbed his knuckles against his temples. Clenched and unclenched his jaw a bit, then picked it up like he was pulling mussels with a spare shell.

  He stared at it like it might start crawling on its own.

  “How small,” he said finally, “is small.”

  Sid shifted on the bed, the springs giving another tired complaint.

  “Like… not even a whole thing,” she said. “It’s not runnable, at least I don't think it is. It’s just… patterns—I think. Hooks. Weird comments that aren’t comments. Half the functions are stubs that point to other stubs. I don't know, I can't make sense of it like you.”

  “Last parts nice, first parts not reassuring.”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  Bug exhaled through his nose and rolled back to the desk. He didn’t plug the drive in. Instead, he reached under the monitor and flicked a switch. The LED strips dimmed. The fans changed pitch. Somewhere in the box, something disconnected with a soft, mechanical click, and then a huff of air like a stabbed lung deflating.

  “Mother dearest here is air-gapped,” he said. “Just a precaution though. Let's hope you haven't brought me some real life Flubber shit.”

  Sid nodded, half-smiling. “That’s why you're the best.”

  “Flattering.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  He pulled a battered laptop from a drawer—old, ugly, thick as a brick. The kind of machine that had lived several lives already.

  “Good thing that this thing’s a corpse,” Bug said. “It doesn’t even trust itself.”

  He set it on the desk and powered it up. The screen bloomed into a dull, grey terminal.

  “If this thing so much as twitches, I wipe the drive and you forget you were ever here.”

  “Bug—”

  “I mean it, Sid.”

  She raised her hands. “Okay. Okay.”

  He reached for the thumb drive, and paused. Bug looked at her again.

  “You understand,” he said, quieter now, “that if this is what I think it is, it doesn’t matter that it’s a fragment.”

  Sid swallowed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fragments aren’t good… it's how you hide things. Bad things. OR it's gonna be too small of a slice that we're staring at snail DNA without realising it's a pterodactyl."

  “Yeah.”

  Bug plugged it in.

  Nothing happened.

  He frowned.

  “That’s… not good.”

  “What, you wanted fireworks?”

  “No. I wanted enumeration, you dolt.”

  He typed. Fast. The keys clacked sharp in the small room.

  “Device shows up as generic storage. No partition table. No filesystem.”

  He ran another command. Then another.

  “Huh.”

  Sid leaned forward. “What’s ‘huh’?”

  “It’s… pretending to be empty.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It’s clever,” Bug corrected. “Or lazy. Hard to tell. The best stuff is both."

  He dumped the raw contents to screen. Lines scrolled. Hex, then something else—structures that almost made sense if you didn’t look at them too hard.

  Bug stopped typing.

  Just stared.

  “Bug?”

  “This isn’t game code, dude.”

  Her stomach dropped. “What?”

  “This isn’t source. At least I don't think it's source. It’s…” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “It’s sitting under all that.”

  “Under how?”

  He laughed once. No humour in it.

  “Sid, this thing is a game in the same sense that the Sistine chapel is just painting and decorating.”

  Silence, except for the hum of the laptop.

  “Then what’s it meant to do?” she asked.

  Bug leaned back slowly.

  “Uh. I'll be fucked if I know. I mean, it looks like it's meant to wait. Build itself piece by piece.”

  He scrolled again, slower now.

  “Look at this,” he said, pointing. “See these calls? They don’t execute but they register. Like… like someone’s leaving forwarding addresses to itself from itself.”

  Sid squinted. “Forwarding to where?”

  “That’s the fun part,” Bug said. “Everywhere.”

  He tapped the screen.

  “This looks like it hooks persistence reconciliation. World-state diffs. Anything that resolves conflict over time.”

  Sid felt cold.

  Not the room—Bug’s place was always overheated—but the specific kind of cold that crept up your spine when something slotted into place a little too neatly.

  In a burst of nervous energy, Bug snapped a thumb across an F-key and his headset burst into a tinny cacophony of black, sludgey metal. He liked to listen to some heavy shit when he was overwhelmed. After a few seconds, Sid could make out the track for herself. Job for a Cowboy - Entombment of a Machine.

  Bug was kind enough to leave the headset idle on the desk so they could both take in the noise.

  “You told me once,” she said slowly over the drone, “when I got the job… that the engine would be the only thing at Monolith nobody’d be allowed to touch without five layers of sign-off.”

  Bug didn’t answer straight away. He just kept scrolling as lines of code reflected in his lenses; orange, red, green, blue. He shook his head and scrolled again—this time with a kind of grim familiarity, like he already knew what he was going to find but was checking anyway.

  “I said nobody admits to touching it,” he corrected. “Big difference.”

  He highlighted another section.

  “This isn’t payload code. It’s scaffolding. Bootstraps. Interface contracts.” He paused. “Jesus Christ.”

  “What.”

  “This technically is the engine.”

  Sid sat up properly now. “You mean—”

  “I mean this is core, but an old core,” Bug said. “Not runtime. Not tooling. This is the thing everything else plugs into, or at least I think it is.”

  Her mouth went dry. “But it’s not complete.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s clean, and it kind of also… doesn’t exist.”

  He leaned back, staring at the ceiling.

  “Someone lifted a versioned slice. Early. Before the compliance layers. Before the locks. Probably not your lunch guy. He probably found it too.” He looked at her. “This is how the engine used to think, but it almost definitely doesn't think like this anymore. Like first memories kind of shit.”

  Sid hugged her arms. “That makes it worse, right?”

  Bug snorted. “That makes it useful.”

  He turned the laptop so she could see. Boxes, arrows, dense comments written in a tone that wasn’t corporate, wasn’t quite academic either. More like notes left for a future self.

  “This guy didn’t hide a thing in the engine,” Bug said. “They took the engine at it's earliest stage and—” he gestured vaguely “—knew that it could be taught how to accept company.”

  Sid frowned. “Accept what?”

  “A guest,” he said. “Cute little hitchhiker. Maybe a false memory. Mandala effect shit. A plug-in that doesn’t look like a plug-in. You said this thing was neural, right? Well it'll need a brain. Lots of them. Human ones, probably.”

  She felt a spark of understanding, thin and dangerous.

  “So we’re not running this,” she said. “We’re… extending it.”

  Bug’s eyes flicked up to hers.

  “Now you’re thinking like a criminal. Better hours in my line of work."

  He scrolled again.

  “See this?” He tapped the trackpad. “This is a registration surface. Old one. Deprecated, technically. But they can’t remove it without breaking backward compatibility.”

  “Because something, somewhere—”

  “—is still using it,” Bug finished. “Exactly.”

  He went quiet for a moment, jaw tight. He tapped the pocket of air in the space between his cheek and teeth.

  “This fragment tells us where to hook,” he said. “Not what to hook. That’s on us.”

  Sid exhaled shakily. “Which means—”

  “Which means you don’t smuggle this back in,” Bug said. “You don’t even acknowledge it exists.”

  She nodded.

  “What you bring in,” he continued, “is a plug-in. Legitimate. Signed. Boring. A pig rig or something.”

  “And inside?”

  “Inside is this same core,” Bug said. “Small enough to pass review. Dumb enough to be ignored. It’ll register against this old surface, and the engine will do the rest.”

  Sid stared at the floor.

  “I’d have to install it myself.”

  “Yes.”

  “On prod.”

  “Yes.”

  “At Monolith.”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed, once, sharp and humourless.

  “They’ll audit it.”

  “Of course they will.”

  “They’ll sandbox it.”

  “They’ll think they did.”

  Bug leaned forward, elbows on knees.

  “Sid,” he said quietly, “this only works if you’re the one who does it. You understand that, right?”

  She nodded again. Too quickly.

  “They won’t trust the engineers,” he went on. “They’ll trust builders. People like you. People who look like they just want to ship features and go home.”

  Her hands curled into fists.

  “I just rig pigs,” she said.

  Bug shook his head.

  “Yeah but you’re boring and cute enough with it that you won't be assumed,” he said. “That’s always been the dangerous part.”

  Silence settled between them, thick and buzzing.

  Finally, Sid said, “If we do this… what happens?”

  Bug looked at the laptop. At the code. At the shape of something that had been waiting longer than either of them.

  “Nothing,” he said. “For a long time.”

  “And then?”

  He closed the lid, gently this time.

  “Then one day the engine notices there’s a question it can’t answer on its own. If it ever gets there.”

  Sid swallowed.

  “And that’s it?”

  Bug met her eyes.

  “That’s enough. Trying is enough.”

  She reached out and slid the thumb drive back toward herself, fingers trembling just a little.

  “So,” she said. “Can you help me write it?”

  Bug hesitated.

  Then nodded.

  “…Yeah,” he said. “I think I can.”

  “But once it’s in,” he added, “it won’t be ours anymore.”

  Sid slipped the headset on over her ears, the foam pads pressing tight on her jaw bone and temples.

  “It never was,” she said—as the vibrations of her voice bled into noise.