Kira mentally rolled her eyes, but stopped herself from doing it for real. “That’s the thing,” she said. “Most of the rest of the information is pretty clear. We don’t get any sort of viral formula or anything, but there are records in here that detail almost everything else. We know how they did it: They designed the pheromone glands that run the link so that they could start pumping out viral spores when triggered by a specific chemical. We know why they did it: because they were worried the Partial army could rebel, or worse, and they wanted an easy way to shut it down; not the most ethical decision they’d ever made, but there you go.” She put her hand on the glowing screen. “There are records in here where they debate it, there are records where they plan it, there are records where they talk about the specific details of contagion, trying to predict how quickly it would spread. But all those discussions were about Partials, and then the virus attacked humans, and there are literally no emails in the entire batch that talk about how weird that is. Nothing from the Trust, anyway. There is one email from Noah Freeman, the ParaGen CEO, to the board of directors, that seems to support this theory.” She called up the email on her screen and read from it. “‘We cannot confirm that the Partial team is working to undermine the Failsafe project, but just in case we’ve hired new engineers to imbed the Failsafe in the new models. If the team betrays us, the Failsafe will still deploy.’”

“That seems to confirm what you were just saying,” said Samm.

“Right,” she said. “We know the Trust built RM into the Partial genome, and this email tells us the board knew that part of it. But we also know the Trust built the cure into them as well, but they did it secretly. It never gets mentioned in any of the email discussions between the Trust and their bosses, and this email from the CEO implies that they knew the Trust was trying to undermine the Failsafe, but didn’t know how. That ‘undermining’ must be the cure. It only gets mentioned between Trust members a couple of times, and only under powerful encryption. Without Afa to break it for us, we would never have been able to read them.”

Afa perked up. “They used a Paolo-Scalini level six crawler with Dynamic—”

“We don’t actually care,” said Heron. “The point is that it’s secret, which is weird. They didn’t want their bosses to know they were building a Failsafe to the big scary Failsafe they wanted.”

“Which seems like proof that the first Failsafe was designed to attack humans on purpose,” said Samm. “If it was a mutation, the preconstructed cure wouldn’t be able to stop it.”