“I trusted you with my encryptions, Enslow,” Blackburn snapped. “You are the only person I shared those with. Do you know why I never suspected Sysevich? Do you? It’s because you’re the only person in the world who could have done this without me noticing.”

Wyatt grew impossibly more pale. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s too late for that now.”

Wyatt was visibly shaking, the adrenaline wearing off. They all hung back as Yuri, or whoever . . . or whatever it was, regarded them steadily from the other side of the darkened Census Chamber.

“Why isn’t the security daemon doing anything now?” Vik whispered.

“Because,” Blackburn said, a strange note in his voice, “it’s been programmed to adopt a new set of behavioral algorithms if it perceives itself at a disadvantage. It’s determined its former approach to physically overpower you won’t contain the situation anymore, and I’m sure it has more encoded instructions ready to trigger, depending on what we do next. Perhaps it’s even awaiting instructions from its remote administrator.”

“So let’s wipe it out,” Wyatt whispered. “We have to get that program out of him.”

Blackburn shook his head. “Can’t be done.”

“If it’s some sort of virus, we can take care of it! I can do it!”

“This isn’t rogue software. I have told you many times, Enslow, how many backdoors I found in this system when I took over the installation. I patched those security vulnerabilities, one by one—except this one. This one, I couldn’t fix.”

He paced back in the other direction, still moving very slowly, and Yuri’s searing gaze followed his every move. Blackburn said, almost casually, like they were in Programming, “Tell me, Mr. Ashwan, given how vast the solar system is, why are we able to communicate instantaneously with satellites, say, thirteen light-hours away?”

Vik’s brow furrowed. He seemed as thrown by the question as Tom was. “Quantum entanglement, sir.”

“Quantum entanglement,” Blackburn agreed, raising his forearm keyboard and giving another shot to hacking Yuri’s processor. “Every single satellite is essentially one half of a greater computer, communicating through one set of an entangled pair of photons up there in space, the other half down here on Earth. This link is instantaneous, it can’t be jammed, and it can’t be hacked. Now imagine a certain Russian trillionaire has a quantum transmitter inside a supercomputer in Antarctica and an entangled counterpart transmitter inside a person’s brain.”

Wyatt drew a sharp breath.