Issue 1 Downtime

Ashlie is walking down the corridor towards one particular holding cell. She's wheeling a popsicle freezer along with her and she's missing an arm. Opening up the cell designed to hold Legion she shoves the freezer inside.

Natalya wasn't far behind. She'd skimmed the file on Legion on the way and had face-palmed halfway through it.

"Good afternoon, Miss Romanov! I believe I may have managed to apprehend the infiltrator." she says proudly while the freezer slowly continues to thaw inside the holding cell.

"I somehow doubt that, but do me a favor while we wait for the... is that the popsicle freezer from the cafeteria?" She shook her head, "Create an entry in the database for a 'Will Stanton' and then set up a second process to monitor that section of data."

"That is the alias he used." she points out, but does as she's told, displaying the newly created entry for Will Stanton on a nearby monitor.

It only takes a couple of seconds and then the screen briefly turns into non-sense code, followed by a blank screen. Ashlie doesn't seem to notice.

"Ashlie, search the database for Will Stanton."

"There are no matches found for 'Will Stanton'."

"Do you have a record of the request I made a few seconds ago?"

"You asked me to create an entry for INFORMATION NOT FOUND in the system." she says, apparently not noticing anything off about what she said.

"ASHLIE," Natalya asked, her own power reaching out to cause the remnants of the ice in the popsicle freezer to open the lid, "do you have some sort of way to identify malicious programming in your own systems?"

"Of course. All my systems are self-regulating."

"Why don't you run that check now? Notify me of any abnormal termination of the check." She adjusts the temperature in the cell to speed up the thawing process.

The robot's joints lock and it sags a little as Ashlie diverts processing power to her internal regulation processes.

"Hopefully she can find it," Natalya mutters as she waits for Will to thaw enough to move around.

"Yyyyyyyoooooou knnooooooooowww, Iiiiii'm beeeeegiiinning to hate technology," Will groused as he slowly thawed.

"Blame your friends in Black Air," she said, glancing at ASHLIE. "Their damn computer virus even got into ASHLIE's records."

"Well, fucking fantastic," Will swore. "That's just...that's just great."

"Oh. Good Humour. I get it," Will said, looking down. "It's not funny, but I get it."

"If it's not entirely melted," she said, adjusting the temperature back to normal, "would you grab me an ice cream bar while you're in there?"

Will shot her a look which just about summed up the situation.

Then he reached in and pulled out a chocolate ice cream bar.

She opened the door and let herself into the cell, leaning against one wall and letting the door close behind her. She took the ice cream bar from Will and started unwrapping it, "I've got her running diagnostics right now. Hopefully a generic enough request can catch the virus unaware and she can eliminate it."

"And if she does," Will sighed, "the damn nanoprobes will reproduce themselves and reinfect her, won't they?

This sucks. If I give up and go to government holding, who knows if I'll ever come back. But if I stay here, I risk putting people in danger -- ASHLIE was going rather all out in a crowded public place, there."

"ASHLIE's enthusiasm is a correctable problem. And we don't know the vector for the virus. It may be that once we get her clean and she knows what she's looking for, we can fire wall against it." She thought for a minute, "There is one other possibility that we haven't considered. We could send you to the Savage Lands with a few others as a recon group. We have contact with Ka-Zar via his daughter, so it could be arranged. You'd be technically outside everyone's immediate jurisdiction there but his. You could consider yourself our 'good will' ambassador, pun only slightly intended."

Will hrmed.

"Well, I am definitely going down there when we make our move -- have no fear about that. I'm just a bit worried about being re...taken or whatever. It's not a bad plan, though, certainly.

Let's see what ASHLIE says when she finishes her checks."

"Might as well grab some ice cream then. I don't think they're going to want it back."

"Their loss, I suppose. I swear, the cafeteria wastes more food..." he said, unwrapping a lime icepop.

"I blame the Board of Health, or whatever it's UK equivalent is."

"What, I'm not hygienic now? I think I'm insulted."

"Well, you're a living being, so technically no. But I think they would object more to the temperature change."

"Point. People don't want chocolaty goop.

But see, that's where you come in! This is a business model waiting to happen, here."

"Scan complete." Ashlie suddenly announces. "Various discrepancies and altered data was found and traced to a hostile algorithm. I have isolated and analyzed it's processes. It's code is set to inject itself into all data relating to a specific identifier and then self-delete. I cannot identify the source of the hostile code."

"I guess this means we need to go check Maddie and Calvin, too."

"We'll get someone on it," she said to Will. She turned to ASHLIE, "Can you isolate it enough to keep it from affecting anything or reinfecting you?" Natalya continued munching on her ice cream.

"Not without locating and disabling it's source. However, I may be able to instate a work-around for myself. I am hesitant to access my backups to see if I can restore the missing data right now but going forward changing the unique identifiers should work as long as they don't refer to the particular string the virus is targeting."

Natalya seemed to have an idea. She turned to Will, "What's Sara's maiden name? Also, change your hair color and hair style for me."

"Evans. She was Sara Evans," Will said, changing his hairstyle into something less distinct

"ASHLIE, create an entry for this individual under 'Will Evans'. Set up a second process to monitor the data."

"Entry created. My apologies, Mister Evans." she says.

"Yeah, let's see how long this lasts," Will shrugs. "It might be at least a band-aid."

"I still do not remember anything about you." she says, almost sounding a bit disturbed by the idea that her data could differ this fundamentally from reality.

"Well, you know me. I'm Sara's husband!

...Evans, not McDohl. Never mark me down as related to McDohl."