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That day was surprisingly normal. The traffic lanes were as busy as always, which meant that Olirian almost reached the building late. He didn't think anyone would care, not today, but he prided himself on being punctual.

"Oli! Wait up!"

He turned and saw Jofre running toward him. "Hey Jof, cutting it close."

The statistical analyst grinned. "Couldn't sleep, so had trouble getting up." He slowed and they walked together. "I can't believe today's the day."

Olirian returned the smile. "I know. Years of work are finally going to pay off."

"Hey Annie," Jofre greeted the guard. "The universe is changing today."

The guard waved back and went back to looking ahead.

"What are you going to be doing?" Jofre asked Olirian as they entered the lift.

"I have to check in on a simulation I started last night, then I want to continue working on the Arsinian Project. I'm hoping to crack the nucleotide assembly sequence today."

"You're working? On today of all day? Come on, you need to celebrate."

"The celebration's later today, I'll be there. I wouldn't miss watching the canisters being loaded."

"You should join me and Evelene, we're going to have a pre-party celebration."

Olirian shook his head. "How you can have sex with her, considering who you're married too I'll never understand."

"No woman can keep up with a guy like me. And it keeps the marriage interesting. You should try it."

"I'll pass."

"Fine, but at least come in for a drink."

The door opened on the first of the three floors their company owned and they exited.

"If you can promise me that the two of you will be dressed, I'll think about it."

Jofre smiled. "I'll make sure we're dressed. I can't promise about anyone else who's going to be there."

Olirian sighed. "Please tell me you aren't planning an orgy."

"I'm not planning anything, but I have invited a bunch of like-minded people."

Olirian sighed. "There's only a hundred and fifty-three people working here. Just how many of them are willing to risk their livelihood just to have sex?"

"More than you think, and no one's going to be working today. It's partying all day long."

"You're looking to become one of those statistics you study."

"The ratio of people who lose their jobs for having sex at work compared to other slackers isn't something I've ever bothered looking into."

"Well, you have fun. I won't tell Brian what you're up to if I happen to see him. I have work to take care of." He took the next right.

"Live a little!" Jofre called after him.

Olirian waved without looking back.

Like every morning, he began his day by running a calibrating sequence on every machine that had been shut down through the night. Then he checked the progress status on those that had been working on a project.

Once he'd gone through every one of them in his lab he sat at his terminal and identified himself to it. Memos and messages filled his buffer. At a glance they were all about the party, or other parties. Wasn't anyone working today? At least everyone had shown up to work, well the office. Brian's message, reminding everyone that even on this momentous day work needed to go on was lost among every other one.

He found three messages from clients buried in there that he answered. Two updates to their projects and one wanted to make a modification to the project.

With his inbox cleared he brought up the simulation and stared at the result. 'Casualty result, 100%'.

That couldn't be right. His sample had been a million people over a hundred fifty year time frame. He'd expected no more than one percent death, and even that was simply because he figured that in all the possible ways someone had to get hurt there might be some where the damage was so catastrophic their virus wouldn't have anything left to repair. Like someone flying into a star, or throwing themselves into a vat of molten metal.

For everyone to die, there had to have been a mistake in how he'd programmed the simulation. Maybe he hadn't coded the virus in it?

He brought up the code and went through it. He found where the virus was, so that hadn't been the problem. He looked it over, and couldn't find anything wrong with it.

He checked the communication logs. Maybe in sampling the population it had caught an infection? No abnormal data transfer there.

A glitch? The only way to check for that was to rerun the simulation. So that's what he did. He didn't want this to take all day, so he sent a request to borrow any unused processes. The list was so long that Olirian suspected Jofre had been right. He was the only one working today.

He only used a quarter of them. It needed to be slow enough for him to watch what happened. He started it. For the purpose of the simulation he didn't look at the propagation of their virus, only the effect on the million subject.

The pool of subject filled from a randomized selection from the planet's census. Bramolian Six had over a trillion people, so his sample was diverse, it even had a handful of aliens in it.

Within days of becoming infected, all instances of health-related problems stopped. Visits to hospitals or clinics vanished. Each time one of the subjects became injured the name flashed in red and a tally went up. If someone fell sick, the name would flash green. If someone died, the name became black.

Over the first year names flashed on and off in red. The tally went up to close to two million, by the end of the year. No one had gotten sick, and one person had died.

He paused the simulation and brought that person up. A woman, supervisor at a power plant. The core had been sabotaged, by protesters claiming that anti-matter power generation was draining the life of the universe, speeding up its final death. The explosion had vaporized the complex as well as half the city. Just under three million dead.

Being vaporized would make it difficult for their virus to repair the damage. He unpaused the simulation.

The injury tally continued to climb. Hitting the one billion by the end of the fourth year. As people realized they were almost impossible to kill they became less careful with their lives. Jofre had brought up that concern, but everyone agreed that after a few years the novelty would wear off and people would go back to living normally. Their increased health and healing capability would just be part of everyday living.

In those four years only five people died permanently, each in an incident that didn't leave a body for the virus to repair.

Year five passed without any death. Six saw one, seven two. Eight none. Year nine saw three death, which Olirian was about to mark as a statistical anomaly, but year ten saw ten death, eleven two hundred, twelve six thousand.

He sat stunned as the death tally went up faster and faster until the simulation ended halfway through year fifteen. 'Casualty results, 100%'

He shook himself and brought up the causes of death. A variety of health failure.

That was impossible.

Salvation was supposed to keep that from happening.

He brought up a dozen DNAs to see what had happened to them. What he looked at was a mess.

That couldn't be right.

He set up six simulations to run concurrently, using every processes available. Each would take a different starting pool. To be sure he had them pick from different planets.

He watched as within twenty years in each simulation, everyone died. Samples of DNA he looked at from each showed the same kind of strands damaged beyond repair.

What could have caused it? The simulations couldn't account for an even outside the norm, like a group decided to attack Salvation directly, corrupt it; not that it could be done. So the triggering event had to be something normal. For it to happen in every simulation it had to be even more so, it would have to be mundane. Was it possible that there was some ordinary thing they'd forgotten to take into account?

The stress group was supposed to have thrown everything at Salvation. They'd even tried to get it to mutate, but their design was so stable that over the universe's lifespan it hadn't changed at all. It was impervious to change.

At least it should be.

He almost ran to find Brian, to inform him, but he couldn't go to him without at least some idea of what was causing it.

He ran a new simulation, this time he picked twelve subjects within the pool of million and monitored their health personally. He watched as they got injured, had accidents, gave births. He watched as the causes formed a list, looking for a common thread. Something they all went through that triggered the fatality event.

He watched them die over three years. Heart failures, kidney failures, aneurysms, something the simulation simply marked as 'generalized failure.'

He brought that one up. A man, in his thirties, he'd been infected by Salvation for twelve years. His body had just stopped working.

Was there a correlation between age? How young they were when they first became infected?

He contacted Jofre, but he wasn't answering. Too busy partying. He left him a message anyway, hopefully he'd come up for air at some point to check them.

He ran another simulation, this time he picked one subject and layered thirty screens, documenting every aspect of his life. He had trouble looking at all of them as the simulation ran, there were just too many for one person.

But he caught something in the screen with the DNA. By the time he focused on it, three years for the subject had passed and he was dead. But now he had all this information to look at. He could see everything that was going on in his life at each moment.

He rewound the simulation and ran it again, paying attention to the DNA screen. He watched as Salvation entered his system, attached itself to his DNA, became part of it. Immediately it began making repairs. This man was in his fifties when he became infected. Within days his body was behaving as if he was twenty years younger.

Salvation detected injuries and boosted the healing factor to prevent death. Withing minutes anything minor was dealt with, within hours anything was dealt with.

There was a change to the DNA.

He paused the simulation, brought it back. There, one of the strands had changed. He looked at the other screens, looking for the trigger, but there was nothing. It was the middle of the night, the man was asleep, normal REM cycle, his diet was normal, he hadn't had any sexual encounters that day.

This might simply be a random mutation. He moved the simulation forward by a day. The change wasn't corrected. He looked at the year. Year eleven of infection. He let the simulation run forward. More changes in the DNA. None of them corrected. Within a year the man died of pulmonary failure.

Why hadn't Salvation fixed those changes? It knew what the baseline was, it should bring it back to that whenever a mutation occurred.

Olirian glanced at the DNA screen and stared. How had Salvation allowed it to become this mess? He rewound and watched as little by little changes appeared, and stayed. Not only that, but one of those changes mutated, and was brought back, as if that was the baseline.

His mouth went dry. Salvation couldn't do that. It couldn't change what the baseline was. It shouldn't be able to.

"Where's Brian?" he asked the system, transferring the data to his datapad. The room number that came back was his office. Of course the man would be there, he was always working. Olirian ran out of his lab.

The door opened as soon as he requested entry.

"We have a problem," He panted before the man seated behind the desk could say anything.

"Why aren't you at Jofre's party? I thought everyone was there." Brian indicated the chair and Olirian dropped into it. "This is more important, it's vital. There's something wrong with Salvation."

Brian's smile didn't falter. "Oli, it's just nerves speaking. Salvation is a departure from anything that's ever been done with health-related technology. It's going to revolutionize how people live, how they--"

"Damn it, Brian, I don't have time for a sales pitch." He threw his datapad on the desk. "I ran a simulation last night, this morning--"

"Oli, we already ran all the simulation." Brian pushed the datapad back, his smile harder. "We know that in three to four years the entire universe is going to be infected, that within only a couple of weeks from infection all genetic defect are corrected. The statistical department ran a lot more of them, everything's been covered."

"Not everything. Not one of them ran a simulation on the effect of Salvation over the long run."

Brian sighed. "Of course they did. They ran simulations on how societies will change because of Salvation, the expected population booms because of the drastic drop in death. Oli, it's all been covered."

"They haven't done one on the effect of Salvation itself, because if they had they wouldn't be partying right now." Olirian pushed the datapad back to Brian. "This is the result of the simulation."

With a hint of annoyance the man picked it up and read the screen. "What am I looking at?"

"The statistical death of everyone in the universe in twenty years from release."

Brian eyed him over the pad. "Oli, that isn't funny. You know the kind of money I invested in this."

"Brian, when have I ever been the one to joke? This is telling you that if we release Salvation, we're killing the entirety of the universe."

The man shook his head. "Salvation doesn't kill, it heals."

"Salvation doesn't work magically, it works off the template, which is the DNA. According to the simulation, over time, Salvation either forgets, or it changes what the baseline template is. It not only lets mutations and defects slip in, it forces them in."

"That's impossible."

"Damn it Brian, the simulation doesn't lie." How could he not be getting worried?"

"Then there's an error in it."

"I reran it a dozen time. Each with a different subject pool, different starting conditions or starting size. I always get the same result. Every one of them is dead within twenty years."

"Then there's a problem with the simulation program. I'll get the coders to look it over tomorrow."

"Brian! Tomorrow is going to be too late!" Olirian was on his feet hands on the desk. "If even one person gets infected with Salvation, the entire universe dies."

Brian sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Oli, this is the stress of eight years of hard work speaking. There is nothing wrong with Salvation, you're just tired. Other than me you're probably the one who worked the hardest on making sure Salvation would be the end to pain and misery. Take a break, Oli. Go to Jofre's party, have a drink."

A drink? How could he go have a drink when they were about to commit murder on a scale never even imagined before? "Brian, you have to postpone the distribution. We need to go over Salvation again. We need to find out where the flaw is and--"

"That's enough." Brian closed his eyes and made an effort to calm himself. "There is no flaw. We would have found it if there was and we would have fixed it. Oli, you are tired, that's all."

"Damn it, what is it going to cost us to delay? You're not selling Salvation, we're releasing it to the universe for free. What are a few days going to matter?"

"Oli, I'm not going to make any profit of this, but there are expenses." Brian spoke with a calm and measured voice. "I have to pay to keep the ship at dock. They're on a schedule. The fabricator is already in the warehouse, it's going to be transported in a few hours. If I have to reschedule that I have to pay for the extended storage, for bringing back the transport shuttle."

He thinks I'm unhinged, Oli realized. He's explaining everything hoping to calm me.

Olirian opened his mouth, then closed it. If he pushed, what would Brian do? Would he have him sedated? He cursed mentally. Brian couldn't be this blind, he was a scientist before being a rich entrepreneur. He knew the science didn't lie. Why couldn't he see that?

"Oli, just take a break. From the message board, Jofre's party is really moving, go, Salvation is done, you don't have to think about it anymore. In the morning I'm going to have the simulation program taken down and examined. You can rerun your simulation then and you'll see that everything is fine."

Olirian wanted to scream. The problem wasn't the program, it was Salvation. He wanted to grab Brian by the head and smash it on the desk, until it sank in that they were about to become murderers. But he couldn't do any of that.

He forced himself to calmly pick up the datapad. "You're right, I'm probably overworked." He couldn't afford to be sidelined. If Brian wouldn't see the truth, he had to find someone else to see it.

Brian smiled. "There's no shame in it. You worked hard, you were driven, your wife's--"

"Don't." His tone was harsher than he'd intended, but he hadn't expected Brian to bring his deceased wife into this. He calmed himself. "Please don't."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm going to go to Jofre's party now."

"Good. You have yourself a good time."

The moment the door closed behind him, Olirian ran. He was going to the party, but not for the reasons Brian had given him. He needed to talk to Jofre. He ran the statistical department, if anyone could look at the simulation and see what was really going on, it would be him. With his help they could talk some sense into Brian.

He heard the party before he got there. The music was loud. Something with a lot of strident sounds and the singer was more screaming than anything else. Was that what passed for music these days?

The door was open and he stopped in the doorway, searching the crowd. The first thing he noticed was that everyone was dressed. Every office equipment had been removed, leaving a large space that accommodated the close to hundred fifty employees. Tables had been set up at the edges and people were milling there, snacking and drinking. In the center of the room a group was dancing to the horrible noise.

Olirian hurried through the crowd, ignoring the greetings and attempts to get him to join a conversation of a dance. Where was Jofre?

He found him talking to three women from the engineering department, Olirian thought. At least he recognized one of them from when they'd had the meeting to discuss the design of the fabricator. Brian had decided they'd build their own to ensure there wouldn't be any defect introduced in Salvation by a faulty machine.

Olirian grabbed Jofre by the arm and unceremoniously pulled him away.

"Hey, careful, you almost made me spill my drink." When they stopped moving Jofre continued to waver for a moment "Hey, Olirian, you came!"

"What happened to the orgy?"

Jofre frowned, then exploded in laughter. "You believed me?" he turned to face the crowd. "Hey, everyone! Olirian thought we were going to have an orgy!"

Cheers went up.

He was drunk, Olirian realized.

"Jof, I need you to focus. We have a problem." He pushed the datapad in the man's free hand. "Salvation is going to kill us all."

The man laughed. "No, no, it's going to save us. No more dying, no more getting sick." He looked at the datapad, turned it around. "This isn't mine, is it yours?"

"Look at it. I ran a bunch of simulation, we're going to die."

"No, no. I told you we--"

"Damn it, Jof, tell me you have some Detox on you. You have to look at this, Brian won't listen to me, I need you to talk some sense into him."

"Why would I have any Detox, this is a party!" more cheers went up.

Olirian cursed. He didn't drink alcohol, not since Victoria's death, so he no longer carried Detox. He'd had to run to the infirmary, six floors down for some. He didn't have the time. Brian had said a few hours until the fabricator was transported, but he hadn't even looked at the time, those few hours could be a lot sooner.

He looked around, was there anyone sober here with the knowledge to understand the data? This was a big day for everyone. They were going to change the universe so they were enjoying themselves. Everyone was, except for one guy at the end of a table looking uncomfortable with a drink in his hand.

Olirian didn't know his name, but he remembered him from meeting with Jofre's statistical group. The man's blond hair was in a crew cut, his suit was light gray, and he looked like he'd rather be anywhere but here.

He smiled when Olirian approached him. "Hey, I know you. You're--"

"What are you drinking?"

The man looked in his glass. "Just water. I can't drink alcohol on relig--"

"Good, then you're sober." Olirian pressed the datapad in the man's hand. "I need you to look at this."

"What is it?" the man sounded pained.

Olirian explained about the simulations he'd run. The man nodded, flipped through the screens.

"Brian won't listen to me," Olirian said when he was done. "I was hoping Jofre would be able to help me see reason, but your boss is drunk, so you're going to have to do."

The color drained out of the man's face. "You want me to speak with Mister Carnian?"

"You understand what this means, right?" he pointed to the datapad.

The man hesitated. "Yes, but."

"But what?"

"I can't speak to him. I'm just...I just collate information. I don't have the seniority to talk to him." He pointed up, indicating the floor above them, where Brian's office was.

"You said you understood the importance."

"No, I understand what this says, but there isn't any contextual data. I haven't seen the program you used. There could be an error in it."

"I checked it, there isn't an error."

"You're a biochemist, not a coder."

"I know code, okay, enough to check a program. Damn it, I'm trying to save the universe, I'd think you'd want to help."

"I do, but I'm just... Why would Mister Carnian listen to me, if he didn't listen to you?"

"We can try, don't you think? We have to--"

The music cut off. One of the walls turned into a screen and Brian looked at them. "I hope everyone's enjoying this unauthorized party during business hours." The crowd cheered. "Good. I thought you might want to know that in exactly forty-five minutes, Salvation will be loaded into the transport that will carry it to the ship that will take our creation to Pardue Station."

Some of the people booed.

"Now, now. I know not everyone is happy with the choice of Pardue as the release point, but I think you'll agree Salvation is more important than us, so picking the station with the highest rate of people moving through it is more important than being the first ones infected with it. We're saving the universe people, not making ourselves into superstars."

Cheers.

"Now, I would suggest that you slow down on the partying since the official party will be starting in thirty minutes in--"

Olirian couldn't hear what Brian was saying. He was running back to his lab. A few hours my ass. Had Brian purposefully lied to him? He couldn't believe that, but then again, he couldn't believe he wouldn't accept the evidence Olirian had presented.

Forty-five minutes. That was how much time he had to save the universe. How was he going to get that done? He needed to keep the fabricator from leaving the planet. That was the first thing. If he could delay that then he'd have the time to get Brian to see reason.

He almost tripped as he realized that it wouldn't help. If the fabricator was activated in the warehouse, the virus would find its way out of it and infect someone. Brian had the activation sequence. It was part of the plan, once the Fabricator was in position on Pardue Station, he would turn it on.

Olirian didn't know what the code was or the frequency. When Brian realized the fabricator was still on the planet, he could just activate it.

And what if he couldn't talk sense in Brian? What if the only thing Olirian managed to accomplish was to be pushed out of the project? How could he stop them?

He had to destroy the research. That would be easy enough to do, everything was stored on servers in the Terlize complex. All he had to do was release some malware there and it would get eaten up.

Only, that wouldn't stop them. Just delay them. They would be able to recreate the research, rebuild Salvation, and relaunch it. But it would force them to look at it a second time, they'd be able to catch the flaw in it then.

Wouldn't they?

Olirian felt sick.

He leaned against a wall. Could he risk the universe on the hope that they would find the flaw? A flaw everyone here, including him, had missed? And he wouldn't be here for that. He wouldn't be able to hide the destruction of the data. Brian would see to it he paid.

He ran to the restroom and threw up.

He could only think of one way to ensure the universe would live. He was going to have to kill everyone here.

His legs gave out. How could he even think that? He wasn't a killer. Except he was going to be one regardless of what he did. Which one was better? Kill a hundred and fifty or so people? Or the entire universe? Olirian closed his eyes. He knew a lot of those hundred and fifty, how many of those in the universe did he know? Only a handful. His mother, his two sons, his daughter, their children.

If he didn't do that, in twenty years they'd be dead.

He laughed.

In the end the universe didn't matter, he wouldn't kill his co-workers for it. He was going to do it for his family. He got up, dried his tears and headed for his lab. He needed to figure out how he was going to keep everyone here. It had to be painless and quick acting, both because he didn't want anyone to suffer and because he couldn't risk someone sounding an alarm. He might be able to stop the transport from getting the fabricator in the less than forty minutes he had left, but he was going to need more time to make sure the entirety of the research was destroyed. Not to mention he had to find a way to destroy the fabricator after that.

It was going to be a long night.

He found the poison that would get the job done in the biochemistry archive. Odorless, airborne, painless and fast acting. He primed the fabricator on the floor below his for it. While it produced it he dug through his drawers for his earpiece. It had been months since he'd last gotten bored while waiting for some result to do coercion, but he knew he'd left it here.

He found it at the back of one and put it on. He had twenty-eight minutes left to lock down the company's floors, then isolate the air system so the poison would only be distributed through it.

He borrowed everyone's processes to help in his work. Fifteen minutes in the fabricator informed him the poison was done. He'd had it create enough to fill twice the volume of the three floors. He wasn't going to take any chances.

With five minutes to spare he'd isolated the floors, cut his lab off from them, convinced the air system to ignore any reports from its sensors, and released the poison.

He immediately moved to the pickup. That was easier to handle. He switched the fabricator's ID with something else in the warehouse. He didn't care what, and the transport ship wouldn't either. No humans would be involved along the chain, so there wouldn't be anyone to see it wasn't what they expected.

With that done he breathed again. Now he had the time to create a program to erase the research. He wished Brian hadn't been quite as on the ball as he was. Only he had access to the server where the research was backed up. Olirian knew about it only because Brian had wanted him to. In the off chance anything happened to him. He'd said there was something arranged for him to get he access after he died, but Olirian had the feeling he wouldn't be around if he waited for it.

An alarm sounded.

"How?"

He pulled up the sensor grid. There was no one left alive at the party. So how?

Someone was moving in one of the corridors, stumbling as he or she headed for the lift. Olirian couldn't believe his bad luck. Someone had had a tolerance to the poison. As he watched they stumbled, dropped to their knees, then tipped forward. Before their head hit the floor, their life-signs had died out.

He sighed in relief, but only for a moment, an alarm meant the Law would be informed. As well as The city's Health service, because they worked with controlled substances. At least he didn't have to worry about building security, they'd be busy handling the evacuation.

But he was running against the clock again. He didn't curse, he didn't have the time. He didn't know how much or how little time he had.

First thing first. He set the fabricator to make the counter agent and release it. He wouldn't have to worry about killing anyone else when they made it in. Then the one in the warehouse. He couldn't leave it there, whatever was scheduled to pick up the ID it now had would come, then who knew what might happen. That would happen no matter what ID he gave it, so he erased it from the warehouse's system, along with the physical space it was in.

Then he had to deal with the research. He had to handle the backup before wiping the systems here. He found the vault where they were, but the security was higher than he'd expected. He had no idea how long it would take him to get in, then he'd have to figure out what kind of malware he'd have to write. If he was in the middle of it when the Law arrived it would have all been for nothing.

He decided to do to that vault the same thing he did to the fabricator. He erased it from the server's index. He took his time, he couldn't chance anyone coming across it by accident. Once he was certain no one would find it he tried to think of anything he might have forgotten.

The fabricator couldn't be accessed by any of the warehouse's system, so it might as well be gone. Once he was out of here he'd go there and physically destroy its memory. The backups were inaccessible. At some point, when things had quieted down and he'd learned more about coercing he'd get back in and destroy it too.

All that was left were the local servers. Those were easy. He forced a factory reset on all of them. With that done he took his things and ran out. He only realized he could have poisoned himself when he reached the lift since he hadn't checked the quality of the air before doing the reset.

The lift came when ordered and he reached the ground floor, surprising the guard there with his lateness. Olirian joined the crowd outside moments before the Law arrived, and then slipped away.