'There. You see it?' said Kath.

There was a pause while Unicorn pretended to be watching the video. So dramatic. Kath could not help the tiny surge of pride. He was learning well.

'NO,' Unicorn said.

'Okay,' Kath said patiently. 'Rewind. Stop. Play.' A flickering, blurred image, showing a little boy standing in the middle of the gallery. Hand over his mouth, wide-eyed and confused.

'There! I mean, what the hell is that about?'

'I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, LITTLE KATHY.'

'Well he just stands there. For at least a minute. Looks like he's talking, but to whom?'

'THERE WERE OTHER CHILDREN IN THE ROOM. THE BOY WAS FRIGHTENED.'

'I know he was scared, but look at them! They all just stare at him. Not moving. It's as if, as if…' She paused. This was quite a leap, even for her. Kath wasn't sure that this was the right direction to be taking this, it all seemed too - well, crazy.

'PERHAPS HE STOPPED TO HELP THE OTHERS.'

'Really? I wouldn't have. No, I think something made him stop there. I think he was talking to someone.' The little boy on the screen was clutching an object to his chest, small and square. 'Can you enhance this video for me?' Kath asked.

'I MAY BE ABLE TO MAKE SOME IMPROVEMENTS, HOWEVER THE ORIGINAL RECORDING WAS ALREADY DEFECTIVE.'

'By "defective", you mean, "on tape"?'

'CORRECT.'

'You know you were first programmed using tapes? Before I persuaded Dad to buy me that 486?' Unicorn was silent then, and Kath knew she had hurt his feelings. What passed for feelings, anyway. He did not know much about what had happened before the fire. Everything he could remember was on these tapes. A few damaged recordings which escaped the static in the explosion, and the subsequent security shutdowns.

'I'm sorry,' she said, then smiled. 'Look at me. Apologising to you after all these years!'

'THE OBJECT IS A WOODEN CONTAINER. DIMENSIONS EIGHTY BY TWENTY-THREE BY ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE. ORIGIN UNKNOWN. DESIGN APPEARS TO BE MECHANICAL. THE BOY APPEARS TO BE ATTACHED TO IT.'

'I thought you said you couldn't enhance?'

'I WAS THERE. THE OBJECT WAS ALSO THERE. I REMEMBER IT.'

'And you say you can't remember anything important?'

'IT DID NOT SEEM RELEVANT AT THE TIME.'

'Not relevant? This kid is brought here, blows up half the building, kills two Techies and maims that bitch Katerina beyond recognition and the only thing he cares about is some little wooden box and you decide it's not fucking relevant?' Yelling at a computer now. Nice one.

'I - DO NOT UNDERSTAND. THE OBJECT IS INSIGNIFICANT IN CONTEXT.'

'Yeah, whatever. It looks pretty significant now though, doesn't it?' The boy's obsession with the little box intrigued her, but she was sure it was just a trinket. Still, he seemed to be talking to the box as much as the motionless children in the white room.

'IT IS JUST A BOX,' Unicorn said, with more than a hint of patient frustration. 'A TOY, LIKE YOUR PINK RABBIT.' She had forgotten about Bunny, the threadbare little rabbit had been her favourite. Before Unicorn came along and blew all other toys out of the water.

'I guess they might have used it to control him. You know, manipulate him into doing what they want,' she said thoughtfully. 'Like with Dad,' she added, almost choking on the words. She tried to feel glad the little boy's parents had not been there. Glad he had been spared that horror. 'Most likely he died in the fire with the others, so it doesn't make any difference, does it?' she added.

Most likely.

'GIVEN RECENT EVENTS, THE APPEARANCE OF A SHARED STATE OF TRANCE AMONGST THE YOUNG SUBJECTS SHOULD BE OF GREATER INTEREST?'

'Yes, alright, Uni. Point made.' Uni was right, of course. The only other time she had seen behaviour like that - well - she still had the bruises and the lingering headache.

'THE ONLY OTHER RECORD OF SUCH AN EVENT IS TWO DAYS OLD.'

'But Omega-Five was there then! You know how odd he's been since we put that chip in his head. You think this boy had the same technology twenty years ago?' If it had even been her chip that caused this. Omega-Five was in possession of a unique sort of brain, even more wild synaptic connections and odd characteristics than her own.

'PERHAPS THEY WERE OF THE SAME MIND,' Unicorn said, as if reading hers.

Kath did not know what to say to this, so she kept silent, watching the boy on the screen. She wondered what the Dragon would say when she heard what had happened. Who she would blame. If Kath did not take kindly to things happening to her subjects without her knowledge, all she did was rant a while and work out how to fix things. The Dragon would be utterly terrifying. With so much at stake, she relied on Kath knowing everything about the subjects, and so she had, up until today.

Every waking motion, expression, cough, behavioural idiosyncracy. Every bowel movement. All recorded and monitored. Reduced to numbers and pretty graphs, and medical breakthroughs the like of which the world had never seen. The common cold? Gone! Influenza? Gone! The Canker? Going! Higher brain function - Gone! This last was a problem, but she and Uni were working on a solution. Nothing happened in that room without her watching and writing it down. They would not dare to breathe without her authorisation. And this included the other Techies. In truth, Kath had felt that she had reached a bit of an impasse, in terms of controlling the immune system. So much ground had been covered already, any other cures would branch off naturally into their own specialised research teams. There was nothing left to be learned.

But there was a lot of red tape. Her work was fiercely confidential, she knew, but recently some of her subjects had been taken away. More and more removed halfway through treatment and never heard of again. Any enquiries met with blank looks and friendly, but firm resistance.

It had been a simple step to ask Unicorn to dig around behind some odd firewalls she found. Ones they had not created themselves. Company A.I. he may be, but he would not forget who had brought him into the world. They found the old recordings and suddenly she was watching her own past in faded black and white. She remembered meeting the little boy and his friend. Her father, trying not to show the children how scared he was. A momentous day for everyone, by all accounts. Things she had forgotten, once her new life had taken over.

She had been there when the Legend of The One was created.

'Play the rest of the tape, Uni.'

'THE TAPES CONTAIN ONLY STATIC AND INTERFERENCE AFTER THIS POINT. THERE IS NOTHING ELSE OF USE.'

'Oh come on, there must be something?'

'NEGATIVE.'

'Okay,' Kath sighed. 'Do it to make me happy.' The timer in the corner of the screen continued counting, and Kath watched the boy mouthing unknowable words into the room. She noticed that the screen noise started quite early, gradually growing more pronounced, until the point where the boy ran out of the lab, by which time she could only make out faint outlines in the shadows. The tapes for the next hour were all like that. White noise, interference, tracking errors. Every single camera on the four basement levels had been taken out. Then suddenly the system came back online and all the cameras worked perfectly again.

Only the boy was gone.

'KATHY?'

'Hmm?'

'I HAVE FOUND SOMETHING.'

'What?'

'THERE IS A PATTERN IN THE INTERFERENCE.'

'A pattern? Like what?'

'000000101010100000000001
001010000010100000001001
100010001000100101100100
101010101010101001001001
000000000011010000000000
000000000011010000000001
000000000101010000000000
000000000111110000000001
000000000000000000000000
110000111000110000110001
100000000000001100100001
110100011000110000110100
111110111110111110111110
000010000000000000000011
111110000000000000111111'

'Stop!' Kath said, laughing. 'I don't understand that!'

'WAIT. THERE IS MORE: 0110000011-'

'No, please don't! Can you see a message, or code, or something?'

'IT IS ALL CODE.'

'Yeah, okay. Um.' Kath thought about the best way to phrase the question. 'Can you translate it?' she ventured.

'IT WILL TAKE SOME TIME.'

'Good. Then I can sleep for a while.'

'THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-THREE HOURS AND FIVE MINUTES AND SOME SECONDS.'

'Some seconds?'

'I DID NOT CONSIDER IT RELEVANT TO BORE YOU WITH TINY DETAILS.'

'Great, thanks. Wait. What? But you're so powerful! That's like - wait.' Kath stopped to think. Her brain wasn't really working. The echoes of the screaming was coming back to haunt her. 'Damn this headache!'

'IT IS APPROXIMATELY TWO WEEKS.'

'Yeah, okay, I was getting there. I am a genius, you know.'

'YOUR ABILITIES HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED. YOU NEED TO RECHARGE.'

'In a minute,' Kath said. 'Why so long? You're a supercomputer!' She lowered her voice. 'You have - you know - the whole internet to use.' Best to The Company was a big place, you never knew when somebody was listening in. Well okay, you always knew they were listening. Best to be safe.

'THERE IS A LOT OF CODE.' Unicorn protested.

'And it's going to take two weeks?'

'YES.'

'In that case, give me a couple of hours and then send the doc in. I think it's time for a holiday.'

'VERY WELL. COMMENCING SLEEP MUS-'

'And no bloody sleep music!'

Kath fell into an uneasy sleep. She saw a small group of frightened little children being bundled into a tiny steel lift. Unicorn sat in boxes beside her, warning her that she was in way over her head. She saw her father's face. The little boy, although terrified, comforting his friend. He looked at little Kathy and grinned, a gappy, twisted melted-face grin.

He opened his mouth impossibly wide, and screamed.