Chapter 17 · Reset Protocol - Chapter 17: The New Admin Gets a Kill Clock

"You're the admin now," Erin said. "So administrate."

Mark stared at the core interface floating in front of him. It looked like someone had skinned a hologram and left the bones. Numbers scrolled past in a language he didn't have words for, but his brain translated them anyway. Kill logs. Evolution indexes. Subject vitals.

Forty thousand people reduced to data points.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he said.

"You know enough." Erin leaned against the wall, arms crossed. Blood still leaked from the gash on her temple where the core had fought back during the code rebuild. "The system responds to intent. You want to stop the archiving process, you tell it to stop."

"And it just listens?"

"It listened when you forced the shutdown code through. It listened when you let your hand turn into that." She nodded at his right arm. The claws were still out, bone-white and sharp enough to cut steel. "It knows what you are now."

Mark flexed his fingers. The claws retracted with a wet sound that made his stomach turn. "What am I?"

"Useful," Erin said. "That's all that matters.