<P>Peter was mostly extremely annoyed that this had all happened now. Why now, 3 weeks before the system was due for inspection!? They'd basically finished everything and were just optimizing a bit of code here and there, and then something like this happens! Peter had pretty much been occupied with cursing his bad luck the past 2 days, and he wasn't done yet.
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<P>Daniel couldn't remember a time he'd ever been this scared. He'd once awoken with a tarantula in his bed on a vacation in Thailand. He'd estimate he was about twice as scared now as he was then. So many things were at stake here: His job, the past 6 years of work they'd all put into developing Icarus, and most importantly: Possibly the life of one of his best friends. They couldn't be sure what Icarus was capable of now, because this morning they found out that someone had put the Icarus servers online during the crash, opening up the entire MJ12 network to the AI. God only knew which new tools Icarus now had at his disposal.
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<P>So far, however... nothing seemed to be happening. Ralph was looking, and Ralph was finding nothing. Nothing? None of the subroutines seemed to be where they should be. Where was Icarus? Where had he gone?
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<P>There was a flicker. It was almost inconceivable. They all saw it, but only Peter noticed it. He moved over to one of the other consoles and brought up the status screen of the /~tjx.64 subfolder. Numbers were scrolling across the screen faster than he could follow with his eyes. "What are you getting?" Daniel asked with a trembling voice. "I... I'm not sure." But that wasn't entirely true. In fact Peter was quite certain he was looking at Icarus. But what was it doing? Then he caught the words "life support" scrolling across the screen. His eyes widened.
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<P>"It looks like it's running... no, this can't be!" Disbelief was evident in Peter's voice as he began typing like mad. "What's happening? What are you doing, Peter?" Kate got up and almost jumped over to him. She studied the monitor for a few seconds, after which she let out a gasp of horror. "It's running some subroutines on his brain, isn't it? It gained access to his brain? How's this possible!?" She almost cried. Peter could only shake his head in response. How could he possibly know? The AI had apparently been creating its own subroutines with data from other servers in the complex, and now it had forced entry into Ralph's mind through the life support devices. By all accounts, there should be no way this would be possible of course, but that didn't seem to stop Icarus.