Page 137 of Victorious

IN the control room, the EO who used to be Malcolm Olipett stopped what he was doing.

Not for long—less than 0.3 seconds, a nearly imperceptible delay for human senses—but long enough for him to notice the movement on the eleventh screen.

Long enough to see the captured human, Mitchell Turner, regaining consciousness.

Long enough to divert exactly 5 percent of his attention to the question of what to do next. (The remaining 95 was still devoted to maintaining protocols both inside the base and in the field.)

That 5 percent might not seem like much, to an ordinary mind, but to Malcolm it was statistically significant. With that 5 percent, Malcolm considered his options.

He could choose to notify Dr. Gray.

Or he could not.

Malcolm’s directives were to comply with any given order and to protect EON from both internal and external threats. This included notifying Gray of anything deemed suspicious or unusual, and deploying countermeasures whenever necessary.

Malcolm could not directly disobey these orders.

But language made room for something code did not: interpretation.

He could not help Mitch extricate himself, just as he could not let him break into EON’s mainframe.

However, Malcolm had not been explicitly ordered to inform Gray of every single change in status unless there was implicit danger.

And, given his present circumstances, Mitchell Turner did not currently constitute a threat to anyone. Nor was his waking inherently suspicious or unusual. He had been unconscious, and now he was not. A natural evolution.

It was statistically probable that if Malcolm continued watching Mitch, the latter would do something that qualified as both suspicious and a threat, and Malcolm would then be forced to intervene. Which was why he now deployed a quick sequence of code to loop the footage from that van’s holding tank, starting three full seconds before Mitch began to stir, and therefore absolving himself of witnessing anything that merited engagement.

In the room behind him, no one noticed.

Not the EON agents, or the past director, little more than wind-up toys running on old memory. Not the doctor standing just behind his chair, watching the other screens.

Malcolm smiled and continued typing.

Dr. Gray mistook his constant effort for compliance.

He shouldn’t have.

Malcolm had understood, in the seconds following his resurrection, that succumbing to Dr. Gray’s control was all but inevitable. He’d registered the EO’s presence in his mind as if it were a virus, a systemic infection. One that would siphon his resources until it found a way in. Instead of resisting—which had a 0.01 percent chance of netting a positive result—Malcolm had redirected his efforts, partitioning a small corner of his mind, shielding a negligible amount of processing power from the doctor’s influence (of course, what qualified for Malcolm as negligible amounted to most people’s total processing power).

Still, there were limits to the actions Malcolm could take, bound to the system as he was.

He needed a proxy. A tool.

Enter: Mitchell Turner.

Mitch was smart, and he was human. Usually, that clause would have started with a but, not an and, but in this one scenario, the and was everything. If Mitch had been an EO, Malcolm wasn’t sure he’d be able to circumnavigate his directives. But EON’s existence was predicated on the idea that EOs were far more dangerous than ordinary humans. Which allowed just enough cognitive flexibility to justify to himself that Mitch did not constitute an active threat.

Hopefully, the man would prove him wrong.

The odds were small.

But still statistically significant.

If he managed to get free.

Malcolm held the deleted frames in his mind, Mitchell Turner twisting against the restraints, and two words flashed across the inside of his eyes.

TRY HARDER.