The room was full of devices.

The desks in the large office were covered in screens; computers and small electronics Miles had never seen before. In the tiny, spare spaces available, there were scraps of paper with mad scribblings on them. The space was that of a scientist who had no other way to busy herself - her life was dedicated to technology and figuring it out.

Marissa had figured it out. She'd figured out how to shut off the Alteration, and now she was dead.

Why, though, had her office door been open?

One by one, they group of Unaltered teens filed into the room, all with expressions of different shades of horror painted on their face. Lia looked mesmerised, Luca looked terrified, and Percy seemed to be the most enthusiastic.

"We're in a dead scientist's office!" Percy exclaimed in a hushed voice.

"Unfortunately," Miles grunted, shuffling through a few of the pieces of papers on Marissa's desk. "Sort of weird, if you ask me."

"I didn't ask you."

Lia, before Percy and Miles could start bickering, intercepted. "It's interesting, but we shouldn't stay here for long. There's not much we'll be able to find in the office of somebody who died years back."

"On the contrary! This place is full of cool history," Angelina replied, breezing around the room with uncharacteristic grace. She seemed suddenly engaged, whereas for the previous half of the trip she'd seemed relatively disinterested. Reluctant, even.

Miles noticed that as Angelina walked herself around the room, she brushed deliberately close by Percy; so near that they made fleeting contact. Miles realised with a curl of his upper lip that Angelina was only feigning her interest to catch Percy's eye, and it seemed to be working. The raven-haired boy glanced over his shoulder to watch Angelina as she walked around to the other side of the desk, pretending to be fascinated by an old notepad.

Lia noticed this too, and appeared immediately defensive. "Can we hurry up, please? We can return later when there aren't lives on the line."

Miles physically cringed when Aaron was brought to the front of his mind once more. Wounded, unresponsive Aaron, who was currently three levels downstairs with Bri and Eira. "Lia's right. We have no business here." Even as he said that, there was a voice at the back of his head screaming his instincts at him. This room was full of research from one of the most fantastic scientists, and her door had been open despite the fact that she'd been dead for years now. There was something hidden beneath all this mess that was vital information, Miles was sure of it.

It was then that a small voice sounded from the corner of the room, and all eyes found Luca standing beside an indistinct, white door hidden so well in the wall that the only reason it was visible was because of the ID pad on it. The ID pad which read, for some reason, unlocked. "There's a door here," Luca said softly, then point to the pad. "Why's it unlocked?"

Claire spoke from behind Miles. "Look," she said, pointing to the ID pad on the door of the office. "This is unlocked, too." Which was obvious, because the door was open. But it wasn't the fact that the doors were unlocked which was weird; it was the fact that they had ID pads on them and had somehow come unlocked.

"The only way for these doors to unlock would be... for Marissa to place her hand against the pads." Miles' voice slowly trailed off, and he felt himself shrink into his clothes. For not the first time that night, he was nervous. Really, really nervous. "Shit, there could be a zombie Marissa out and about."

"Miles, shut up with that," Lia warned, voice pitchy. "That's absurd."

"Then how the hell did these doors get unlocked?" Miles shot back.

"Easy!" snapped Lia. "There's plenty of technology that can replicate handprints, I'm sure. It wouldn't be hard for somebody to open the doors."

Miles shook his head, approaching the door Luca was beside. "That would be ridiculous. Scientists' information should remain private if that's what they want. The chances that anybody tried to get into Marissa's lab after she went insane and died is so low that it's practically impossible. Besides, it's highly likely that there are countless other security mechanisms in this room that were also shut down before our entrance. Also, the lights are on! Where else in this tower have you seen the lights on, tonight? Fucking nowhere. The place is preserving electricity. That means somebody deliberately came in here and turned them on after or when the apocalypse started."

"You're overthinking this," Kano interrupted.

"No," Miles said. "I'm not. I'm considering the most likely reason that we're standing in this room, safe from security bots and ID failures. Marissa must have been here."

"Miles, she's dead!"

"They never found her body!" he insisted.

Without waiting for a response from anybody - it didn't seem like he was going to get one, anyway - Miles pushed open the door that Luca had found. He didn't think twice about it - there could have been any kind of deadly creature on the other side, but Miles wasn't nearly as cautious as he should have been when he pushed the door open.

Immediately, he was met with the sight of something he should have expected. "A lab," he breathed. Unlike the office, Marissa's lab was uncluttered and admirably organised. Everything was in place, from the multiple computer screens and monitors down to the metallic tables and equipment.

The argument from a few seconds ago fell completely away when Miles and Angelina simultaneously spotted a computer screen, still turned on. Miles was the first to make a move for it, avoiding the obstacles in his path. He was careful not to knock anything over, worried for some reason that he may ruin research that hadn't been touched in years.

"Somebody has definitely been here," Miles said as he pulled up in front of the computer. The majority of Marissa's computers were seated on tall, height-adjustable benches with holographic sensory keyboards that Miles was quick to access. Whether or not it had been Marissa that was here - which would be a terrifying thought - somebody had.

"What's on the screen?" asked Spike. It seemed that now, everybody's attention had been hooked; even those who hadn't cared at all earlier. Miles felt the presence of all of the other Unaltered teens gathering eagerly behind him, trying to get a look at the screen that Miles was reading now.

"Give me a moment," Miles said impatiently. At first, he didn't know what he was looking at. The screen was filled with images, which appeared to be screenshots. Before Miles even glanced at those, his eyes locked on the one thing on the page that wasn't an image; a hyperlink.

Naturally, he clicked it.

He heard Lia give an exasperated gasp from behind him. Miles knew better than to click on unknown links, but he was currently on a computer that wasn't even his own and he was sure the group's situation couldn't get any worse with a wrong link now.

Miles was expecting the Internet to fail him, but it didn't.

The link led to a website. It loaded, and loaded, and loaded.

Until, finally, it provided an error message.

The page you are looking for has been removed.

Miles frowned. He leaned in and inspected the link he had clicked on, and when he located the keywords, he thought aloud, "I think that was meant to lead to an article."

"Go back to the images," Percy instructed.

Miles did that. He closed the failed website and went back to the document full of screenshots. When he zoomed in, he realised that the screenshots were -

"The website," Claire said. "Those are screenshots of the website you just tried to go to."

"Somebody must have taken screenshots of the article before it was removed from the website," Miles replied suspiciously, wondering what the article might have been. In order to have his question answered, he started to read the article to the group via the screenshots.

"After scientist Marissa Vega, daughter of Antonio Vega - the mastermind behind the modification we all know now as the Alteration - uncovered the ground-breaking discovery that the Alteration may be reversible, she allegedly killed herself. Many people have commented that Marissa was acting strangely in the time leading up to her 'death' "-- Miles frowned at that word, seeing that it was in quotation marks, but continued reading - "and most people suspect that reversing her own Alteration caused her to go insane.

"After Antonio Vega's death nearly a decade ago, the Alteration has continued being provided to all sixteen-year-olds on their birthday. The process involves the implantation of a small computer chip into the brain that regulates our lives, and an appearance modification (the latter of which is certainly, and always will be, irreversible!). That being said, after Antonio's death, scientists started to realise that without him, they had no way of knowing how to reverse or turn off the Alteration. For a few years, it was a hot topic; scientists desperately trying to discover what might be able to turn off the Alteration. But the excitement quickly wore off - it seemed impossible, and there was no reason to rid oneself of the Alteration regardless. It's unharmful and serves its purpose.

"Marissa Vega was one of the few scientists who didn't give up on searching for the answer. Perhaps the determination came from being desperate to surpass her father, or perhaps just to reverse her modifications. As most of us know, just weeks ago, she finally discovered how to turn off her Alteration. Before she could share her research with anybody else, she started acting off, until the moment she jumped off a bridge hardly a day after she'd been Unaltered again. There were only a few witnesses, but those who saw her jump are absolutely certain it was her. Of course, no body was ever found... but most people were happy to settle for the fact that she was now dead."

Miles paused for an intake of breath. He wasn't quite sure where the article was headed; everybody knew most of this information anyway. His friends were huddled tightly around him, reading over his shoulder and prodding him to continue.

When he kept reading via the screenshots of the site, he noticed how quickly the tone of the article changed.

"We have since uncovered the lies at work here. When witnesses were interviewed, there were flaws in each of their stories. It's our belief that the witnesses were payed - most likely by Marissa - to pretend to have witnessed her death, and with how much money Marissa owned, they undoubtedly received a lot. After we discovered this, we searched harder for more information.

"We're now aware of Marissa's whereabouts and she is not, in fact, deceased as she has lead everybody to believe. After feigning her own death and paying witnesses, Marissa has fled to a ghost town on the outskirts of the city, where nobody ventures anymore. The last that our sources have heard is that Marissa is attempting to remain unseen and unknown. She is living now as an Unaltered in an abandoned town, and is likely to remain there until she is found or until she well and truly loses her sanity."

"It's an exposé," Percy breathed.

Miles' head was spinning. "Holy shit."

On the bright side, Miles had been right. Marissa hadn't been dead. Which meant she had to be behind this virus. "Shit, shit, shit," Miles panted. "It makes sense. Whoever wrote this article posted it online, but Marissa immediately removed it - hacking, probably. But she took screenshots first."

"She must not have wanted that up online," Bates muttered.

"Obviously," Miles agreed. "So she deleted it before anybody else could find it and discover her secret. But she screencapped it first to keep the information, probably so that she could keep record of who knew about her. Maybe to keep record of what they'd written. I don't know - that part doesn't matter. What matters is that she's alive. Or at least, she was when the virus started." As Miles spoke, he was closing the document so that he could see if anything else was open on the computer that might be useful.

Sure enough, the instant Miles closed the document, another page filled the screen. This page was filled with code, and it took Miles no time at all to recognise it. "Her programming for the app," he stated, his voice brimming with something like disappointment. "This is her programming for that fucking app and the notification we got."

"So, two years ago, she turned off her Alteration," Claire said, "then she pretended to die, then she came back to her lab years later - AKA, a few weeks ago when the virus started - and somehow gave every Altered person in the world a virus?"

"Yes," Miles said. "That's what I'm getting at. But there's something else."

"What?"

"That article said that for a little while after Marissa turned off her Alteration, she was acting weird. Crazy. Almost like the Altered are acting right now, don't you think?"

Kano shook his head. "No. That's what the witnesses said. And the witnesses were paid to pretend."

"No, no. The witnesses were paid to pretend she died." Miles pushed himself away from the desk and turned to face everybody at once. "But there were countless people that said she was acting up. This all fits together."

Nobody else seemed to comprehend.

"She turned off her Alteration," Miles said slowly. "Then she went crazy. But then, she went back to normal. Normal enough to pay people and run away. Which means, in order to turn off her Alteration, she must have given the chip in her head a virus. A virus like the Altered have right now."

"So that's why she was crazy for a little while," Lia said incredulously.

"Then what happened after that?" Percy pressed. "What made her go... un-crazy?"

"An antivirus," Angelina spoke up. "If she went crazy by giving her chip a virus, she probably fixed herself by giving it an antivirus."

"Exactly!" Miles exclaimed, relieved that Angelina had understood, just not relieved that it had been her specifically. "She gave herself a virus, and then an antivirus. Which means, now that all of the Altered have a virus... there's definitely a way to fix them. Just like Marissa fixed herself."

"But why would she pretend to die, then return to her lab years later to give the entire world's Altered a virus?" Lia asked.

"It's obvious," Miles said. "She wanted to turn off the Alteration for everybody. Fucking smart. The Alteration is stupid - she had the guts to basically undo everything her father did by giving all of the Altered this virus."

"But why didn't she give them the antivirus too? So that they don't just stay insane forever?"

Miles opened his mouth to answer, but he suddenly stopped.

A memory flashed before his eyes. Something that had been nagging at him constantly since it had happened.

He swayed on his feet.

"Oh," he said very quietly as it clicked in his head. "Because she's dead. Actually dead. I found her."

Everyone's expression became horrified.

Miles gripped his hair with both hands. He lifted his gaze to Kano, Claire, and Lia. "When my group was at the treehouse, in the ghost town. That house I found, with those two dead Altered. One of them... one of them was Marissa. It had to be. And the man... he must have been who killed her. She killed him, too." Miles sucked in a shuddering breath. "She's dead for real, now."

"She didn't get to finish the job." Percy's voice cracked. "She gave the world the virus, but she died before she could give it the antivirus."

"So if she's dead," Luca said quietly, nervously, "how do we get rid of the virus plaguing the Altered?"

Miles shook his head. Once, twice. Then he said, "We'll have to do it ourselves."

______________________

+2721 Words.