A Study in Violet

[Fairchild]

The lab was populated with Ageira employees and just a few Wisp quantum programmers that seemed to be more invested in the project that their microbiologist colleagues. Nagrebetskiy was sitting by himself in the other room, looking over the rough flowchart of the Vergil way of operation.

He had previously read the development notes. The top level was be running on software suite called NexOS. It was an open-source operating system started by some non-profit company called Armitage Software, designed for consumer-grade quantum chips and consoles, targeted at people that couldn't afford expensive Ageira and Kishiro software. According to some, probably out-of-the-hat as he thought, statistical estimates, about 40% of the Neural Net ran on NexOS.

The foundation of Vergil ran on custom code that was at all times protected from any outside tinkering. It contained configurations for the four Critical Calls (resynchronise, sleep, hibernate, excrete), each could be called only by the user, completely bypassing the operating system.

The professor slowly started tapping on the display, in the area of the flowchart that troubled him the most - the arrow between the "Neural Map Interface" and "Critical Calls". The fact that it could only take requests from the user went against the underlying idea of those calls, which was to prevent a third party from gaining full control over the system and thus, the user.

They had to map some emergency brain patterns to invoke those emergency calls... but that would mean a test case. Mind control just to prevent more mind control. He rested his chin on his hand. Immoral. Again. The grey area of ethics he had hoped not to thread into. But the end justified the means - it would be a trauma of one person to prevent traumas or even more horrible things for millions of people.

And he knew just the person who could do this.