Humanity's Shadow

[Fairchild]

She combed through her freshly dyed black hair, thinking about Reeves's question. She had never actually considered this before, could it be that someone else who worked with them and knew about Vergil secretly developed their own version? A third party to this. She thought about the possibilities for a moment. Birch was out of the question, all he ever wanted was to get to his retirement safely. Burbank... no, impossible. There might have been someone from Feint who still had it. Nauthiz was the only one who came to mind, she was also given the intial batch of Vergil. Where was she even...? She shared her thoughts with the Professor.

None of the scientists who worked with me on this have access to the override code we developed, thanks to the sacrifice of our friend Antonio. She winced internally at the thought of the Outcast they killed. I made sure not to release them and they were, actually, fully completed after we had run away from Atka. Nobody from Feint, as far as I know, remained with Cryer after the takeover. She could have run back home to Gallia, but chances they will be able to do anything with such a volatile material are so tiny they can be discarded. And that's assuming she even made it back and hasn't gone into hiding elsewhere. She could be dead as far as I'm concerned.

So we only have to worry about Cryer outpacing us.

She turned to Reeves.

"From the information I've got, the only other party actively interested in developing Vergil is Cryer. We know that for sure, their CEO announced it quite directly at the Worlds Fair last year. What works in our favour is that it will take time for them to understand and reconfigure the code Professor Nagrebetskiy had written before we escaped from Atka. Wetware programming is a difficult, low-level job which requires a lot of experience and the technology we've pioneered will require a lot of brainpower to parse and modify. Especially considering that if Cryer really wants to make it like we assume they do, they will only use the most trusted people for the job."