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Chapter 10 - Exploit

So, Miana was using that fact to her advantage. As long as she was hanging out with Sandra, the Cyclops would leave her alone. And if he didn't... well, if that happened, Miana had decided that she would come clean with Sandra. Give her the whole story, starting with that night when the blue eye icon appeared on her phone screen. Of all the team members, Sandra was the one that Miana believed would be the most understanding if she heard about everything.

Everything? Including how the app clued you in to Sandra's feelings? What about the part where you pretended to have feelings for her, just to keep her on the team?

Well, maybe not everything.

She set her phone down on the small coffee table in front of the couch. Right in clear view of where she and Sandra would be sharing a drink or two. There would be no way that the Cyclops could send her a notification without the screen lighting up in front of them, revealing himself to Sandra. It was a gambit, and there was no guarantee that her tormentor wouldn't find some way to "punish" her as he had before.

But Miana didn't have many other options. She needed release, even if it was temporary. To get away from the Cyclops, and from her apartment. Not just to evade her annoyed neighbors – all of them convinced that Miana had gotten involved in some online feud that resulted in them getting unwanted notifications – but to avoid the eyeless stares she was feeling from all of the devices in her home. Every last one of them compromised by the Cyclops.

Sandra returned with two glasses of wine. "Sorry, it's not exactly the fancy stuff like we had on our date," she said, handing down one of the glasses before sitting down close next to Miana.

"Right about now, 'fancy' isn't exactly what I'm looking for," Miana said, taking a long sip from her glass.

"I know that feeling," Sandra said, matching Miana's motions and sampling her own drink. "So, how are you holding up? You had me so worried back on campus, the way you rushed off after passing out. And when you called me before, you sounded so... distraught."

"Yeah. These last few hours have been rough. Just can't stop picturing those students getting wheeled out of the building on stretchers." Miana said. She paused, took another sip. "Makes me think about all the changes I've been making to the teleporter, and what could have happened if one of them went wrong."

Sandra shook her head. "No, no way. You would never let something like that happen. The team trusts you, Miana. I trust you. No matter what, you would never put us at risk, I'm sure of it."

This drew an involuntary, bitter laugh out of Miana. "Right, I never mess anything up," she quipped. "Just detonate a chimpanzee on occasion, nothing major."

Sandra clasped her glass in both her hands, her brown eyes focused on the other side of the room. "Miana, I have to tell you something. And it's going to sound bad," she said after an awkward moment. "But you need to understand that back when we did that test, things were different. I wasn't... I didn't realize that you were..."

Miana had never seen Sandra like this. Flustered and upset, like she would have given anything to leap to her feet and flee from the room. "Sandra, just tell me," Miana said, keeping her tone soft and assuring. "Whatever it is, I'm sure it's fine."

"It's not... but I'll say it anyway," Sandra said. She worked up her nerve, rolling her shoulders and taking a deep breath before meeting Miana's eyes. "What happened during test #47... it wasn't your fault."

"I appreciate you saying that. But it was my responsibility to calibrate the-"

"No, Miana," Sandra cut her off with a firm tone. "I'm telling you that what happened to that chimp wasn't your fault. Think about it. A miscalibration of the buffer variance should have never resulted in such a massive loss of biological integrity. At worst, the subject might have dissolved, maybe developed a couple dozen tumors. But something that explosive... a divergence of 0.07 in the buffer could have never caused that, Miana."