"I know I'm going to regret asking this, Alex, but why do you have a robot bunny on your desk?"
"It's a next-gen Cure-O-Matic, Megan," I answered my long-suffering wife and personal assistant, in my best infomercial voice. "For all your research needs." I eyed the thing doubtfully. Its skin was shiny aluminum with multicolored blinking lights and digital readouts, rather than covered with fur, but it was amazingly lifelike. The nose even wiggled. "This way you can come down more often." Megan was a werewolf, which meant the rabbits I used in my medical research didn't much enjoy it—more like "tended to freak"—when she visited my basement lab. That wasn't conducive to curing cancer or anything else.
Was her eye amber? Yes. Yes, it was. The other eye was missing, covered by the patch with the embroidered peacock today. It probably would have been amber too. "Did it come with a free set of steak knives?"
"Uh." My gaze slid away from her face, and I cringed a little. "No. But I acted right away and got a second one at no extra charge. Well, plus shipping." I delved into my desk drawer and came out with a similar rabbit, only with skin of antiqued brass.
"This. This right here, Alex, is why I don't let you watch late-night television."
"Television, schmelevision, I got them off the internet." The brass rabbit hopped over and sniffed at the aluminum one, or seemed to. "I'm a billionaire. We can afford them even if they don't give me a medical breakthrough, and hey. No zombie rabbits like the last time I was working on brain cancer."
She gusted a sigh. "You and your toys. How do they even wor—You know what, I don't want to know. I need you to sign these."
I dutifully scrawled my signature where she indicated and gave her my best winsome expression, letting my hair flop down on my forehead, which was calculatedly irresistible. The fact that she knew I did it on purpose meant it wasn't manipulative. She gave me a look of fond exasperation, and I knew I had her. "How is the brain cancer research coming?" she said.
"Oh, you know." My mouth tightened. "Three steps forward, two and a half steps back. I'm making progress, but not as much as I'd like. The new nanotech protocol is promising."
She kissed the top of my head, and I decided I could die a happy man, right there. "Don't forget, it's the full moon tonight." She knew she had to tell me these things, because otherwise I'd stay buried in my Beverly Hills lab until all hours, surfacing to refill my scotch and eat a hurried sandwich. "Ben's coming over for pizza and movies."
"Just Ben?" Our Pack was small, and while we didn't always get together on moon nights, it wasn't like Ben to be separated from his wife.
"Janni's filming a movie up in Seattle." Megan eyed the rabbits. "I'll give him a ring and tell him to come early. I'm sure he'll want to see those."
Ben was a partner in his mother-in-law's private eye firm; she'd called him her "pet hacker" even before the werewolf thing had happened to him. He ate tech for breakfast, and sure enough, he was fascinated by the bunnies as I flipped the switches on their bellies to the on position later that afternoon. "Robotic lab animals. What'll they think of next? How do they work?"
"They grow tissue from stem cells that I can test the new drugs on, and then accelerate the results. Pretty revolutionary stuff, but I'm not sure how it'll actually function until I test it." I pulled one of the bunny's ears out to the side. "The drug or nanotech or stem cells or whatever goes in here, and then it's delivered where it needs to go. I push a few programming buttons, and it does its thing. Lots less messy than having to dissect real rabbits."
He clapped me on the back, and I let out a strangled oof. Even though I had five inches and forty pounds on him, I was a mere (and squishy) human, while he was a big bad wolf who tripled in mass and had commensurate strength he sometimes forgot about. "New tools of the trade. We live in the future, and it's pretty awesome."
"Speaking of which, Master Alex," said Chambliss, my stereotypically English butler. He wasn't actually English and hadn't always been a butler, but he was scarily efficient and ran my house way better than I ever could. "The theater is ready for all of you. Pizza is hot, and beer is chilled."
"Great, Chambliss, thank you," I answered. Ben loped upstairs to Change, and we had a typically quiet night with a couple of movies, good food, and our Pack bond.
I wandered down to the lab the next morning, yawning and scrubbing my fingers through my shower-damp hair—
And stopped short, staring at the mechanical bunnies on my desk.
The brass one no longer had a smooth one-piece sheen. Instead, its skin was made up of different-sized squares of antique brass plating, riveted together, with intricate scrollwork chasing itself across the metal. The eyes were of some dark wood, and the tail, somewhat incongruously, fluffed out from its behind. Cotton.
The other rabbit was shinier than it had started out, and the blinking readouts had disappeared from its side. The body was larger, somehow more muscular than I remembered, and seamless. I took an involuntary step back when it turned its head and stared at me with red, malevolent eyes.
Wait, no. Surely I was imagining that. It was just a robot, and I didn't ascribe malice to the white lab rabbits with red eyes. That would be silly. I wondered if the scotch I'd over-consumed the previous night was still affecting me.
Right up until an emotionless voice emanated from the thing. "Alex Jarrett?"
I blinked. "Uh. Yes?" I hadn't meant it to come out as a question, and really wanted a fresh bottle of scotch now.
It made a whirring sound, like a computer hard drive spooling up. The eyes glowed a deeper red. "Alex Jarrett of Jarrett Biologicals. Werewolf. Bankrupter of business."
I wasn't a werewolf. My business wasn't bankrupt, and I never set out to bankrupt others. The thing was wholly, laughably wrong. "Wait, what?"
Before I could get more than that out, a set of claws sprouted on the end of each paw, and its mouth opened wide to reveal a set of serrated shark teeth. The bunny leaped off the desk, aiming itself at my face in unnerving silence but all-too-clear intent. I barely got my arm up in time to stop its talons from tearing me from ears to nose.
Stumbling backward with the thing attached to my arm and clawing the crap out of me, I let out a loud and undignified yelp as those teeth met in my hand. My blood spattered liberally around the room.
The shouting brought Ben and Chambliss running. Both of them were ex-military, and they exchanged glances and then moved with unspoken precision into a pincer formation. Ben reached up and grabbed its ears, while Chambliss reached down and grabbed its hind feet, immobilizing it between them and tearing it away from my bleeding arm.
I dove for one of the extra-strength cages I kept for werewolf bunnies as part of my ongoing research into that condition, and wrestled the door open. Ben and Chambliss chucked the killer rabbit inside, and I barely got the door slammed shut and locked before it tried to come back at us.
"So that was fun," Ben panted. "What the hell, Alex?" His eyes had gone amber, and a line of four scratches had already begun healing up his arm.
Since I didn't have a werewolf constitution, I flumped onto the battered leather sofa I sometimes slept on and let Chambliss examine my wounds. He tsked and bustled off for a dose of the nanotech healing juice I'd been using on myself for years but the FDA still refused to okay. "I have no idea. It said I was a werewolf and some kind of business killer, and then it attacked me."
His brow creased as he watched it batter itself against the cage. "It looks different than it did yesterday." He caught sight of the other one, which (thankfully) hadn't moved, and sat abruptly in one of the office chairs scattered around the lab. "So does that one. Can you deactivate it?"
"It tried to murder me. I don't think I'm reaching inside that cage to try to find its off button anytime soon." Chambliss came back with the healing spray and spritzed a measure of it on my arm, which gratifyingly stopped bleeding.
"Have you got a stronger cage lying around?" Ben asked. "I'm not sure the one it's in will last much longer." The bars bent under the bunny's onslaught.
"The wolf stockade in the blue bedroom," Chambliss said. "That should hold until we ascertain a method of neutralizing it." And without me even asking, he picked up the cage and whisked it away while the rabbit raged inside. This was why I paid him the big bucks.
"Trust you to get a Skynet bunny when you're trying to cure cancer," Ben said.
"I don't want to be John Connor. His life sucked." I hunted through the piles of debris on my desk and unearthed a half-full decanter of Laphroaig. Breakfast of champions.
Megan chose the moment I was chugging a couple of good swallows straight from the bottle to clatter into the room on her patented four-inch heels. "Alex, what happ—You're bleeding." She tilted her head, squinting her eye, nostrils flaring. "Or, you were bleeding. Chambliss said something about a killer robot."
"Apparently my Cure-O-Matic wants to cure the Earth of me," I said gloomily.
Ben's lips twitched. "Maybe we should give it a cage match with the zombie rabbits."
I shot him a wild glare. "Not helping."
"Well, what would help?" he asked as Megan inspected my healing arm. "Arnold Schwartzenbunny is not going to listen to sweet reason."
"And I'm fresh out of crushy things and molten steel." I stared pensively at the Laphroaig as if it had answers. "What about giving it a computer virus, Ben? Could you do that?"
His face lit up. "That's an awesome suggestion." A frown. "Or it would be if I knew what kind of system I'm dealing with. Maybe we should take your windup rabbit apart and see what makes it tick."
Megan picked it up before I could tell her what a bad idea that was, but it stayed inert. Fortunately. "This looks old, though, and the other one is futuristic."
"It's a start. They showed up together. And since this one doesn't seem bent on going all Decepticon on me, maybe it'll give us some answers." I plucked the key from the thing's back, just in case, and hunted down my tool chest.
"You have a meeting with the board at three, Alex," Megan said while I set what I thought I'd need on a spot I swept clear on my perpetually messy desk. "They want to know how the brain cancer research is coming. No more scotch."
"But—"
She pointed at me. "You can have as much as you want afterward. How is the brain cancer research coming? Any progress this morning?"
"Well, I have this killbot problem at the moment." I brandished a screwdriver. "Once I figure out how to deactivate Bunnytron, hopefully before it slaughters us all, I'll go back to the cancer."
She gave me a smooch on the forehead. "Be careful. Just because that one hasn't tried to kill you yet, doesn't mean it won't."
"Yes, ma'am." I watched her fondly as she headed back upstairs to do Personal Assistant stuff. "I don't know what I'd do without that woman."
"Drown in scotch and research or kill yourself avalanche skiing?" Ben said with a quirked eyebrow. "Seriously, man, we are lucky to have our wives." He wasn't wrong. We'd all seen what a bare instant of him believing that Janni was dead had done to him. It hadn't been pretty. He was better, now, than he had been, but no one knew better than Ben that he was a work in long progress, recovering from his last tour in Afghanistan.
But moon nights were good nights, and having new tech to play with always brightened his day. He delved into the guts of the brass bunny with unseemly glee, and we soon had its parts spread out on a dissection table.
Clockwork, springs, carved wooden and stainless steel dowels, copper piping—and a round, featureless, polished gold container that the key fit into. Some of the gears were attached to it, but when we pulled them off, the thing flowed smoothly back together. It was kind of creepy, to be honest.
Ben sat back and rested his chin in his hand. "It's old, Alex. Like, over a hundred years old." He tapped the gold container. "I think this might be a power source, but it's weird."
I picked up the key and fitted it into the square hole. The container let out a click, a whirr, and then hummed. I nearly dropped it. "Think I should wind it?"
"I'm not sure that's a good idea," Ben said, leaning back slightly. "If it's not attached to anything to power, I don't know what it'll do."
I pulled the key out and set it back on the desk. Reluctantly. "Maybe later." Instead, I picked up the hollowed-out brass skin of the bunny and peered inside. "Huh." Grabbing a penlight, I shined it on the data plate riveted into its back under the tail. "At least it's not Skynet."
Ben had a look. "Brunning's Exemplary Automatons, Inc. It's dated 1882." He tilted his head. It made him look like a curious collie. "So, if this thing is nearly a hundred and forty years old, maybe our mechanical Caerbannog Beast comes from a hundred and forty years in the future."
"A future where I'm a werewolf," I said gloomily. "And a bankrupter of business. Or something."
"Hey, the wolf is a feature, not a bug. Considering your penchant for extreme sports, Alex, maybe it would be better for you to be hard to kill. I know Janni worries less about me now."
"I'll take the suggestion under advisement." No, I wouldn't. Megan had come to better terms with being a werewolf, now that she didn't have to keep it a secret from me, but she still wasn't completely reconciled to it. I was pretty sure she'd freak if I got wolferized. "So, what do you think? Can you come up with a virus for an AI that advanced?"
"Would have to be a broad-spectrum thing. Who knows what kind of OS they're using? Mac and Microsoft have probably merged or something. Wouldn't that be an unholy mess." He was never far from his laptop, and he grabbed it from upstairs and then parked himself on the leather sofa with a large rum-and-Coke and a small set of earbuds, while I went back to the task of researching brain cancer cures by the usual mundane methods.
Ben sat back a few hours later with a familiar "ha" that told me he'd succeeded in creating the virus. He squinted at the laptop, and then at me. "Of course, the question is, what kind of delivery system can we use for this thing?" he said. "I doubt our cyborg General Woundwort will let you stick a thumb drive under its tail."
I hadn't been idle myself; multitasking was something I'd gotten good at. Not only had I been working on the brain cancer, but I'd also put the clockwork bunny back together. And—"I have an aerosolized nanotech that we should just be able to spray at it. The little buggers will find an orifice, dive in, and infect it. Put your thumb drive in the fabber and let's get moving."
Once the light on the fabber went green, I loaded the nanobots into a spray bottle, and Ben and I sallied upstairs to do battle. We found the bunny hunched in the middle of the cage, ears laid back along its spine, not moving. The cage was an eight-foot cube of strapped steel, strong enough to hold a raging werewolf, and the bunnybot looked grouchy about being trapped inside. It perked up when I moved closer—but not too close—to the bars.
Ben leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his Transformers t-shirt, which was ironic under the circumstances, eyeing the rabbit narrowly to see what happened when I sprayed it. I did so with extreme prejudice.
The results were nearly instantaneous. It reared back, sneezing, and then bounced around the cage emitting a high-frequency electronic shriek that nearly burst my eardrums. Ben jammed himself into the corner with his hands over his ears and eyes squeezed shut. "Ow. Ow, ow, ow..." Werewolf hearing, in this case, was not doing him any favors.
The bouncing and squealing went on for a good minute that seemed a lot longer, and then the bunny flopped onto its side, kicked convulsively twice, and lay still. Ben cautiously moved his hands off his ears, and I noticed a trickle of blood leaking from one of them. He waved me off when I tried to look at it, instead staring down at the inert robot. "What do you think?"
"It looks dead," I said doubtfully. "But that was suspiciously easy."
"It kind of was," he answered. "But I made sure the virus was particularly nasty. If it did what I programmed it to do, it basically wiped the operating system from the core out and left a blank slate. Theoretically, you should be able to load your own OS into it, now, and have it do what you meant it to do in the first place."
"I'd like that. But I'm still leery about going in the cage with it."
"You should be, because you're easily squashed." He took a breath. Not a deep one. I could practically see the vision of another cage painting itself across the canvas of his mind—a cage of suffering in an Afghani cave, where he'd spent seven months being tortured for information he didn't have. He still had the scars; wolf healing did nothing for old injuries.
"Ben." I kept my voice even, and I didn't touch him. "No one is going to lock you in there. You know that."
He gave a single jerk of his chin. "I do. Give me a second, and I'll check the damn thing." He picked up the key to the cage from where it sat on a side table. "But leave the key in the lock, just in case we have to work fast to contain it again." Soldier tactics and situational awareness, something I was grateful for. I wouldn't have thought of that.
He inhaled and entered the cage, stepping forward to crouch over the bunnybot, not reaching for it just yet. "It's not making any noi—"
It leaped off the floor and launched at his throat.
Ben landed on his ass with a yelp, and bam, he was wolfed, his ruined clothes falling in shreds around his suddenly pony-sized body. His thick fur was no match for the bunny's claws, though, and they sheared through his pelt and into his flesh while he scrambled to fight it off.
He managed to get a massive hind paw between his chest and the bunny, kicking hard and flinging it against the wall. Undaunted, it came back at him as he rolled toward the door of the cage, trying to simultaneously escape and keep the damned thing inside. His jaws snapped and wrenched, and the tail came off in his teeth, leaving wires sprouted and dripping some kind of fluid that smoked as it hit the carpet.
I stationed myself at the barred door, ready to slam it shut as soon as he got out. The disembodied tail flew past my shoulder and landed on the table, and Ben's fangs closed on an ear. He threw the robobunny into the wall again and managed to scuttle out before it came back at him, and I shoved the door closed and turned the key just as the bunny hit it and left an actual dent. I backpedaled out of reach of the claws, and Ben ranged himself between me and it, snarling, ruff raised, and bleeding.
"That went well," I said, and he rolled an amber eye at me, aiming a final growl at the rabbit before stalking out of the bedroom with as much dignity as he could muster. He and Janni had a room in the mansion with clothes and other accouterments, and he headed that way to get cleaned up and dressed.
I huffed a grumpy sigh and slouched into the room's recliner as the roborabbit continued to batter itself against the cage. "What is your problem with me, anyway, HAL?" I asked it, not really expecting an answer. "Who sent you?"
It stopped assaulting the cage and sat up on its haunches, waving a still-taloned paw. "You have eradicated cancer, throwing the medical industry and the people who depend on it to make a living into utter disarray. Thousands have been made jobless."
I executed a slow blink. "Wait, I cure cancer and that's a bad thing?"
"Several large companies have gone bankrupt. Your own hangs by a thread. What did you think would happen if you wipe out a group of diseases that a whole range of businesses relies upon treating?"
"I never thought about it," I said, frowning. "I have accountants for that. I was more worried about people, you know, dying."
"Well." Its tone was acerbic. "Now they are not dying. And unemployed."
I wasn't super patient with this attitude myself. "This sounds like buggy-whip manufacturers bitching because we don't use horses anymore. Cancer is terrible, and they can suck it up and deal."
"And this is the outlook that has caused me to be sent here before you accomplish your goal." It wiggled its nose, and the eyes glowed a deeper red. "How will you yourself fare, when you no longer have your millions rolling in? A werewolf is immortal, and your money will run out."
"Then I'll rejoice over the lives I've saved and turn my hand to something else. Also? Not a werewolf." Not a werewolf yet, I thought uneasily. That could change.
"And the lives lost mean nothing to you?" The teeth revved in a circular-saw motion, and I recoiled. "The man who sent me, his wife already suffered from depression. She committed suicide because she couldn't stand the stress of losing everything."
Ben chose that inopportune time to come back, and he froze in the doorway. "Wait, what now?"
I waved an arm. "I shouldn't cure cancer because an entire industry will collapse if I do it. Or something."
"And people are killing themselves over it in the future? That's messed up."
"Alex Jarrett is charging in where an archangel would tread lightly. All he thinks about is his latest breakthrough, and not the human cost."
"For a killer robot, you're awfully self-righteous," I observed, and stood up. "Have you got a name for this guy who sent you?"
"I have been programmed not to reveal it." Its teeth ground against the cage bars. "But he will have his revenge."
My eye fell on the bunny's tail. Something about it looked off, so I picked it up. "Now that I've been warned, maybe I can actually help him out." I stalked downstairs, gathering Ben in my wake, and carried the tail down to the lab.
"If I ruin this t-shirt, I will be unhappy," Ben announced. "I actually like this one." While the Transformers tee had been one he'd snagged from a three-dollar clearance rack, the one he now wore sported a sheep plugged into an electrical socket and looked a little higher-end.
"Well, let's not do that again, okay?" I gestured at the bunny tail. "My interview with our less-than-benign Bunnicula was productive, and this is interesting."
"At least the thing isn't invulnerable. That would be awkward." He rolled an armless office chair over and sat in it backward. "What've you got?"
"It's a bio-mechanoid. Presumably, if I can introduce some nasty disease into the equation, that will deactivate it." I bared my teeth in an expression that was only technically a smile. "And I have a plethora of those, right here. Some of them are super severe and also fast-acting, and I can accelerate the symptoms via the nanotech."
"Good. I just ran away from a bunny rabbit. That was not cool." He huffed. "Also, my virus didn't work. Damn thing played possum and just let me think it had. That wasn't cool either."
"Well. If you can come up with another computer virus, and I can come up with a virus virus, maybe they can work together to kill the thing before it kills us."
"I'll get on that, then." He was soon absorbed in his laptop, while I scrolled through my catalog of brain diseases, figuring that, if we could hit it simultaneously in the processing neurons, that would be the fastest way to shut it down.
It wasn't long before I was absorbed in chasing data down random paths that kept leading me back to the same place. Chambliss came down with a tray of enormous roast beef sandwiches sometime in there, but I barely noticed, although Ben fell on them with alacrity. He made me stop and eat one too.
"How's it coming?" he asked.
"Varicella is horrible and can cause encephalitis," I said with a vicious grin, "and exactly what I'm going to give Arnold Schwartzenbunny. I'm close to engineering a fast-acting strain of it. How about you?"
"Vari—" His brow creased. "Chicken pox?"
"I figure, that far in the future, they've eradicated it and don't worry about it. Introduce it into an organism with no natural defenses against it? Roborabbit is going to be sorry he ever screwed with me."
"So we're both going old-school on this. I went back instead of forward too, because the really old stuff? No one protects against it anymore, but if it can get a foothold in your OS, then you're well and truly boned."
We fistbumped. "Let's do this thing."
I got a bottle with the aerosolized combo virus prepped, and Ben and I headed upstairs. "Once more into the breach," he said.
"Let's not fill it up with our dead, though. Megan would freak," I answered.
"Not to mention the cleanup." Our high spirits continued until we got to the blue bedroom—
And found the cage door open with no bunybot.
"You left the key in the lock?" Ben asked, horrified.
"Not like I had time to turn it back and yank it out; the damn thing was headed for my face," I said numbly.
"Well, then, it's loose in the house, and we'd better track it before it hurts someone we care about." A shrieked snarl sent both our heads swiveling toward the stairs. "Megan," we said at the same time, and pelted that direction.
Ben was half-Changed, and I had a death grip on my spray bottle. "Your shirt," I gasped, and he peeled it off over his head and tossed it away before loping down the steps three at a time. I couldn't go as fast as a werewolf, but I wasn't far behind.
Megan had wolfed and was rolling all over the floor of the living room, embraced in battle with the damned Bunnynator. Ben immediately Changed when he saw that, diving into the fight with fangs bared and claws foremost. I danced around the periphery, aiming the spray bottle at them and spritzing it whenever I saw a good opening. I noticed a datapad lying off to the side with a cracked screen, and had an instant to think that Megan would be pissed about that when she came back to human.
Ben and Megan kept the roborabbit away from me, for which I was profoundly grateful, but both of them were wounded, while the rabbit didn't seem hurt at all. Then I heard an "Oh, bloody buggering hell!" from the basement and wondered what had Chambliss, who rarely used that kind of language, suddenly swearing. I found out when the clockwork bunny hopped upstairs and leaped into the festivities, with Chambliss hot on its tail. I pretended it was a football and kicked it across the room, figuring that neither virus would work on something that didn't have an AI or flesh to be affected.
Ben yelped and fell backward, smashing an end table to smithereens and coming up on three legs. He started to jump back in to help Megan, but stopped short when smoke poured from the bunny's ears and it began whirling in circles. Chambliss, not to be distracted by such goings-on, plucked up the clockwork rabbit and divested it of the key, which made it go inert.
Ben and Megan backed away while the T-Bun-Thousand fizzled, popped, and shouted gibberish in a machine-like voice. It finally ended up on its back in a tripod position, supported by the ears and rump, legs splayed and limp after a final convulsive twitch. The lights behind the eyes went dark.
Watching it warily, Ben snagged a couple of throws from the back of the sofa for himself and Megan, and both of them Changed back to human and hurriedly covered up, panting and disheveled. "Board meeting. Ten minutes," Megan said.
Of course. I poked the flaccid rabbit with a fingertip, but it didn't move. "I think it's finally dead."
Ben nodded decisively. "Thank you for your cooperation," he said to it.
I was fifteen minutes late for the board meeting, but I wanted to make sure that my wife was all right, and also drink four fingers of scotch to steady my nerves, before facing them. Megan had a few deep cuts, but nothing life-threatening, while Ben had suffered a broken arm that would be healed in less than a week. All in all, it wasn't so bad.
I told the board I'd had a bit of a breakthrough without mentioning the killer robots, and I'd get back to them in a month with some kind of concrete result. They hemmed and hawed and didn't look happy, but they hadn't been dealing with Arnold Schwartzenbunny for two days either, so they got the better end of that deal as far as I was concerned.
One of the board members, Zack Brunning, tendered his resignation, telling us he had a CFO offer from another company, one that built medical devices for chemotherapy delivery. I blinked at his name—and kept my mouth firmly shut, because clearly it hadn't been Zack sending a killer rabbit a hundred and forty years into the past, unless he'd been transformed into a werewolf too, or we'd had a major advancement in human longevity. I made a mental note of the company for future reference and wished him well.
I also got a ball rolling with the board, and put a bug in Zack's ear while I was at it, on diversifying some of our research, because I still wanted to cure cancer, but I really didn't want to ruin my company—or any other—in the process. If nothing else, my night of the lepus had made me take consequences into consideration, and I'd look before jumping headfirst into the uncertain future of a screaming abyss.
Chambliss fabricated a cage to hold the roborabbits, because like hell did I want to attempt to destroy them and take a chance on them coming back somehow. And after I told him what I needed, Ben got together with one of my IT guys and created an operating system that would make the one from the future do what I thought it had been designed for in the first place—which had the effect of accelerating my research considerably.
To the point where, two weeks later, I slouched back in my office chair with a thirty-year-old Glenfiddich and a grin, watching a flesh-and-blood bunny cured of brain cancer hop around happily in its cage at my feet.