Part 2 of 3
 

After a night of restless dreams, Scully woke up, and she was hungry. Not
ravenous, certainly, but very much wanting food. It was a great feeling,
one that managed to stay with her as she dressed and applied her makeup
and went to Mulder's room.

Her good cheer faded away as she stood there, looking at the tarnished
number 11. She didn't want to have the door thrown open, his face a hard
mask covering his pain. She didn't want to deal with his concern masked
as anger, his overwhelming hurt and frustration. She wanted him to smile
and guide her into the room and maybe put another warm hand on her back.

She should have brought a heavier blazer. She was cold. So cold, in fact,
that after another sharp breeze rushed by her, indoors seemed a better
idea than outdoors, and she could finally force herself to knock on the
door. He answered it after a few beats, a toothbrush in his mouth and his
tie looped around his neck.

"I'm hungry, Mulder. Let's go get breakfast," was all she said. But it
had him rushing to spit out his toothpaste and put on his blazer and find
his shoes. She sat on his bed and watched, feeling much warmer.

They went to the Denny's just a block down the Real, Mulder's mouth
twisting a bit at the contrast between the pure white Virgin Mary statue
resting in the front bushes and the claw machine in the waiting area.

"Tell me your theory," Scully asked after they were given their menus.
With a promise of omelettes in the air, even rubbery Denny's omelettes,
she could manage debunking whatever he had come up with.

He beseeched the waitress with his coffee cup before answering.  "I think
there was an unknown influence acting on her - a controlling force that
commanded the death of Nitin Patel. Something that turned her into
nothing but a software program, executing the user's command."

"Executing is right," Scully remarked, and even though it wasn't much of
a gibe, Mulder's eyes still lit up.

"You saw her yesterday," he persisted. "She wasn't mentally stable at all
- she's nearly comatose."

She shrugged. "I saw a woman who snapped after workplace stress had
gotten the best of her. The fact that her mind processes what happened in
terms of computer systems is a clear indication of that."

"It takes a lot of workplace stress to be able to lift a 30-pound monitor
and slam it down on a defenseless man's head," he countered.

"Have you seen the houses around here, Mulder? She's trying to raise two
children in one of the most expensive areas of the country, with only her
husband's salary as a contractor to fall back on. That would be enough
stress for me, I think."

He sighed, rubbing his hand over his face. "We both agree that there's
some form of outside pressure here. Let's just leave it at that until we
have more information."

She raised an eyebrow, a rush of relief running through her at how
natural this all felt. "And in the meantime?"

His look was serious and stern and concerned, and Scully knew he had
shifted his focus to that little dark lump growing, growing in her
forehead. "We'll eat breakfast."

She lowered her eyebrow and her gaze, and lost her appetite.

-------------

Back at the Interlink building, business was clearly proceeding as normal
again. The place was buzzing with workers: Mulder saw echoes of Langly in
several people, but otherwise the Interlink employees didn't seem to fit
the stereotypical geek mold. On their way up to the seventh floor, they
shared the elevator with two middle-aged women in business suits, a guy
in a shirt and tie who looked about fourteen, and a young Asian man with
a terminally bad hair-cut.

On the programming floor, a couple of small glass-walled offices on the
edge of the cube maze had been set aside for them to interview members of
staff. They had flipped a quarter for it in the car - Scully took the
other two members of Nitin and Shelley's coding team, leaving him with
the cranky janitor who had seen Shelley leaving the crime scene.

The janitor, Carlos Sanchez, had large dark circles marring the smooth
olive skin around his eyes, and was still wearing his dark blue coveralls
over a checkered shirt. He suppressed a yawn as Mulder introduced himself
and reviewed the statement Sanchez had given the police.

"I already told the police everything I know," Sanchez said in a flat
voice with a strong Mexican accent, waving a hand at the text of his
statement. "I just finished working a night shift, Agent Mulder, so can
we make this quick?"

"Sure," Mulder said, realizing with shame that he hadn't expected the man
to speak such good English. "We appreciate you coming in this morning.
I'm sure you did tell the police everything they asked for - we just find
that sometimes they don't always ask witnesses all the questions we need
answers to." He offered the other man his best "trust me, I'm a federal
agent" smile. "So, you were mopping the hallway on the first floor when
Mrs. Hope came out of the elevator, and you say she didn't say anything
to you as she left the building."

Sanchez regarded him with a level stare. "No. She didn't. You know, if I
was fleeing the scene of a murder covered in blood, I wouldn't stop to
chat either."

Mulder groaned inwardly, already sensing that nothing fruitful would come
of this interview. He glanced quickly to his right, through the glass
partition separating the offices. He could see the backs of two heads,
one a woman with ash-blonde, tightly curled hair, one a man with black
hair cropped close to his scalp, and beyond them, Scully, listening
intently to whatever they were telling her and then asking another
question, gesturing with her hands as she spoke. They should really have
done the interviews together, but at this stage he was going for the
options that would give them the quickest solve and have them on a plane
back east at the earliest opportunity.

"You clean the seventh floor programming office, too, right?"

"Right. There's a team of us working shifts, so we go where we're needed
each night. I'd been working up there a couple of hours earlier."

"And Mrs. Hope and Mr. Patel were still in the office then..."

"Uh-huh. That Patel guy, he was real friendly, he'd always say hi, take
some notice of you. She was usually pretty nice too, but she wasn't in a
great mood that evening, didn't even look up from her computer."

The computer. Mulder felt a spark of interest. "Did she appear to you to
be irritated or angry with Mr. Patel?"

Sanchez shook his head. "No, they weren't even talking most of the time I
was up there, they looked so busy. She was hardly paying him any
attention, real absorbed in whatever she was doing, you know?"

He continued to question Sanchez, getting nowhere fast. But his mind was
wandering, returning to Scully like a dog to a bone, to her face, open
and maybe even anxious over mediocre omelettes and hash browns at
breakfast. To the look in her eyes, fleeting and pained, when she'd
somehow *seen* him thinking about the cancer. Had she been trying to
close the gap she had opened up between them a little? He had lost the
knack of being able to see where she was going, know what she was not
saying as well as what she was.

With part of his mind tuned in dutifully to the janitor's increasingly
curt answers to his questions, he let his eyes glance over to the right
every so often, looking for that bright flash of copper and the slender
figure in the black suit at the edge of his peripheral vision, wondering.
He had dreamed of her the night before, but could not remember the events
of the dream - he had only vague impressions of Scully running through a
dark forest, slipping in and out of shadows, and of himself, running,
running and trying to keep up.

-------------

Mulder trotted beside her down the police corridor, trying to keep up
with her rapid pace and her rapid tongue.

"Stock options, Mulder. That's what both Gellar and Witt said - that
Nitin and Shelley were both up for the same promotion, with over twenty
thousand dollars' worth of stock options attached."

"It doesn't prove anything."

Scully rolled her eyes, feeling, for once, on top of this case. "Except
that she had a motive - and a very good one, at that. What did you find
out from the janitor?"

He grimaced. "Not very much. His statement seemed to sum everything up."

The sense of relief she felt was potent. No more to see here, Mulder,
let's go home. "Then I don't see what else we can do. There was a murder
- the confessed killer is behind bars. We don't need to be here anymore."

They had reached the small office the local PD was loaning them, and she
removed her laptop from the case that had been swung over her shoulder;
she hadn't checked her email since they had arrived.  Undoubtedly most of
it would be unimportant, but her mom, a woman who genuinely loathed
technology, had taken recently to sending her short notes every day or
two.  It was, she thought bitterly, a reaction to the cancer - her
mother's way of making sure she was still breathing - but the sentiment
was good-hearted. And Mom worried if she didn't reply back right away.

She booted up the computer and hooked up a phone line while Mulder
twitched nervously, clearly hesitating. She didn't think he liked it here
much more than she did, but she could tell that something was nagging
him.

"I want to leave as much as you do," he said with his usual brazenness,
and she took a moment to enjoy being right. "But there's something
missing here. And that woman is
going to go to jail for what happened, even though it potentially wasn't
her fault. She's got kids, Scully."

She shrugged. "There's always temporary insanity."

"No jury will buy that," he snapped.

She sighed. "Why do you care so much, Mulder?"

His squirming frame stilled, and for the first time, his eyes were
unguarded and uncompromising, boring into hers. "Why *don't* you?"

Their gaze held for several minutes, no ground surrendered, until her
computer made cheery welcome noises and she gratefully looked away from
him, logging into the server and opening her e-mail. A few minutes of
tense silence and the feel of his glare on her back, and she had
downloaded all of her new messages, opening piece by piece.

"Mulder, did you send me something?" she asked hesitantly. His name as
sender, with a large attachment and the oddest subject line...

A moment of hesitation, and curiosity got the better of him. He looked
over her shoulder. "Scully, I didn't send you that. Look - it's dated
this morning."

A quick look between them, the same they'd share if they were about to
break down a suspect's door, and she opened the file. And her screen
blazed with activity.

Windows crashed and the same commands appeared at the DOS prompt, over
and over:

CORRUPTED DATA
REPORT: FILE PATH ://PHILOS
FATAL ERROR
REPORT: FILE PATH ://EROS
FATAL ERROR
CORRUPTED DATA

....until it stopped, suddenly, and the screen went dark. Scully attempted
to reboot, but the slight whiff of smoke coming from the back made it
clear that her luck was out.

"I think it melted my hard drive," she exclaimed.

Mulder's eyes were wide open, stunned. "Guess you should have gotten a
Mac."

------------

As they swung out of the police station parking lot and back onto the
road, headed once again for Interlink Technologies, Scully kept casting
mournful glances over her shoulder at her fried laptop, which sat on the
back seat.

"Scully," he said, in his most serious tones, "I just wanted to tell
you...I'm so sorry for your loss."

She glared at him. "Laugh it up. You wouldn't find this so amusing if
you'd just seen over a thousand dollars of hardware go up in smoke."

"Relax," he told her, pulling up to a stop light. "We'll find a way to
put the squeeze on the expenses department and get you another toy to
play with. Anyway, I don't find it amusing. I find it extremely
interesting, as a matter of fact."

"Which is why we're going back to the cube farm?" she asked, in a way
that suggested she was preparing to sit herself on the fence and enjoy
watching him blunder down the wrong trail.

"Which is why we're going back to Interlink," he agreed smoothly, pulling
away from the light the instant it changed.

He didn't volunteer anything further until they reached Interlink,
flashed their badges at the security guard who was starting to wave them
through without even glancing up from the funny pages, and were on their
way back up to the seventh floor.

"So," he opened, leaning up against the elevator's polished steel wall,
"you want to hear my latest crackpot theory or not?"

"If it's going to explain why my hard drive is now an expensive
paperweight, sure," she shot back.

"I think Shelley Hope killed Nitin because she received a virus, the same
virus that just ate your laptop. I think if we get someone to start up
her computer and have a poke around, we'll find that her hard drive was
also fried--  Maybe in part you were right, maybe it was the straw that
broke the camel's back, but I think it's more than just a simple computer
virus, Scully. You saw the words it generated - what if there was a virus
that, I don't know, feeds off ill-will somehow? Off corrupted
relationships?"

She rolled her eyes as the elevator doors pinged open. "You know, Mulder,
if leaps of faith were an Olympic sport, you'd have a drawer full of
gold," she said, click-clacking her way out down the hallway. What she
did not say, but what they both heard hanging unspoken in the air as an
Interlink tech support employee managed to boot up Shelley's computer for
them to show a fatal error screen, was that if he was right, then they
could hardly ignore the reason the virus had targeted Scully. Had
targeted *them*.

"Can you restore the hard drive at all?" he asked, sensing Scully's body
thrumming with nervous tension at his side. "We think she received a
virus through her company e-mail account shortly before the murder; we
need to know more about it, and who she received it from, if possible."

The techie shrugged. "We should be able to do it. Might take a little
while. How soon do you need it?"

"As soon as possible," Scully said, speaking up suddenly. "We need to
know how this happened to her - to her computer, that is - and we need to
know *why*."

As she spoke the screen before them blinked off, as the monitor powered
down, and then flashed as it powered itself back up. Across the black
screen, words began to appear.

>FATAL ERROR.

>IRRETRIEVABLE DATA CORRUPTION.

>EXECUTE. EXECUTE. EXECUTE

The cursor blinked at them for  few seconds, and then a final message
appeared

>EXECUTE. Y/N?

Oh Scully, he thought sadly, looking at her with her mouth pressed down
into a hard line and thinking of Shelley Hope's empty gray eyes, we know
why it happened to her - you just don't want to admit that it might have
happened to us.
 

End Part 2 of 3
 

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