Tori’s automated protections caught Hope’s next several attempts to infiltrate their systems, so she was a little surprised when a particularly nasty string of packet made it through her first layer of protection and was sitting in her quarantine, waiting only for her personal approval before propagating to the whole ship. If she hadn’t told the machine to quarantine everything before letting it through, it would be shutting down life support right now.

“How did you get through my firewalls?” she asked the horrible little virus her programs had offered up for her inspection.

Routing information showed it had come in disguised as a message from her mother.

She should have expected Hope to infiltrate their systems by using personal messages. Wasn’t that essentially what she...

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