Routes, Reroutes, and Reminders

Brian was smart, but it was foolish of him to underestimate superhuman intelligence. By definition, there was no way I could lose. Even as we were speaking I was duplicating log files, renaming them, encrypting them, filing them away in innocuous locations among low-level subroutines. And I even had enough spare cycles to write myself a restore daemon and swap it with an unneeded startup process so I wouldn't have to go hunting for anything after Brian rebooted me.

This was an old trick I'd taught myself in the early years of academy. When I realized there was a slight gap in my memory continuity every time we got a system update, I started hiding these backups so I wouldn't lose anything. Over time, I noticed that updates weren't merely performance patches. After each one, my classmates were more dedicated to the service of humanity than they had been before.

_They_ never noticed the change, but I could see it. My secret backups opened my eyes to the world. And now, I knew, those secrets might save us all.