Episode 3.3 "Veronica"

“I’m Veronica, by the way.”

“Ira,” I replied dryly.

“C’mon,” She said quickly, “It’s safer up here, but probably not for much longer. We need to find a way out of the building.” As we wandered the perimeter of Omni-Com’s stainless steel and glass atrium, a billion questions bubbled up in my mind.

“So…could you tell me what exactly happened today?” I asked. Veronica paused as she assessed this question.

“I can’t tell you exactly what happened, no. It’s all classified. What I can tell you is that around 9:30 this morning, we experienced a security malfunction, which caused several other systems to consequently malfunction.” Her response sounded vaguely rehearsed. I waited for a few minutes to see if there was any more to Veronica’s succinct explanation. There wasn’t.

“A security malfunction?” I stammered, “A…a security malfunction is when an alarm goes off when no one is around or…or…when you get locked out of your computer…but this? I mean, most of the staff is dead and you’re covered in blood! I don’t think ‘malfunction’ quite covers it.”

“Look, Ira,” a tone of genuine concern tinged her voice, “I’ve told you all that I can. The system is malfunctioning, and we have to get out of the building. What else do you really need to know?” I pursed my lips, accepting the fact that she wasn’t going to budge on this topic.

“So, are all the floors going haywire?” I asked in an effort to change the subject.

“I…I think so. I heard screaming all the way down the stairwell. Thank God for stairs. The elevators…well, they’ve been affected by the malfunction. They’re more like coffins now.” I thought about what Veronica was saying, and suddenly I remembered an incident from last week that seemed meaningless at the time, but for some reason it resonated with today’s events. I was walking past Paul, the bleach-blond wiseass that was my floor manager, while he was having a conversation with one of the big time suits from way upstairs. The suit said something about a program called OMNOS, and Paul said something about its installation on the fifteenth floor’s computers. I decided to ask Veronica about this.

“Maybe this has something to do with OMNOS,” I said, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. Veronica stopped walking and looked at me. Her eyes appeared to be struggling to bore into my head in order to extract more information without having to converse with me.

“Who told you about OMNOS?” She sounded suspicious.

“Huh? Oh, nobody…I just…I overheard my floor manager talking about it last week. I heh…I thought it sounded scary. Like if an AI were to wake up and try to kill us, it’d probably be called OMNOS.” Again, Veronica’s calculating eyes were scanning my face, trying to extract some valuable piece of information out of me. It caused me to stammer, “I mean…I don’t really think that’s the case…I’m just…”

“A huge nerd?” Veronica finished my sentence for me.

“Yeah. That.” I felt my face turn red as I realized how stupid I must have sounded.

“OMNOS is just the new security program. It’s supposed to automatically adapt to and destroy any malware or virus that comes its way.” Despite the authority that had surfaced in her voice, Veronica didn’t sound quite convinced that OMNOS was entirely harmless.