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.