TITLE: Abort, Retry, Fail
AUTHOR: Tallulah Wolf
CATEGORY: S/X, A, DAL
RATING: Rated PG-13 for potentially disturbing themes.
SPOILERS: The early cancer-arc (say...MM through to Tempus Fugit).
SUMMARY: Fairy-tale castles with rooms to rent by the hour. Under a
gray Californian sky, Mulder and Scully get stuck on the road to
nowhere. 
ARCHIVE: Yes to Gossamer. Anywhere else would be lovely, but
please ask first. 
DISCLAIMER: Mulder and Scully: not mine. Interlink
Technologies: not real. The Glass Slipper Inn: not mine either
(dammit). 
FEEDBACK: Welcomed with open arms and cheesecake at
tallulahw@bayarea.com


-------------
Abort, Retry, Fail
By Tallulah Wolf
tallulahw@bayarea.com
-------------

Silicon Valley, California
February 12, 1997


It was only a twenty-minute ride from the airport to the motel, but
Scully had still drifted off into a light slumber filled with hazy
nightmares. The car's sudden stop woke her, though, and stunned, she
blinked twice. Her second look confirmed what she hadn't comprehended
with the first.  

Mulder was parking next to a fairy tale castle.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and took a better look at the gray
paint, the gracefully sweeping roof, the two spindly turrets, the
bright neon spelling out the motel's name: The Glass Slipper Inn.

She almost smiled. She would have smiled, had it not been for the
anger with which Mulder put the car in park and slammed the car door
on his way outside. He was still mad at her, so the world had to
suffer as a result. Too much a gentleman to hate a dying woman.

Through the window of the lobby, she could see him checking them in,
drumming his fingers furiously on the counter. He was too painful to
watch for long, though, and she turned her head to the side, taking in
their surroundings.

This surreal motel was wedged into a long row of buildings lining the
busy street, surrounded by booming franchises and failing small
businesses. The other side of the street, six lanes of traffic away,
was almost identical - except for the castle.

Mulder stalked back to the car, opening up the trunk and removing
their bags. He picked up his and began walking inside, leaving hers on
the sidewalk.

She sighed and got out of the car, using the automatic lock to secure
the doors.

Mulder was walking just slowly enough for her to catch up, but the
tapping of her heels sped up to quite a tempo before she made it to
his side.

When she thought of California and fairy tale castles, she assumed
wide blue skies and romantic adventures with happy endings. Instead,
the thick, gray sky hung low to the ground, and the closest thing she
had to a prince was being anything but charming..

False promises, she thought to herself. So much for assuming.

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

As they rode the elevator to the seventh floor of the monolithic
Interlink Technologies building, Mulder realized that he had
unconsciously positioned himself as far away as he could from her
within the cramped space. He stayed where he was, however, and
deliberately did not look across at her, or at her smeared reflection
wavering on the polished metal wall.

He didn't want to hate her. But after four years, he would have
thought...

There should be more than this. More than finding out she had started
chemo only after she had to have him pull over the car so she could
throw up on the shoulder of the highway on the way to Dulles. More
than this subtle betrayal. It might have looked to the casual observer
as if she was still there, he mused bitterly, but he knew the truth -
she was already leaving him. Untangling herself because she thought it
would hurt less that way.

The elevator announced their arrival with a cheerful ping and she
stalked out, heels clicking like bones on the polished hallway floor.
He followed two paces behind, more out of habit than politeness.

Yellow and black police ribbon hung across a set of glass double doors
at the end of the hall. They ducked under it, emerging into a huge
office that apparently took up the whole floor of the building. A maze
of cubicles stretched out in front of them, forming a monotone
landscape of oyster-gray hardboard and the pale, sickly gray of
computer monitors. He fingered the leaves of one impossibly glossy
green desk plant as he followed Scully towards the back of the office,
and found that it looked so perfect because it was fake. A bored,
pudgy man with thinning hair stood at the far end of the office,
raising one hand in a wave and the other to show them his police
badge.

Nitin Patel's body had been removed, of course, but his blood still
spattered the immaculate surfaces of his cube, dried to a dull rusty
brown. The computer monitor that Shelley Hope had allegedly used to
bludgeon him to death sat on the floor where it had been dropped,
cables taut and stretching back behind a nearby desk. Scully knelt and
peered into the gaping hole where the screen had been.

"She actually picked this up and smashed it over his head? While it
was still switched on?" she asked incredulously.

"Uh-huh," Detective Weisel answered, snapping his gum. He indicated
the monitor Scully was examining. "That one wasn't hers, though. That
belonged to the guy who sat directly behind the victim. Hers is
there," he said, pointing to a computer sitting in a cubicle to the
right of Nitin's. "It was still on when we arrived, but it looks like
she'd had a virus or maybe a current surge fried her machine or
something - the screen was just covered in these crazy error
messages."

Scully stood and went to a cube across the way. She placed both hands
experimentally under a monitor and heaved. "Mulder, I can barely lift
this off the desk," she said. "I can't imagine being able to pick it
up, raise it and bring it down on someone's head with enough force to
kill."

He shook back thoughts of her slowly weakening muscles, and shrugged.
"Maybe she works out. I don't care *how* she did it. I'm interested in
why." He turned to the detective. "Has she said anything else since
her arrest?"

Weisel shrugged and snapped his gum again. "Nope. Just the same thing,
over and over, whatever we say to her. 'Execute the monster.'" 

He turned to look at Scully, who had crossed back to peer at the
contents of Nitin and Shelley's neighboring cubes. He caught her eye,
and mouthed the word "Monster?" at her, lifting his eyebrows and
feeling his mouth twist itself, almost against his will, into a smug
little smile.

When she shrugged with elaborate indifference and turned back to the
Far Side desk calendar propped beside Shelley's keyboard, he felt an
urge to slap her so strong it scared him. When the hell had she
stopped caring?

He turned to stare at the photo tacked to Nitin's bulletin board, a
bright spot of color in the grayness.  Some sort of company picnic in
the background, he thought.  In the foreground...  He recognized the
people from their pictures in the file, but Nitin and Shelley looked
much different - happy and cheerful, posing together with light
hearts.  In another life, they had clearly been friends.

His thoughts, as ever, turned back to Scully, though, as if pulled by
a force like gravity. He might not have known when, but as for the
why, his best guess was that she had stopped caring to keep herself
sane. Meanwhile he - and the sight of her small body heaving and
retching at the roadside as cars screamed by rushed back to him
unbidden - he couldn't stop caring. No matter how hard he tried.

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

They were going to the police station next, but Scully asked for a
minute of air first, and when Mulder said nothing in response she
simply walked outside. It was still cloudy out. The wind ripping
bitterly at her skin was not much warmer than DC's biting breezes.

The officer inside had said this building was on El Camino Real - just
a few miles down the road from their motel, also on El Camino Real.
This goddamn road seemed to go everywhere.

They'd only been there five hours, but already she was sick of the
sight of it.

She looked across the street, watching the day workers mingle on the
opposite corner, burrowing into their denim jackets and staying close
together. For the body heat, she assumed.

Mulder's hand had been warm on her back, she remembered - a single
source of heat radiating through her coat, blazer, blouse and
camisole. He had rubbed gently, such concern in his eyes as she wiped
her mouth off and wished mournfully for a bottle of water to rinse
with.

When his look of concern had become too insistent and she was forced
to explain, she had shivered when his hand dropped away and he got
back into the car, his features carved with anger.

She had just wanted to give him the denial he craved - wanted it for
herself as well. She only felt sick when he treated her like an
invalid. Only felt healthy and alive when it was just him and her,
equal partners on the same journey. But if he wanted to behave like a
spoiled child, pouting because she didn't tell him all her intimate
secrets, then let him. It was a waste of her time, but since he
refused to believe she'd die, why did it really matter?

It was early afternoon now, but she still hoped it would get warmer
later on. She hated to think of those men across the street, out all
day on a day like this. Did they too think California meant sunshine?
Or did they know gray skies loomed on the horizon?

God knows she hadn't expected them today.

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

Mulder stared into Shelley Hope's calm gray eyes and felt it, the
tingle behind his own eyes that said that here was a puzzle to be
pieced together. Somewhere was a lock that he might be able to pick
that would open up the box of secrets so that he could look inside and
understand how it worked. There was something here, he knew it,
something more than simple workplace stress.

Still holding her gaze, he mentally reviewed what they had been told
by Weisel on the way down to the station. Forty-one, two grade-school
age kids, one apparently happy marriage about to hit the fifteen-year
mark, and one house in a fairly affluent area of Los Altos that was
mortgaged to the hilt. She had been Nitin's colleague, had in fact
supervised the team of Interlink coders to which they both belonged
since a year after her return to the workplace.

Behind him, interrupting his mental recitation of the known facts, he
heard Scully click her tongue impatiently. He didn't have to look - he
could visualize her, propped against a wall with her arms folded
neatly below her breasts. She would be wearing her blandest saintly
face as she waited for him to start assembling his latest whacked-out
theory.

Beneath the table, he clenched his hands into fists for a moment
before relaxing them and placing them flat on the table between
himself and Shelley.

"Hi, Shelley," he said with a calm he did not feel. "My name is Fox
Mulder, this is my partner Dana Scully and we're with the FBI. We're
investigating the murder of Nitin Patel." He paused, looking into
those perfectly serene eyes with their huge black pupils. "Do you
understand me, Shelley?"

Shelley's gaze flicked to Scully, quick as a switchblade coming out,
and then back to him. She licked her slightly chapped lips, and
replied in a level voice, "Execute the monster."

He considered a moment, and then leaned forward over the table. The
weak sunlight filtering in through the closed shades imbued the
claustrophobic little interview room with its sludge-green walls the
feel of an aquarium. He fought the urge to loosen his tie and take a
few deep breaths.

"Was Nitin the monster, Shelley? Did you kill him because he was some
kind of monster?"

At his back he could *feel* Scully purse her lips and turn her face
away in disgust.

The seconds ticked by. Shelley looked down and fiddled with her
wedding ring, sliding it with difficulty over the knuckle, twisting it
around and then pushing it back down again.

"No," she said suddenly. "He wasn't the monster. I didn't want to do
it, but I had to."

He felt the tingle in his skull intensify, smelled blood and gave
chase. "Why did you have to?" he asked gently.

The woman looked down at the table again, and when she looked back at
him her eyes were large and brilliant with tears. "The monster made me
do it. I just executed the command."

Execute the monster. Execute as in...as in carry out, not as in kill,
then? If she had been following orders, then that begged the question
of whose orders she had been carrying out, and why.

Mulder sat back, worrying absently at his lower lip and the dry skin
there, looking at the teary-eyed woman over the table but not really
seeing her. His theory was forming, sure enough, and he knew already
that Scully wasn't going to like it one bit. The way things stood
between them at the moment, the silent anger humming like high-
tension cables, he was sure she wouldn't like anything he came up with
one bit.

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

Sometimes, there was nothing Scully enjoyed more than an autopsy,
especially a fairly mundane one that consumed her attention but left
her subconscious free to drift. It was fairly simple, cataloging the
damage done to the light brown skin and gleaming white bones of Mr.
Patel - Shelley had been imaginative in her use of office supplies,
but the stapler marks and welts from a power cord whip were easy to
identify. And the crushed skull left no doubt as to cause of death.

She let herself dwell a bit on the tense, quick dinner she and Mulder
had eaten in the car an hour ago, the earliness of the meal a minor
concession to their jetlagged bodies. The only words spoken were
necessary ones, deciding the fast food drive-thru of choice and
confirming her order - she hadn't wanted to talk about the case, and
somehow he got the hint. So instead of talking, they parked the car
and watched the beginnings of rush hour traffic stop-and-go down El
Camino Real, him devouring his burger while she only picked at her
chef salad.

He became even surlier when he looked at her leftovers, but kept his
mouth shut. She  wanted to say something about how it was the most
she'd been able to eat in the past 48 hours and he should just
consider himself damn lucky that she was even there, but that would
have involved talking about what was troubling him, and she knew that
wasn't going to happen for a while yet.

And despite how much this morning had disrupted things, she knew he
had a theory already. It probably managed to ignore the fact that
Shelley Hope simply snapped due to an extreme case of workplace
stress, and undoubtedly made sense to nobody but him...

A flash of color caught her eye - there was blood on her fingers. Oh,
no, fresh blood, her blood... When she raised her hand to her nose
though, checking for yet another nosebleed, she instead felt a sharp,
stinging pain in her fingertip. She must have been so preoccupied that
the scalpel slipped. Clearly, a sign for her to start paying
attention.

Banishing thoughts of Mulder from her mind, she began to wash her
hands.

-----------

Mulder lay on his lumpy, musty bed and contemplated undressing, maybe
even showering, but couldn't summon the energy. He had intended to go
for a run, but the combination of jet lag and his reluctance to pound
up and down El Camino Real past endless strip malls and brightly lit
fast-food joints put him off.

He heard Scully returning from the morgue, her heels clicking up the
concrete walkway past his room, and her key rattling in the stiff,
unyielding lock as she struggled with it. Her door creaked open and
then slammed shut, and he winced as the impact shook the thin walls.

In the room on the other side of his, a couple had been arguing for
ten minutes now. The woman's voice was steadily increasing in volume
and shrillness as she berated the man for some misdemeanor. It sounded
as if she was standing right by the wall behind Mulder's head, leaning
down and trying to yell *through* the wall.

"I swear to God, Vin, I shoulda listened to Momma when she said you'd
be no good for me. You wanna spoil this whole goddamn trip for me? Is
that what you want? This whole trip was such a fucking mistake."

Vin's response was inaudible. "Your Bronx is showing, honey," Mulder
muttered wearily and levered himself off the bed, pacing aimlessly
about the small room. He switched the TV on, settled on CNN as
providing the least irritating white noise, and wandered over to the
window. The blue-white glare of the TV set illuminated the room behind
him as he stared out between the drapes.

The woman on the other side of the wall was right, whether she knew it
or not, he thought bleakly. This whole trip had been a goddamn
mistake. Oh, there was an X-File here, he could practically taste it
in the air, but he was beginning to wonder if this was how it would
feel on every case he and Scully worked together while she was well
enough to stay in the field.

Outside the window, traffic hummed ceaselessly up and down under the
darkening sky along the glowing ribbon of El Camino Real. The lights
of a mammoth Blockbuster store radiated a sickly glow across the
street. He was really starting to hate the damn road, after a whole
afternoon spent driving up and down it. America, this is your brain on
the twentieth century consumer trip, he mused, peering left and right
out the window and trying to count the number of brilliantly
illuminated business signs he could see from here. He remembered
enough high-school Spanish to know that El Camino Real translated as
the King's Road. Had the Spaniards who came here naming cities after
saints and angels envisaged a day when the King's Road would be lined
by the corporate kings, cookie-cutter companies like Interlink, The
Gap, McDonalds?

He hated California, he decided. Hated it with a passion. It was all
about faking it, faking the perfect tan, the perfect pair of breasts,
the indispensable and ultimately useless perfect piece of software,
the perfect celluloid dream that you could rent by the night at
Blockbuster. The motel said it all. They were staying in a goddamn
fairy tale castle, maybe the kitschiest thing he'd seen short of
Graceland, but all it was under the turrets and the paint-job was
another crummy, cheap motel, somewhere to stay when you were too far
from home and on Uncle Sam's dollar.

There had been a time when he would have pulled up outside the motel
and delighted in seeing her try not to smile and lose the struggle
with herself. A time when he would have enticed her into a debate on
the fin-de-siecle zeitgeist of California, spun all this out for her
over a cup of coffee and waited contentedly for her to come up with
the perfect rejoinder. Now she was no further away from him in body
than ever, but he felt a distance between them, getting bigger all the
time. It was a chasm between them that he wasn't sure he could cross.
Not without coming face to face with her cancer and her determination
to keep this most terrible, huge thing walled away within her.

He wandered back to the bed and flopped bonelessly down onto it,
oblivious now to the CNN anchors droning on or Vin and the nameless
woman on the other side of the wall screaming at each other. He was
not ready to cross that chasm, and he didn't know whether he was
angrier at her or at himself for that.



End Part 1 of 3


Abort, Retry, Fail
By Tallulah Wolf
tallulahw@bayarea.com

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


Abort, Retry, Fail
By Tallulah Wolf
tallulahw@bayarea.com

Part 3 of 3


She was standing outside the building again, observing the same flat
gray sky and the ever-present day workers across the street. It didn't
feel like much had changed since yesterday - except that today, Mulder
had followed her outside.

"The computer guy thinks that the virus came from an IP address that
Interlink uses," he said softly.

Damn him and his convictions. "That doesn't prove anything."

"How about the fact that there was no way the virus was forwarded from
an Interlink computer, because of the heavy virus protection software
they have?"

That did make her stop and think. "Jack Witt did say Shelley had been
having problems with the virus protection interfering with some
applications she was trying to run. Saying something like technology
had turned against her, and life just sucks when that happens. 
Something like that." She shook her head. "But what you're proposing
is utterly ridiculous. A sentient virus?"

His coat rustled like the wind when he shrugged. "No stranger than
aliens." She arched an eyebrow.

"It's still all based on the supposition that the virus targets
friendships under stress - and we've only seen one example of this."

"Two," he muttered. She sighed, and looked out upon El Camino again.

"Look at them, Mulder," she said, gesturing towards the huddled
day-workers. "They're out there on a miserable day, hoping and praying
that they'll get picked up for the day and make enough money to feed
their families. This can't be a life they chose to live. But they're
stuck here, going back and forth along the street and making no real
progress."

Their voices were a touch too soft to overcome the rushing of the cars
flying by them, but instead of speaking louder, Mulder moved to stand
even closer to Scully, leaning down to place himself firmly within her
personal space. "Maybe they think it's worth it," he offered. "Maybe
they think they have a chance of getting better work, or going to a
different climate. I don't think they've given up yet. Not if they're
still out there, trying."

She smiled, a thin twist of her mouth, and thought fondly of all the
previous times that he had thought things could get better. "Trying
takes a lot of work."

"But they're not running away from it, Scully." The words sent chills
through her. Were they still speaking in metaphor? It was easier than
being brutal and honest about what they were thinking. But even so, it
became confusing. Maybe it was better just to be honest. Though that,
too, took a lot of work. She just didn't know what to say - didn't
know how to make that one all-important sentence come out.

"Do you think I'm running away from you, Mulder?" she finally asked.

His eyes widened at the candid statement, and he stumbled over his
words. "I think...you might be."

She shrank into her coat, looking at him with greater understanding.
"And that scares you. I never wanted you to be scared."

He still had that wild, panicked look in his eyes, wary of the woman
who was suddenly being honest. It hurt her to see that. "You didn't
tell me about the chemo, Scully. I didn't know what was happening
yesterday morning. And I need to know. You're my partner, and I want
to know what's happening to you."

Across the street, a truck pulled up to the corner where the day
workers stood, and they watched as a few lucky ones hopped in the back
and waved goodbye to their friends. One of the remaining men pulled
out a paper-wrapped bottle as the truck drove away, passing it around.
Everyone got a sip or two.

She couldn't explain this urge to share that was flooding through her.
Maybe it was a reaction to having kept so much of it hidden away for
so long. Maybe it was just the relief of being able to talk to her
closest friend again. "You know what's funny?" Scully said at last.
"When I got the test results, I had this thought that maybe the cancer
would make things easier between us."

His face tightened on that, tense with what she hoped wasn't guilt.
"Easier how?"

"I don't know," she said honestly. "Maybe I thought we would be able
to share things more easily. Be able to talk about things not related
to work. We would just be able to talk."

"We could do that, Scully," he said, after a moment. "But you need to
tell me things about the cancer. So that I can help you."

"I don't want you to think of me as weak - someone who needs
protecting," she murmured.

"I'll be honest with you too, Scully. Then we can both be weak." His
smile, a tiny ray of sunshine, peeked through the cloud cover.

She attempted to smile back, and made a promise. "I'll try."

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

They stood outside the entrance to the holding cells, Scully leaning
against the wall and watching uniformed officers pass up and down as
he listened intently to the crackling voice of the Interlink data
retrieval specialist on the other end of the line.

"Okay," he said, sighing, as the other man eventually wound down,
"that's great, thank you. Can you have a couple of copies of that
report made for us? We'll get someone from the local PD to stop by and
collect them, or come in ourselves if we can. Thanks again for your
help."

He pressed the disconnect button on his cell and met Scully's
expectant gaze.

"Looks like she's going down for this, Scully," he said, feeling
frustration start a slow burn in his gut. "They managed to retrieve a
fair amount of data from her hard drive and they can confirm that she
did receive a virus, one they didn't recognize, although the time
frame's uncertain - could have been as long as a week ago. They
examined the records for their internal company e-mail system, and it
definitely originated within the company intranet somewhere. However,
they don't recognize the message source as belonging to any registered
Interlink employee, and the combination of their internal virus
protection measures and the intranet firewalls should have made it
impossible for this virus to enter the system, let alone propagate."

"What can they tell us about what it did to her hard drive, though?"
Scully asked, turning to glance through the glass panel in the door at
her right at Shelley, sitting perfectly straight and still on her bed
in the first cell on the corridor.

He shrugged wearily. "It fried it to a crisp, although he used
slightly more technical terms than that. Everything she was working on
appears to be irretrievable. She would have experienced a complete
systems shut-down within seconds of the virus activating itself,
probably."

She regarded him levelly for a second, and then laid a hand on his
arm, very lightly. "I'm sorry," she said in a low voice. "I know you
thought there was more to this, and I'll admit that there are some
unanswered questions, but even you have to admit you don't have
anything like the kind of evidence you'd need to make this theory
stand up in a court of law. Anyway, I really doubt that any jury would
acquit on the basis that an evil sentient virus altered the murderer's
state of mind."

He raised his eyebrows. "You'd convict, wouldn't you?"

"I would, yes," she said gently. "And I think you would too, even if
you didn't want to. She snapped under an extreme case of workplace
stress, arguably exacerbated by the effects of the computer virus that
destroyed all her work, and committed a startlingly violent, even
brutal act. You - *we* - can't prove otherwise. It's time to admit it
and go home, Mulder."

He scrubbed a hand across his face and nodded. "Yeah, you're right. I
know you're right. I just - I'd like to speak to her, before we go."

She said nothing, but turned and buzzed the officer on duty to let
them into the cells. They strode down the hallway and came to a halt
by Shelley's cell, standing a few feet from the bars and watching the
woman sitting like a statue behind the bars.

"Shelley," he said, "do you remember us? Agents Mulder and Scully?"

She turned her head slowly and stared at him. "Are my kids coming to
see me soon?" she asked, speaking as if she was struggling to retrieve
the words she wanted from her mind and put them in the right order. 

At his side, Scully bit her lip and turned away. "I don't know,
Shelley," he admitted. "I'm sure if they can come to see you, they
will."

Shelley inhaled deeply and squeezed her eyes shut, nodding. When she
opened them again and fixed him with her unrelenting gaze, he was
struck by the thought that they seemed bigger and emptier than before,
somehow, as if the woman behind them was slowly disintegrating and
disappearing.

"I'm going to prison?" she asked, still in that slow-grind voice.

"You'll be formally charged with Mr. Patel's murder later today, and
there'll be a trial," he told her, ducking the question.

She nodded again and sighed. "Okay. Okay."

"Shelley, can I ask you about something? The virus you received, the
one that destroyed your work..." He trailed off, realizing that he
wasn't sure what he wanted to ask her, exactly, other than perhaps
"did it make you a murderer?"

Beside him, Scully put out a hand to steady herself against the cell
bars. He looked round quickly and saw that she looked unusually pale,
two spots of color burning high in her cheeks. "Scully, you okay?" he
asked her under his breath. She nodded and smiled, releasing the bar
and waving a hand at him to carry on, muttering that it was just a
little close on the cell block.

He marshaled his thoughts and turned back to Shelley. "The virus, do
you have any idea where it came from or how it did what it did to your
computer?" he asked.

This time he got a head-shake, and then Shelley said in a thick voice,
"I know something about it, though." She paused, and for a moment he
wondered if she had lost her train of thought, shaky as her grasp on
events seemed to be. "It's *in* me," she said suddenly, almost in a
whisper, as if imparting a momentous secret, and with that she settled
back on to the bed and closed her gray-ocean eyes with their untold,
decaying secrets.

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

Traffic on El Camino, and the world outside Scully's window was going
mad.  Mulder indulged in one long angry honk as the car in front of
him refused to move an inch.  

"We're almost there, Mulder," she murmured, leaning against the cool
glass next to her.  There was a haze around her thoughts that had been
growing since Shelley's cell, and resting her head against things
seemed to help.    

He rubbed a hand over his face.  "I know, I know.  I just want to get
out of here.  When's our flight again?"  

She leaned up and tried to focus, though the weight of exhaustion was
heavy and all-consuming.  "Eight.  And it's only five now.  We have
time to pack and get there.  Besides," she pointed through the
windshield, at the looming turrets of the Glass Slipper Inn, "we're
almost there.  Just one more block."  

One more block that El Camino Real did not give them easily.  The stop
and go was a rhythm that ground away at her resolve and strength, a
one-two beat that did not leave her feet tapping, left them instead
flat on the floor.  But they made it.  They always made it eventually,
Scully knew.  

Mulder sighed with relief as he pulled into the hotel's parking lot,
under the arch, and got out of the car.  "C'mon, Scully, let's get
going," he said, before closing the door.  

She was able to open her door, and unfastening the seat belt wasn't as
hard as she had thought it would be, the gentle click of the catch
giving her an extraordinary sense of freedom.  Getting her feet moving
took a little effort, but a little exertion and she was standing by
herself.  Walking, though...  

First it was a stumble, then it was resting on her knees, then it was
a gentle, graceless fall to the ground, her conscious mind doing
everything it could to fall in the right position, avoid hitting her
head.  She felt like water leaking out of a paper cup, first with a
drip and then, when the bottom gave way, with a splash.  

Mulder's face was soon looming overhead, and an old man's pain twisted
the corners of his eyes into agony.  "Oh, Jesus, Scully...  Are you
okay?  Can you get up?"  

"Fine, Mulder...  I'm fine," she gasped out, hating the rebellion of
her body, hating being weak in front of him, wanting it to be true so
badly.  She would be fine, with some rest - that was all she needed, a
silent, easy descent into slumber.  

"Scully, please," he implored, interrupting her thoughts of sleep with
a harshly pleading tone.  "Let me take you to the hospital.  Please." 

She would be fine, she just needed some rest, nothing the hospital
could do for her...  But she looked at him.  The eyes that begged her
and the bent frame that had huddled around hers that afternoon, so
that he could be heard when he told her to try.  The face that filled
with hurt when she shut him out.  She had promised him she would tell
him when it hurt.  No more false promises.

She found herself nodding, and he knelt down, his arm going around her
waist, supporting her weak frame against his own.  The lobby clerk,
rushing out to see what the trouble was, got assaulted by Mulder's
impatience.  "Where's the nearest hospital?" he nearly barked at her. 
 

She shook her dark head and started pointing in random directions. 
"On Grant Road.  Take this little side street over here, don't bother
with El Camino, there's too much traffic..."  

No more El Camino.  She didn't attempt to listen to the directions
after that, putting her trust in Mulder, just this once, to take them
down the right path.  

They were getting off the road at last.  Thank God.


END


Author's note:

This is my first story, though I've been lurking for over a year now -
I probably should have tried something more simple for my first, but
this was interesting nevertheless. I've been living and working in the
area described for a while now, and I've taken some liberties with the
setting - stuff that's in this story may not have been there three or
four years ago.

Except the Glass Slipper Inn. That's timeless.

I'd like to thank my friends Chester, Raoul, and Colleen for their
invaluable help with editing and titles and all sorts of important
things - I couldn't have done this without you. I owe you three a
dozen cheesecakes (four each).

Please let me know what you think at tallulahw@bayarea.com . So far,
this has been a quite a ride - hopefully, you found it worthwhile.