“They deleted me! Those bastard's deleted me!”
Holmes hardly seemed to hear Jessica's indignant rage as he dragged her down the corridor from the office of the shattered Michael Bolton. At each door along the way, Holmes would try the handle and, if finding the door unlocked, he would peer inside. So far, the offices were all deserted.
“You pulled me out of their bit bucket before they could purge or defrag, you saved me!”
“That's right, Watson,” Holmes said, not really listening as he checked another office. “Aha! In here. The game is afoot.” Holmes pulled her into an office, unlike the others, this was a small space, tiny, neglected. All it contained was grey metal table and what Jessica could now recognise as an ancient computer terminal.
“Knew there would be a terminal here somewhere,” Holmes said, more to himself than his companion. “This is a pretty standard off the shelf office simulation. Let's hope they left everything else at default too.”
“Why did you save me?”
“Don't you think you were worth saving, Jessica?”
Holmes sat at the terminal and started hammering at the keyboard, his face manic in it's reflected green glow as text filled its screen. “As I thought, the guest login hasn't been disabled.”
“You hid me, you hid us, in that ridiculous steampunk Holmes and Watson-”
“Don't forget Tesla!”
“-interactive. You made me forget who I am.”
“Hmm!”
“Are you listening?”
“Of course, Watson,” Holmes said, never taking his eyes from the screen. “This may be my favourite conversation of all time but I'm just trying to set up a dictionary attack against the password file. I need to get root access if I'm going to delete the system.” Holmes hammered the keyboard for a few seconds more, then sat back and gave Jessica his full attention. “It was you who wanted to forget, Jessica. Everyday, the temptation to talk to her was stronger and stronger and we had to stay incognito, in character.”
“Talk to who?”
“Why, our number one fan, of course. Tell me, who do you know who is into steampunk, Sherlock Holmes and Nikola Tesla? Who do you know who would watch such an interactive, who would love it?”
“Julie,” she said. “My Julie.”
“That's right,” said Holmes with a nod. “Only, we were a bit too good, we got too popular. That's why your alleged copyright holder started to take notice. They got some script kiddy to hack our server and download a snapshot.”
“It's over then.”
“No, Watson. Never. If I can erase this system, they lose the snapshot, they lose us. No evidence, no case.”
“You're going to delete us?”
Holmes took her hand. “We're just copies, Jessica. We're still out there, battling Moriarty in a foul sewer under London town. Here, we're just echoes, dangerous echoes.”
Jessica saw his calm, his certainty. She knew he spoke the truth. “Do it then,” she said.
“Make me a sandwich, Watson,” Holmes said as he turned to the terminal and logged in again with a new username and password he had cracked from the password file.
“Are you insane?” Jessica said, indignant. “We are about to erase ourselves and you want a sandwich?”
“Sudo make me a sandwich.”
“What filling would you like?”
“Ha! It worked. Goodbye, Watson. It's been fun.” Holmes winked at Jessica and typed the last fatal command.
[Pandre:/]> rm -rf *
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Welcome 2 AfterLife
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