System Reboot (Sequel to System Failure)

Chapter 12

Alesa's POV
It was late at night. Probably too late to be awake and trying to solve a nearly impossible problem but that was what we were doing. Ian and Quentin, Mitch and Jerome, Ross and Barney, Jin and Jason, and Ty and I were lounging in the break room of the Glitch base, tired after a long day of fighting. The night shift team had already gotten work, which was usually our cue to go home, but there was no other time during the day that we could sit down and wrack our brains over the problem of how to get Adam back to normal.

Unfortunately, late at night is not the best of time to try and solve a problem. Jerome was close to falling asleep on a beanbag, Ross was already asleep on the couch, Ian, Mitch, Ty and Jason were flicking through their phones with half-closed eyes, Jin was trying to solve a rubix cube (I think he kept undoing every move he made), Quentin was staring at a page of the book he was reading while Barney was staring blankly at the roof, and I was thinking of that leftover lasagna in the fridge that I really wanted to eat.

"So remind me again," Ian said, locking his phone and slipping it into his coat pocket. "We can't separate Adam's coded half from the human half, and we can't uncorrupt the code."

"Uh huh," Jin said, not looking up from the rubix.

"And there's no way we can get around those two problems?"

"Nope."

"And you've been doing that wrong, you're supposed to turn the left face, not the right."

Jin froze, then quickly spun a few faces of the cube and came up with the white side completed. "Oh my goodness, you're kidding me! I've been doing this wrong my entire life," he half-shouted.

Ross jerked awake and upright. "Huh? What? What's happening?"

"Jin's life is a lie," Jerome sighed.

Most of us were too tired to chuckle. Ty and Mitch put their phones away, nearly simultaneously sighing as they leaned back in their chairs.

"Okay, so what about this," Ty said. "If Adam going into cyberspace somehow rebooted him as a virus, then why don't we just reboot him again?"

"Great, how?" Quentin asked, lowering his book a little (I think he had been on the same page for the last several minutes, but I couldn't really remember).

Ty shrugged. "Put him in the system? Then restart the system?"

"Nuh uh, too dangerous," Jason said, not looking up from his phone. "First off, when the system is restarted, everything gets dumped into cyberspace so that would include Adam. Secondly, assuming that the first one wasn't a problem, you guys would need to get out of the system before we restart it and in that time, Adam could destroy some important files or possibly hijack the system altogether, and that's not something we can afford."

"Besides, the guys are using the system now," Jin added, nodding his head to the door of the break room. "We shut it down, even just to restart it, and we could have a huge city-wide virus problem in seconds."

"But it could work, right?" I asked. "Rebooting him?"

Jin shrugged. "It could. Maybe."

We sank into silence again. At first, I was trying to think of a way to reboot Adam without putting the Glitch mainframe in danger, but soon my mind wandered back to my dinner. Maybe I should just leave and go home to eat and sleep.

"What if we just hit him really hard on the head?" Mitch asked suddenly, throwing his hands in the air.

He stared at us as we stared blankly back at him. He gave a shrug that also somehow incorporated a mexican wave of his arms. "I mean, it can't hurt, can it? Not like he could get any worse."