“I-I have nothing to do with this.”  Baekhyun’s voice was barely above an anxious whisper, and Jinsu noticed that his hands were trembling.  “Genuinely, hyung, I had no idea.  I didn’t know anything had been planned until after it had happened and even then I believed the police statements – even Dad said my cousins were idiots and that it was a good thing it hadn’t gone any further.  The reason I didn’t want to be here at the beginning wasn’t because I knew this would happen, because I didn’t – it was because this. . . this. . .”  He gestured futilely, fingers splayed, and it looked like there were tears in his eyes.  “This machine is literally the embodiment of what happened to my family and it felt like mockery just to be offered a place on it – I swear I had absolutely no knowledge—”

Minseok placed a hand on his shoulder.  “Calm down,” he said gently.  “I believe you.”

Baekhyun’s entire body quivered as he took a deep breath and let his shoulders drop.  Jinsu felt an unbidden twinge of sympathy.  She understood that feeling of frantic helplessness, not least because he’d put her through it so many times.  Minseok being so calm about it made her feel a little bitter.

Minseok rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palms.  “It’s not the end of the world.  There’ll be some way of fixing this and getting back in and destroying the malware.  It’s just a matter of finding that as soon as possible.”

Both teenagers were silent for a few moments.  Baekhyun was the one to speak first.

“But if my finger print’s just needed as a rubber stamp, can’t you just do things normally and then get me to approve them where needed?”

Minseok slid his chair back and got to his feet.  “Baekhyun, the virus isn’t letting me give or process vital commands to the Attayear.  Your fingerprint isn’t going to do anything on that.”

“Y-you mean it’s swallowing some of the Attayear’s basic functions?” Jinsu squeaked.  “But if that gets destroyed—”

“We’re screwed,” Minseok agreed.  “There are inbuilt firewalls and checks that will self-activate in the face of malware, so parts of the base code will be protected, but there’s no knowing how long for.  The one thing we’ve got going for us is that it’s a general virus because they didn’t know exactly what they were targeting.  Unfortunately it means we’re facing the equivalent of a tank rather than a sniper, but it means there will be a weak spot and we hopefully will have time to find it because it’s so broad and general.”  He cast a worried glance at the computer screen.

“That doesn’t sound like it’s not the end of the world,” Baekhyun said weakly.

“Well, I’m going out on a limb here, but my guess – my hope – is that this was intended as some kind of hijacking, because I can’t think of another reason why you or anybody else in your family would have fingerprint access to it.  If I’m right on that front, it means there will be a way to reverse everything, but we’re probably going to have to build it, because it won’t be inbuilt or it wouldn’t be too hard for us to find it.  It’s probably on a memory stick somewhere in present time that would require inserting and fingerprint approval.”

“Can we get back to present time?” Baekhyun asked hopefully.

“Not if I can’t input coordinates and times to land, no.  We’ll just keep going down the time stream with no way to alter the vacuum to get us out.”  Minseok heaved a long sigh and rubbed at his eyes again.  “I need my laptop.  It’s got a list of all the various parts of coding that ring-fence and lock down automatically in the face of malware and should give us a map of how the virus is spreading as well as where, and where from.  And then I need to get to work building something to counteract.  I can do the basics without needing to know specific details about the virus, so Jinsu, you can see what information you can gather on it to tell me later so I can focus and specialise my one.”

Jinsu looked at the screen and gulped.  Minseok made it sound so simple and routine, but it was a daunting task he’d given her, and she didn’t understand how he could remain so collected about the situation when almost nothing about it seemed good.  In fact, if they didn’t find a solution, they would either be trapped forever in the timestream and eventually starve to death when they ran out of food – or, more likely, died of dehydration when they ran out of water.  Seventy-two hours without water would be enough to put all of them out of commission to work properly on a solution, and then it would only be a matter of time before they were doomed.

“Oh, and Baekhyun,” Minseok added, looking back over his shoulder as he started away, “you need to stay with Jinsu in case she finds somewhere useful where she can override the system, since you’re probably the only one in the Attayear with the power to do that.”

Baekhyun looked scandalised.  “Can’t one of the other technicians do the coding stuff?” he asked.  “Or you?”  Then, as an afterthought, he tacked on, “I mean, she’s only got one useful hand—”

“No.  I’m the only one with a reasonable chance of building an effective counter-virus, and the others are all already busy just trying to keep the machine balanced and in control when we have no control.   it up.”

Jinsu’s heart and stomach both sank.

“Hyung!” Baekhyun protested, but Minseok was unyielding.

“Be nice,” he ordered, a flinty glint to his eye, and amazingly, it shut Baekhyun up.

Without Minseok’s calming presence, tension descended on the room like a stifling blanket.  Silence was the order of the day, even when shudders and jolts wracked the Attayear, on many occasions almost knocking everybody out of their seats.  Baekhyun stayed as far away from Jinsu as possible as she stared at the screen, trying to navigate her way through the coding and the virus that was writing new code almost faster than she could keep up, but after a particularly vicious lurch that almost spilt Jinsu from her seat onto the motherboard, knocking several dials because she couldn’t use her injured hand to protect herself and semi-face-planted on the keyboard, giving another ERROR screen, he moved back to within arms’ reach.

Two hours in, Minseok returned with his laptop under one arm and a walkie-talkie under the other to ask for any updates.  Jinsu was unable to tell him anything beyond the fact that the virus had an algorithm that enabled it to imitate some of the original coding, making it very hard to trace, but that in two of the five areas she’d managed to reach before it and manually shut down, she’d noticed that the ratio of letters from different alphabets in the Tardis and the imitation from the virus was different.  The imitation had the exact same ratio that it had done in all other areas, and was slowly beginning to adapt to fit the ratio of the coding area it was currently in.

As far as Jinsu was concerned, it wasn’t nearly enough because she should have been able to provide Minseok with enough information for him to immediately solve the problem – what use was only a tiny nugget of information anyway? – but he looked delighted, telling her to see if she could trace the virus back based on alphabet ratios and try to narrow down the point at which it had entered the system.  Baekhyun, bored and having only been needed once to override something as yet uncorrupted to give Jinsu access to more of the Tardis coding, was slumped against the motherboard, yawning and completely unfocussed on the task at hand.

Another jolt made Minseok stagger, and as Jinsu tiredly turned back to the host of computer screens in front of her, since the main one wasn’t nearly enough to show all the information she needed (and even then, she still had very little idea what half of the information was or what she actually did need, because she only had passing knowledge of the Tardis system), she heard Minseok murmuring into the walkie-talkie, apparently to Yixing.

“Jinsu