Tae should already know what to expect when she picks up this particular book up. The cover flies open and the pages start to flip, just like all the other ones she's found, but this tome is several times thicker than the rest - even than the other two books on the desk next to it. She's going to be here for a while.

It's early morning in the Thatcher house, but Dusty has been awake for a couple of hours now already. An empty glass and a plate stacked with what's probably half a loaf of bread's worth of peanut butter toast sits on the kitchen table, to his left, while he idly fiddles with the strewn-out guts of a robotics kit in front of him. But he isn't working with purpose, or even casual interest - just screwing in one bolt at a time, looking the part over, slowly adding another. He's waiting for something.

That happens a few moments later. The faint creak of an opening door from just down the hall makes Dusty perk up, a kick of anxiety thumping through his chest. There's a pause, then a gentle click as the door closes again.

"...Dusty?" calls Rose, sounding curious. She must've seen the door to his bedroom cracked open and been surprised; usually she has to wake him up before she goes to work. This was, of course, calculated.

Dusty ducks his head down to the table as he hears her footsteps approaching the kitchen. "Busy," he calls back, feigning disinterest. His voice sounds similar to how it does now - teenager, then. "Couldn't sleep."

That much was true. Dusty's much too excited to sleep.

Rose stops just within the entrance to the kitchen, a light chuckle escaping her lips. Dusty glances up at her; Rose is already dressed for work, suit top and pencil skirt, straight black hair in a tight bun. Her flats click on the linoleum tile as she heads for the fridge, because of course she made her lunch the night before. "Please eat something else that isn't bread," she chides, retrieving a chilled bento box and slipping it into her work bag. "Two vegetables and a fruit. There's some broccoli that's about to go bad, you could steam it for lunch and--"

"--Busy, mom," Dusty interrupts. The impatience in his voice is genuine now. "Trying to focus."

Rose lets out a long-suffering sigh. "They send boys like you to cotillion, you know," she murmurs, walking over to the table to fondly ruffle Dusty's hair. He begrudgingly leans into it. "Don't get too sucked into your projects, okay? You know better. Take care of yourself."

Dusty responds with a noncommittal grunt.

"Love you too," Rose chuffs. She heads for the front door. "See you in eight."

"Later," Dusty calls at her back, not bothering to look up.

He listens for the click of the door and the sound of her car starting, engine noise fading as it rounds the corner of the block. The seconds count down as he imagines her path: Another right turn, one minute, a left into the parking deck, thirty seconds to find a spot, one minute to take the elevator down to the waiting area so she can catch the 7AM company bus. The whole time Dusty continues playing with the kit, too nervous, even, to touch his stack of toast. 7AM comes and goes and Rose hasn't returned home.

Now.

Dusty suddenly springs to action. Abandoning everything on the table, he swings out of his chair and strides quickly down the hallway, but skips his intentionally-open bedroom door and goes straight for Rose's at the end. Her door is closed, but it isn't locked - and why would it be? There's nothing she has that would interest him or that doesn't have security of its own, and she trusts him to follow the one main rule of the house: Don't mess with her home office.

Naturally, Dusty ignores everything else in the room and goes straight for her desk. Her work computer is switched off. Before Dusty turns it on, he retrieves a USB stick from his pocket and ducks under the table to plug it into one of the back ports, then disconnects the ethernet cable before wriggling his way upright again. He quickly pulls up the boot menu, changes some settings. There's a string of code that flashes across the screen for a moment before the computer automatically shuts down. Dusty hurries his way back under the desk to plug the ethernet cable in again, presses the power button, and waits.

Everything seems to go smoothly. The computer boots to a corporate login screen, which stays up for a couple of seconds before Dusty's malware automatically populates the password and fakes an authenticator token, bringing him to desktop. At this point he only has five minutes, roughly, before red flags are raised in Diamond Pharmaceuticals' IT security department when Rose also tries to log in to her account from her on-site computer, but that's all the time Dusty needs. He opens a file explorer window and starts rapidly clicking through folders, opening documents, scrolling through them for several seconds before closing them again. His search is practiced and methodical.

But after a couple of minutes, a path name forces Dusty to pause. ASIS Proposal. Another flash of anxiety runs through him as he identifies the most recent document inside, and realizes that the last edit date was the night after he last went with Rose to work. This time, when Dusty opens the file, he actually takes the time to internalize what he's looking at instead of just relying on his perfect memory to analyze it later.

ASIS Stress Test #457

Abstract
We've seen the ASIS perform well with directly introduced pathogens via ingestion, injection, and topical application. However, aerosolized contaminants have not been studied in sufficient detail to declare that the ASIS could reasonably protect against agents of biological warfare. In this blind study, a subject with a well-established ASIS interface will be introduced to a room with slowly-released contagious artificial pathogen ME456, which subject has previously demonstrated immunity when introduced intravenously. Subject will be monitored for symptom onset for two weeks, then introduced in the same manner to artificial pathogen ME457a, which subject's ASIS has not been trained for in any capacity. Subject will be monitored for symptom onset for two weeks as normal, then tested a second time to see if differences in presentation occur after immunity gain. ...

A pit opens up in Dusty's stomach as a whole new type of anxiety starts to churn through him, steadily morphing into confusion as he moves through the list of papers, finding ones that refer to experiments on others to replicate the ASIS results in himself - all resulting in failures - finding others that attempt to analyze and explain the odd protein structures found in his nerves, things he didn't even realize existed until now. Confusion flashes into anger when he notes that the earliest paper dates to within a few months after Rose found him, and has references to other papers not saved on this drive.

Eight years. His whole remembered life, he's been nothing but a curious experiment to the person he thought of as his mother. All the times she and her coworkers have invited him to 'help' with their studies, the weeks of discomfort after them that Rose wrote off as eating too many sweets, or a mild cold. It was all a lie.

A notification springs up on the computer's dashboard, alerting of an attempted duplicate login. Dusty jolts to attention and slaps the power button off - and the memory ends.