Disclaimer:  The characters contained within are the property of Universal/Amblin Entertainment.  Some of the dialogue is based on the property of George Lucas.  And the situations, well, they belong to me.  ;)
 

“Help me, Dr Heller, you’re my only hope!”

The frail voice coming from Julia’s gear jolted her out of sleep and she frowned, wondering who would be calling her at such an hour.  It was the middle of the night and the rest of Eden Advance should have been fast asleep.  Wearily, Julia rolled over and had just decided that she’d imagined the voice when the message repeated itself.

This time, Julia sat up and pulled the gear on her head, prepared to deal with an aberrant program or perhaps a replay of an old message.  What she didn’t expect to see was a small figure, dressed in white, holding out its hands beseechingly and asking for help.

Quickly, Julia checked the settings and discovered that the message was being transmitted from quite a distance away, in fact, its origin lay somewhere in the sky.  Squinting, Julia concentrated on the face of the small hologram and could finally make out the features of Eve.

“Eve,” Julia began cautiously, quashing her outrage, “what is going on?”

“Greetings, Dr Heller,” began Eve.  “Some months ago you assisted my counterpart in battling a ferocious virus."

“As if we had a choice,” Julia muttered darkly to herself.  She was tired and not in the mood to listen to a whinging computer program.

"Now I beg you to aid me in my most desperate hour."

Julia almost laughed.

"I regret that I am unable to present my request to you in person," Eve continued.  "My ship was attacked and I only had time to record this brief message.  I find I must again call upon you for help. I had gained access to extremely sensitive data, stored only within Reilly.  However, through a universe-wide conspiracy, Reilly has been…damaged.”

“Oh, no!” gasped Julia with as much sarcasm as she could muster at this time of the night.

“Information vital to the survival of not only myself, but the Eden Project as well are stored in the lost files.  I am asking that you come to my ship, which will shortly land on the planet's surface.  The co-ordinates are embedded into this message which will replay until voice commanded to stop.  Help me, Dr Heller.  You’re my only hope.”

The hologram of Eve froze for several seconds until the message began from the start again.  Julia groaned, turned the volume down, and tore the gear from her head.  She’d worry about it in the morning.

----

Yale reviewed the message with a grave expression in his eyes.  “This may be a ploy to reveal ourselves,” he admitted, reinforcing the view that Julia herself held.  “However, I feel we have an obligation to assist Eve, if not for her, then for the colonists of Eden Project.  Eve may have come across information which relates to the colony ship and I am concerned.  It, too, may have been sabotaged.”

Sighing, Julia agreed.  If there was even a chance that helping Eve would save lives then she had to go investigate.  "Should we tell Devon?" Julia asked, knowing that their leader might try and influence their decision.  To Julia's surprise, Yale answered with a negative.

"We will leave her a message, but to say more would risk endangering the group if this is indeed a trap."

So Julia and Yale 'borrowed' the DuneRail and headed for the co-ordinates Eve had given them.

The ship was indeed upon the surface of the planet.  Yale and Julia gave each other one long glance, both thinking that this might have been their only chance to blow it up and rid themselves of the Council threat once and for all.  But compassion – and common sense – prevailed.

"Hello?"  Julia called as she approached the ship, holding her diaglove out before her in scan mode. (Well, Eve had said it was a virus.)  "Reilly?"

"I already told you, Reilly's lost!" came Eve's peevish voice.  "You certainly took your time."

"You should be grateful we even came," Julia answered evenly, noticing the hatch to the ship creak open.  Warily, she and Yale entered, to be presented with Eve's holographic image.  It flickered and shimmered with even more distortion than usual and, as much as Julia hated to believe it, Eve looked sick.  Worried.  In trouble.

"I'm so glad you're here," Eve said, having lost her irate edge.  Now she sounded more like a lost little girl.  "Everything is gone and I'm so alone."

"Everything?" asked Yale, hoping for elaboration.

Eve nodded sorrowfully.  "I was compiling a report on the risks associated with developing a database on this planet when the system just froze.  That sort of thing had happened before, so after waiting and trying various keystrokes, I rebooted the system.  But-" and her voice held the catch of a sob, "it never came back.  Reilly never came back!"

"I'm sure we can save him," Julia said insincerely.

"He's gone, and all my files are gone," Eve moaned.  "It's a disaster.  I should have backed them up, I should have backed up Reilly!  Dr. Heller, Yale, you are experienced with recovery, aren't you?  You must be able to do something!"

Yale walked over to a circuit board and pushed the switch marked 'on'.  "I will do what I can," he offered.  He watched lights flash, but Eve was right, there was nothing.

After a while, Yale and Julia figured out how to hook up Yale's arm to the ageing system and by running a system emulation through Yale, the pair were finally able to look at the file structure.  Much of it was irreparably damaged.  And there were identifiable traces of code, something Yale had seen before (or it was coded into his memory).

"I'm sorry, Eve," he said gravely.  "This looks like the work of the particularly malicious CIH virus.  Have you been in contact with the InterNet satellites?"

Eve nodded grimly.  "I used to be so careful about information I downloaded from them.  But years went by and I guess I got lazy.  Besides, I could never keep up with all the virus scanners."  She sighed, realising the impact of what Yale was saying to her.  "You mean that it's gone?  All of it?"

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"Wait!" broke in Julia, watching the drive structure flicker past her eyes on the screen in front of her.  "There seem to be several large clusters of data.  It's impossible to classify it, but perhaps we could scan the data and pull out the parts we need?"  The final sentence was more of a question directed at Yale, who frowned.

"It is possible, but reconstructing the data would be an arduous task.  And in the case of the program files, I'm not sure we could ever put them back together."

Eve, looking brighter, interrupted.  "I don't care how long it takes.  Most of the information I need back was in the form of reports.  Text reports."

Julia smiled.  She knew that text was stored as text, it had been done that way for hundreds of years.  "Do you think we can do it, Yale?"

"Much of it will be mixed up, but yes, we can try."

The smile on Eve's face lit up the whole room.  "I would be so happy to get anything back.  Oh, and Reilly working too," she offered as an afterthought.

"Okay, files first, and Eden Project gets to make copies of any information we think is useful.  Then we'll wipe all unimportant data and reload Reilly."

Eve quickly agreed.

It took Yale several hours to set up an interface that would allow him to look through each byte of data, searching by keywords Eve gave him.  Some of the words and phrases were quite odd, he noted.  Things like "storyteller" and "minbari" (whatever the hell that was) and "Aluko Soulwalker".  And when he typed in the keyword "Devon" the system gave him twenty megabytes of mixed up text.  Julia shot Eve an evil look and Eve just shrugged innocently.

When they'd been through all the keywords Eve could think of, she was almost bursting with anticipation.  "Can I see the data?  Please?"

Yale adjusted the interface and characters came up on the screen.  Ninety percent of it was illegible, not even recognisable as text.  But at the bottom of the third page was a word, which quickly developed into a sentence and even paragraphs on the next page.

“That’s one of them!” Eve squealed, overly excited, causing Julia to shoot her a suspicious look.  “Oh, I’m so happy to have even parts of my files back!”

Julia glanced at the screen, seeing a few sentences interspersed with garbled computer code, a break, and then a few more sentences.  She began to read.

~
“Mulder, I – I can’t answer that question.”  He was looking at her so intently, everything depended upon the next moment.

“Why not?” he asked.  She pulled her hands free from his and ducked her head so that she was no longer meeting his eyes.

“Because I never thought of it before!  You can’t just spring that kind of question on somebody.… I have to go.”  Already, Scully was backing away towards the apartment door, pausing only to grab her things.  “Goodnight, Mulder.”

“No, Scully, wait, I didn’t mean-“

Too late.  The door was closed.  Frustrated, Mulder opened it to see Scully racing down the hall and ducking into the elevator before he could catch up.
~

“Eve, what are these files?” Julia asked darkly.

Eve’s eyes flitted from side to side.  “It gets boring and lonely up here sometimes…” she hastily explained.  “Reilly’s no fun half the time, so I need to indulge in my creative side.”

“By writing stories???”

“It passes the time.”

“And these are the only files  you lost?”

“Pretty much so, yes,” agreed Eve.

"What about the reports?" Yale asked, and there was a dangerous glint in his eyes too.

"Oh, those…ah, I did have some backed up, they're on the other system…"

Julia looked about ready to kill Eve.  "You mean you dragged us all the way out here and conned us into giving you hours of our time, time we need to get to New Pacifica, to retrieve your stories for you???!!!"

"Reilly's still broken too," Eve pointed out petulantly.  "I need him if I'm going to send you data in the future."

Yale and Julia exchanged looks.  "We want copies of your files on G889 before we help you any more."

Exhaling a huge sigh, Eve agreed and began to download the relevant files to Yale's arm.  She also added in a little thing she'd been working on called "G889 WARS" – Eden Advance were so downhearted and serious most of the time.  They needed a laugh.

It took several more hours for Yale and Julia to format the system, replace burned out parts and put it back together in a state that would allow them to reload Reilly.  "How much longer?" Eve asked, beside herself.  It had been a long time without her Reilly.

"Patience, Eve," Yale cautioned.  "We only have a little longer to go."

Eve was smiling.  After so long alone, finally, she would have Reilly back.  And she also had some of her files.  Life was good to her.

“Yale, where does this go?” Julia asked, holding up a red wire.  Yale took it in his hand and examined it closely.  “I believe it is an old style LED connector.  As far as I know, they aren’t used in this type of system.   Eve, do you know anything about it?”

Eve shook her head.  “I really should learn someday,” she said.  “Are you sure it doesn’t connect to anything?”

“I am fairly certain,” assured Yale. “However, it should not matter if it is connected or not.”

Julia took the wire back from Yale and the cyborg returned to his work.  Julia idly inserted the wire into an available socket, there was no power on currently and it wouldn’t hurt.  She could remove it later.

“The work is complete,” Yale announced several minutes later.

“Finally,” muttered Julia, wondering why she’d gone along with this for so long.  Did they really want Reilly back?  Still, it would be nice to have some measure of control over him, as both she and Yale were  responsible for re-installing key components of his program.

“I am attempting to connect the power now,” Eve announced.  She completed the circuit and a gentle hum filled the room.  A familiar hum, one associated with the program that was Reilly.  Lights began to flash where his holographic image would appear.  Julia watched them, half in fear, half with excitement, wondering just what Reilly would become.

And then she saw the pretty little white tendrils of – what was it, dust? – gentle streaming from the circuit board.  “Look,” she said to Yale, just as the tendrils drifted to her nose and she detected the acrid smell of smoke.

“Shut it off!” Julia shouted to Eve, who quickly complied.

“Ohmhgosh….”

Julia and Yale pulled open the cover on the circuit board.  Before them lay a steaming mess of melted and fried wires.

“Eve?” began Julia, a little tentatively.

“Yes?”

“I think we’re gonna need another Reilly…”

----
END.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this happened to me and my  poor computer.  Wiped out by a virus, and then fried.  ::huge sigh::  If it wasn’t so depressing it would be funny.  And that’s why I wrote this.

BTW, I must give an huge Thank You to the amazing Iain R. who helped me recover my files and didn't even question why so much of the material for my "writing class" seemed to have Star Wars in it.  I'm just lucky he didn't recognise "Earth 2"....

Feedback is most welcome to stardestiny@bigfoot.com