'Yeah, that didn't help. But we straightened out the Ortega angle, and Kadmin, well, I'm coming to Kadmin in a moment. The point is, as long as I equated pulling that trigger with suicide, I was jammed. But then, what if those two acts were not synonymous. What if you'd torched your own stack, not because you wanted to die but for some other reason. Once I let myself think that, the rest was easy. What were the possible reasons that you'd do it? It's not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon. No matter how much you might know intellectually that you'll be re-sleeved with the bulk of your mind intact, the person you are at that moment is going to die. You had to have been desperate to pull that trigger. It had to have been something,' I smiled faintly, 'life-threatening. Given that assumption, it didn't take long to come up with the virus scenario. Then all I had to do was work out how and where you'd been infected.'