The first computers to go were the ones around them. Screens turned blue with indecipherable error messages.

"How will we know if it's working?" Sam asked.

"We'll know," Dodge said. "Whenever it infects a machine, it sends the IP address back here so we can monitor the spread."

Sam watched the screen. The familiar four-part numbers of IP addresses appeared on a list at the top of the computer screen.

First just ten or twenty, then more and more, faster and faster until the screen seemed alive with the numbers, scrolling off the screen faster than the eye could read them.

Above Dodge's head, security monitors showed the battle in the corridor outside the blast doors. As Sam watched, the resistance fighters fell back, and the soldiers of the neuro-forces filled the tunnel.

Jackson ran into the control room behind them.

"I need an update," he yelled. "I got a wing of bombers inbound to Wichita, and they're loaded for bear. What's happening?"

"We injected the antidote," Dodge said. "Just watching now to see it do its work."

"It had better happen quick," Jackson said. "Those bombers will be in Wichita in minutes, not hours. I don't know if you heard, but there are hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps around the city and no time to move them." He turned away from them and shouted outside, "Get those blast doors closed!"

"I hear you," Dodge said, "but it's out of our hands. It'll spread as fast as it can."

"Keep me posted," Jackson said, and ran back onto the main concourse.

There was an explosion from outside, and the entire room shuddered. Sam ran to the door of the control room and looked down.

Smoke was billowing into the room through the blast door, which was almost closed but not moving.

Resistance soldiers were arrayed around the concourse, weapons trained on the narrow gap in the doorway.

Jackson was lying on the metal floor of the mezzanine walkway nearby, and he grabbed Sam's arm, pulling him down as machine-gun fire sounded on the other side of the blast door and lightning flashes of tracer fire lit up the gray smoke.

"They've jammed the blast door," he yelled over the sound of the firing. "We can't close it. We're trying to hold them out."

Even as he spoke, a group of neuro-soldiers ran through the partially open doorway, firing from the hip as they came.

Gunfire sounded from around the concourse.

The men staggered and fell, but more men were right behind them.

"Get back in there!" Jackson yelled, pushing Sam back into the control room.

Sam slammed the door behind him. It seemed paper thin against what was coming.

Dodge was gazing at the computer screen. It was a blur. Numbers cascaded from the bottom to the top and out of sight. Column after column, row after row.

"You sure there's nothing we can do?" Sam asked.

"Nothing but watch," Dodge said. "See how Ursula likes a taste of her own brain-wiping medicine."

Sam watched a little more, mesmerized by the numbers.

There was an explosion from outside and the control room shuddered again. Smoke curled underneath the door.

"This had better work," Sam said. "And soon."

"Sam," Dodge said sharply.

Sam flicked his gaze back to the computer. The long rolls of numbers were slowing down. Slowing, slowing, and eventually stopping.

Then the list began to unravel. Numbers began to disappear faster and faster.

"What's going on?" Sam cried out in horror, knowing what the answer would be.

"She's beaten it," Dodge said slowly. "I was afraid of that. She's seen this virus before, remember, when we used it to escape from the mall. She's recognized it despite my mods and found some way to defeat it."

Faster still, the screen scrolled backward, the Plague reversing, the computers freed from Dodge's disease.

There was long, sustained gunfire from down in the concourse; then, without warning, the computer screens around them all flickered back to life.

56

FULL-FRONTAL a.s.sAULT

"Well, that's it, then. We're fried," Dodge said. "She's beaten it."

"There's one thing we haven't tried," Sam said, staring at the neuro-headset hanging off the desk by its cable. "What if we went neuro? Went in all guns blazing and went for the jugular. Full-frontal a.s.sault."

"No way," Dodge said. "You stick that neuro-headset on your noggin and she'll pa.s.s your brain over the bulk-eraser, say thank you very much, and spend the rest of the day playing ping-pong with her jumbo jets."

"Not if we went in without the browser," Sam said.

Another explosion from outside rattled the door.

"You're stark ravin'," Dodge said.

"Think about it," Sam insisted. "We go in to do battle with Ursula, and it's not a fair fight. She can see the whole of the network-she is is the network-while we go in with four-sided blinkers on. All we can see is the tiny window that the browser allows us to see. How can we fight her when we are fighting in the dark wearing a blindfold with just a pinhole through it?" the network-while we go in with four-sided blinkers on. All we can see is the tiny window that the browser allows us to see. How can we fight her when we are fighting in the dark wearing a blindfold with just a pinhole through it?"

"There's a reason for that," Dodge said. "Neuro-connecting without a browser would be like trying to download the entire Internet onto a laptop computer. Your brain would explode without any help from Ursula."

The door to the control center was flung open, and Jackson burst in, a radio held to his ear, his face streaked with blood.

"B-2 bombers are in the defensive zone. We estimate three minutes to bombs-free. When's this virus of yours going to kick in, guys?"

"It ain't going to happen," Dodge said.

"We've got to go neuro," Sam said. "No browser, just freeboard right into the Internet."

"You do, you die," Dodge said.

"Either way, same, same," Sam said. "Let's at least go out fighting."

"What the h.e.l.l are you guys talking about?" Jackson shouted. "We have less than three minutes before a nuclear holocaust!"

Dodge said, "We're trying one last thing. If it works, you'll know about it. If it don't...well, you'll know about that too."

His fingers were already flying across the keyboard. "We need to leave the core transmission systems open," he said. "Just shut down the protocol stack to prevent the execution of the browser DLLs."

Jackson turned away and fired at something out of sight.

"Whatever you're doing, do it now. We can't hold them any longer!" he said.

Three soldiers joined him, aiming and firing their weapons out through the open door of the control room.

"Let's give it a burst, then," Dodge said.

Sam reached for the headset, but a viselike grip caught his arm.

"I was talking about me, not you," Dodge said.

Sam said, "But..."

Dodge had already taken the headset and was pulling it down over his head.

"But nothing," he said, and plugged it in.

The effect was instantaneous. It was as if he had stuck a wet finger into an electrical outlet. In a way, he had. Except it was his brain, not a finger. And it was not an electrical outlet. It was the entire neuro-network, millions of brains all intertwined, plus the vast database that was the Internet itself.

Dodge's body jolted as if under a ma.s.sive electrical shock, and his eyelids began to blink, impossibly fast. His eyes rolled back in his head, showing only the whites, and his mouth fell open, emitting a harsh gagging sound. His fingers splayed outward, bending back on themselves like the branches of a small tree in the wind, and his hands brushed feebly at his head, uselessly sc.r.a.ping at the headset with the insides of his wrists, trying to unseat it.

Sam reached for the plug but it was already too late.

Dodge's head fell forward, cracking on the front desk of the control panel. His eyes slowly rolled back to center, and the stretched tendons in his body began to relax. The horrible gagging sound stopped also, for which Sam was grateful. It was a hideous, stomach-turning sound.

Dodge sat on the chair, slumped forward onto the desk, his breathing barely discernible. Blood from a cut on his head ran red fingers across the biohazard tattoo on his forehead.

"We're getting an unload signal." Jackson still had the radio to his ear, and his voice was frantic. "Oh my G.o.d, they've opened the bomb bays."

There was a sudden explosion by the doorway, and one of the soldiers was lifted bodily and hurled backward by the blast, flying across the room behind them.

Sam s.n.a.t.c.hed the headset from Dodge's lifeless form and jammed it down harshly over his own head.

"Bomb release, bomb release," he heard Jackson scream, far, far away. "Multiple inbound nukes!"

Sam shut his eyes.

57

BIRTH

It took a moment before anything happened. As if the universe needed to draw a breath.

There was just blackness, and in the blackness, without the guiding hand of the neuro-browser, he was alone, suspended in the void.

Sam barely noticed the dot at first, just a tiny pinp.r.i.c.k in the blackness. It grew and resolved itself into a tiny spiral of light; then that began to grow, larger and larger until it consumed all his vision. Still it grew, a ma.s.sive vortex of stars roaring toward him or sucking him toward it-there was no way of knowing which. And then the implosion, the impossible implosion of everything there ever was, all at once.

He was a young boy on his first day of school in South Korea and a retired stockbroker in Amsterdam.

He was a Greek shipping billionaire, bloated, bored, and choking on excess and an elderly woman on her deathbed in Vancouver.

He was everyone and no one.

He was the world and they were him.

It was information beyond any hope of understanding. a.s.similating. Processing.

The very cells of his brain seemed to quiver as he fought against the deluge, the tsunami of images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, memories, knowledge.

There was no hope. There was no way.

No human being could withstand this.

This much he did finally understand amidst the torrent, and even with the realization that he could not possibly cope with the overload came the realization that it was already too late to shut it off.

Sam gave himself over to the neuro-network, knowing as he did so that the person he was would be gone-forever. The cells of his brain shook violently, faster and faster, then exploded in a fury of starburst and blinding light.

He did not resist. He stopped trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, to understand the impossible, to stretch out and touch infinity.

He let go, and the world flooded inside his head, and he screamed and screamed again and again.

He became the network. The network became him.