Leave him alone. He's just a kid with a crush, he's so sick he can barely move. The only reason he hasn't told you to fuck off is because he thinks you might care.

"I think there is a way," she said.

"Why?"

"If they'd really wanted to crash the whole system, they could have done that long before now."

"How you know?"

Because I know where the demons come from. I know how they started, I know how they work.

And just maybe, I know how to set them free.

"Because we can do it ourselves," Clarke told him.

Ricketts said nothing. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was unconscious. Clarke felt her fingers in motion, glanced down at the new window she'd just opened on the bedside board. The Palliative Submenu, she saw. A minimalist buffet of default settings: nutrients. painkillers. stimulants. Euthanasia.

She remembered a voice from the past: You're so sick of the blood on your hands you'd barely notice if you had to wash it off with even more.

"Crash N'AmNet," Ricketts said.

"That's right."

"Don't know. I'm...tired..."

Look at him, she told herself. But it was dark, and her caps weren't in.

And he was dying anyway.

One finger slid across stimulants.

Ricketts spoke again. "Crash N'AmNet? Really?" Something rustled in the darkness behind the membrane. "How?"

She closed her eyes.

Lenie Clarke. It had all started with that name.

Ricketts didn't really remember where the Witch first came from. He'd just been a kid then, he said. But he'd heard the stories; according to legend and the M&M's, the Meltdown Madonna had started the whole thing.

That was close enough. She'd released it, anyway, spread ßehemoth across N'Am like some kind of vindictive crop-duster. And of course people had tried to stop her, but there'd been a—a glitch. Deep in the seething virtual jungles of Maelstrom, passing wildlife had noticed a flock of high-priority messages shooting back and forth, messages about something called Lenie Clarke. They'd learned to hitch a ride. It was reproductive strategy, or a dispersal strategy, or something like that. She had never really understood the details. But traffic about Lenie Clarke was a free ticket to all kinds of habitat that wildlife had never gotten into before. Natural selection took over from there; it wasn't long before wildlife stopped merely riding messages about Lenie Clarke and started writing their own. Memes leaked into the real world, reinforced those already proliferating through the virtual one. Positive feedback built both into myth. Half the planet ended up worshipping a woman who never existed, while the other half tried desperately to kill the one who did.

Neither side caught her, though.