‘Extra? What do you mean extra?’ The uneasy feeling he’d experienced at the tent with Father was back again, even stronger this time, and now he knew it didn’t make mistakes.

‘So what the doc figured out was, all the code he’d written was intact, but something had been added. A few more strings of code. And when he figured out what they were, that was when he flipped the gasket, as they say.’

‘What were they?’ whispered Albert, afraid, genuinely afraid of knowing the answer.

‘A program.’

‘Like a computer program?’

‘Yup. A certain kind of program. A virus. And a very special sort of virus at that. An AI virus.’

‘An … AI virus?’

‘That’s right. A computer virus, based on the doc’s own AI code, you know, the one he’d come up with earlier? Well, someone used it to make a smart virus designed for one thing, and one thing only—to infect users when they accessed certain high-value information sources, to hook them, you know, because the more time people spent there, the more money the Company made. It was only designed to work on those select few information sources, and contained an automatic self-destruct that activated after a certain time period so that there would be no alarming repercussions, traces left or long-term effects on consumers. Supposedly. Do you get it? After a point, the virus consumed itself. Quite a nifty bit of evil, if you think about it.’

‘No, wait! You’re saying someone deliberately—’

‘Yeah, exactly that.’

‘Who?’

Colby shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Don’t think anyone does, Father included. Someone who wanted to make an extra buck.’

‘But—’

‘Oh, it gets crazier. Because the self-destruct they’d put in—their perfect failsafe—it failed.’

‘What do you mean failed? How could it fail?’

‘Because the virus mutated,’ said Colby. ‘Smart virus, remember? It mutated and outgrew the failsafe, and mutated further, so not only did it not self-destruct, it spread beyond the designated information pages, across the entire web, affecting every single person on the planet, everyone who was online, everyone who had a device. Which was pretty much everyone, as it turned out.’

‘So it was all because of greed?’

‘In a nutshell.’

Albert opened his mouth and then shut it, realizing he didn’t have anything to say. He stood there, shaking his head at the futility, the needlessness of it all.

Then he shook his head, more firmly this time, and looked at Colby. ‘But that doesn’t make sense. I mean as far as the Seekers being after Theo goes. This can’t be why they’re after her.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t the doc’s discovery that’s got people after the girl. It’s what he did with it. As in after. What he did after.’

‘What did he do?’

Colby smiled at him. ‘Came up with the Code.’

‘You mean—’