She yanks up her pants, flushes, and leaves the bathroom. The light coming in the living room window is muted, but it still hurts her eyes. She squints, sees it’s starting to snow, and shuffles to the kitchen, working for every breath. Her fridge is mostly stocked with cartons of leftover Chinese, but there’s a couple of cans of Red Bull in the door shelf. She grabs one, chugs half, and feels a bit better. It’s probably a psychological effect, but she’ll take it.

What am I going to do? What in the name of God? Is there any way out of this mess?

She goes into her computer room, shuffling a little faster now, and refreshes her screen. She googles her way to zeetheend, hoping she’ll get the cartoon man swinging his cartoon pickaxe, and her heart sinks when the picture filling the screen shows a candlelit funeral parlor, instead—exactly what she saw when she booted up the thumb drive and looked at the starter screen, instead of just importing the whole thing blind, as instructed. That dopey Blue Oyster Cult song is playing.

She scrolls past the messages below the coffin, each one swelling and fading like slow heartbeats (AN END TO PAIN, AN END TO FEAR) and clicks on POST A COMMENT. Freddi doesn’t know how long this electronic poison pill has been active, but long enough for it to have generated hundreds of comments already.

Bedarkened77: This dares to speak the truth!

AliceAlways401: I wish I had the guts, things are so bad at home now.

VerbanaThe Monkey: Bear the pain, people, suicide is gutless!!!

KittycatGreeneyes: No, suicide is PAINLESS, it brings on many changes.

Verbana the Monkey isn’t the only naysayer, but Freddi doesn’t have to scroll through all the comments to see that he (or she) is very much in the minority. This is going to spread like the flu, Freddi thinks.

No, more like ebola.

She looks up at the repeater just in time to see 171 FOUND tick up to 172. Word about the number-fish is spreading fast, and by tonight almost all of the rigged Zappits will be active. The demo screen hypnotizes them, makes them receptive. To what? Well, to the idea that they should visit zeetheend, for one thing. Or maybe the Zappit People won’t even have to go there. Maybe they’ll just highside it. Will people obey a hypnotic command to off themselves? Surely not, right?

Right?

Freddi doesn’t dare risk killing the repeater for fear of a return visit from Brady, but the website?

“You’re going down, motherfucker,” she says, and begins to rattle away at her keyboard.