You're all that's left, girl. Datanet's cut. Unlock me in a century. Trust Walshaw, Juliet. Trust him. My girl. Love you. Take care, Kendric will come for you. Integrity stasis, beat it at its own game. Shutting down. Limbo.

And he was gone. But there was something else intruding in her mind, a smooth, grotesque presence oozing in to corrupt her thoughts. Julia jammed her knuckles in her wide, silently screaming mouth. The horror pulled at her memories, prising them out of their neat processor-assigned stacks. She could see them tumbling away from her; stained-glass rosettes, each one a billion-picture mosaic. Her life encapsulated, ruptured, pouring away into some infinite insatiable sink point.

Data Error.

She felt herself falling to the floor, howling in psychosomatic agony, Armscor dropping from deadened fingers. Vision lost in the blinding sparkle of vivid memories flashing by, people, buildings, schoolgames, countryside, mathematical formulae, lists of words.

Memory Node One Index Error.

Her mind was contracting, conscious thoughts slowing as they passed through the processor nodes. The presence was everywhere, tainting the entire contents of her cerebrum and memory nodes, eviscerating her own personality and replacing it with its own implacable insentient logic.

She began to claw wildly at her head.

Memory Node Two Interface Error.

The virus, it was in her nodes, Trojaned into her through OtherEyes. She should've realised instantly. Her intellect was crumbling, the supporting experience-based reasoning mentality denuded of references, blocking her ability to think. Only a vestigial essence of bloody-minded stubbornness remained, that fundamental aspect of human ego which the virus was unable to subsume.

Memory Node Three Interface Error.

Fight back, Julia pleaded with herself. Stop it spreading.

Processor Node Two Format Loss.

Disengage Memory Node One, she ordered. The command was terribly slow to formulate.

Her subconscious rose ominously to fill the vacuous gulf left in the virus's wake. Wounded pictures of a world peopled by caricatures of those who walked through her natural universe. It was the alternate she lived in fear of, nightmares fully expressed. Black idolatry, so hard and bright her remaining rationality nearly disintegrated under its impact.

Disengage Memory Node Two.

Floating without weight, seeing herself and Kendric coupling like frenzied rampant beasts. Loving it, hating it. Grandpa watching them, frail, poised ready to die, tears streaming down his cheeks.

Disengage Memory Node Three.

Primate Marcus offering her benediction inside a suffocating bubble of rock. Herself supplicant, putting Event Horizon on the burnished silver collection platter for him. Dropping it, seeing it shatter into splinters of pure data, profit and loss. All-important. Grandpa shook his head in dismay and died.

Shut Down Processor Nodes One and Two.

The exorcism. Julia felt the virus withdraw, retreating into the nodes. Then the synaptic interfaces sealed, cutting her free, trapping it in isolation.

There was no physical pain, only loss, all that wondrous knowledge she'd taken for granted had been snatched beyond reach. Her own thoughts and memories, once so ordered, now a tangled seething wreckage.