Her headache intensified but she couldn’t look away. She was moving through a virtual space, finding information unspooling away from her in all directions. It could take the form of nested windows or file directories if she wanted, but if she didn’t try to make it that, then it was its own thing, a landscape, a topography. She twitched the mouse and the cursor leapt to the other screens, the ones unconquered by the hypnotic virus currently raging through the leftmost one. Connections were sprouting up like weeds, training angular roots from her open documents into the great abyss of data that she had discovered. Hertzelectric, Moraybleak, Glassknife, all of them becoming mere points of data on a great frozen wave of it that receded back through the decades. There were more and more data points the closer the wave came to the present day, gathering speed and magnitude as it rushed towards the now.

She saw a Plug-ugly woman before a Russian firing squad; a man’s body fished from the Seine; robust, heavy bones in a shallow grave outside Nairobi. She saw objects changing hands, stolen from collections, from museums, from the desk drawers of cranks and conspiracy theorists. She saw shells and pieces of machine and Escher-like geometrical figures made impossible reality. They were the fingerprints of some huge and terrible force, and the Plug-uglies were its vanguard.

She had before her a map, reaching back into history and other directions she could not name. In that moment, she understood that it was a map of interstices, of spaces between, where in a sane world there would have been walls. For where there was a space between, things could cross from there to here. She pushed harder, aware that all this data was pouring into her mind and falling out the back, impossible to retain because her brain was never intended to have this godlike perspective, to be the extradimensional eye onto her own flat world. In that moment she saw everything, including—most terrifyingly—that there was an entity showing it all to her. She finally understood what Charen Volkovska had found.

She’d thought there might have been an AI at work at Schoen Fayre Invested, flexing its mind against the constraints of its stockbrokerage algorithms. They’d sold off the computer to Rove Denton, so were they behind all of this? Hadn’t she seen them in that endlessly branching map, nodes marked with their corporate logo for ease of her human comprehension?