There was a depth in the air before her eyes, the physical space extending away from her into grand archives of information. She saw nothing, but she touched it, connected with it. She wasn’t even looking at her computer. The pain in her head was like a cold knife, but she rode it, feeling herself on the brink of that omniscient perspective. Her thoughts turned to Rove Denton and she began to see connections: images, glimpses of accounts, transactions, fragmentary email chains. She swayed, face screwed up against the freezing agony of it: not an attack on her, but simply a connection to something bitterly unsuited to liaising with a human mind. And it was doing its best, she realized. It was bending over backwards to help her, to make itself compatible with her own cerebral operating system, and yet the gap between them was vast. But it could look over her brain as though she was a plan spread out on a table. It was learning her, interpreting her desires, so when she thought Where is Rove Denton in all this? it understood and was almost able to show her. So who’s behind it all? And perhaps it tried, but from her perspective the data landscape was just pulling out and pulling out, a grander and grander perspective until the individual connections became meaningless. She was looking at something that simply had more elements than she could comprehend.

This wasn’t the SFI stockbroking computer, but it was whatever that system had inadvertently drawn upon to make its miraculous and fallible predictions. It wasn’t even an AI, she decided. It was a really big computer existing outside physical space, everywhere and nowhere.

As explanations went, it wasn’t much better than magic, but it was something she could accept.

Show me, she thought, and then it noticed her.

She remembered going to an aquarium as a child, staring into a tank and seeing nothing. Her dad told her that maybe they’d taken the fish out for cleaning. But even then she’d been a determined searcher for truth, and she’d looked for the fish behind stones and dead coral chunks. Then one of those stones had opened its bulbous eye and stared right back at her, and she’d shrieked—six years old, after all. The sudden transition had given her nightmares for weeks. It was like that. She had been gazing into the abyss, fishing for secrets, and now the abyss gazed right back at her, this insignificant speck that had dared to dangle her tiny hook into its depths.

Alison fell back onto the sofa with a yell, the connection gone, a vice of pain still clamped about her brows. Her breath came fast and ragged. Her fingers were blueish. There was a patch of frozen carpet where she’d stood, the fibres limned with ghostly white.