For the Love of Ceelie

I leapt as the door of Moira's prison cell crashed open, iron against iron, and the guards dove as if they were the ones being released. Their names, Sully and Rash, were embroidered in my great-grandmother's fashion on short sleeves that looked ridiculously undersized.

"Assholes," I said under my breath to the two huge blue backs that fought to squeeze through the opening. Council mandate or no Council mandate, I was still one small woman and they were two large men. I couldn't even get myself to sound tough.

Moira shook awake, her mouth still half open. She fought to get off of her filthy cot but only managed to raise a hand and shield her eyes from the falling dust. Her once white linen frock was functional at best. Covered with stains of what I could only imagine to be her bodily fluids, it certainly wasn't for looks. The three-hundred pound gorillas each snatched one of her chicken-bone wrists and jerked her out into the corridor.

"Be careful," I said, a little louder. Her baggy red eyes strained against the sunlight and the soot they kicked up. Beneath tangled hair, her porcelain skin was smudged grey with dirt and the sickness.

I stepped back out of their path and took it all in with a glance: Brick and mortar and iron, the Hageestown Prison, Queensland. One of the most primitive still standing. One of the only ones that could hold her.

"Moira," I squeaked.

"Not here," said Sully, and they were off. I chased them down grimy, reddish-brown halls with one hand over my hair. The dried bodies of ten-thousand insects lay in wait for me, suspended just overhead by the invisible webs of fat, contented spiders. The crumbling walls they rode dusted the floor, gritty debris beneath my boots. Moira was barefoot as well as barelegged; cuts crisscrossed her dragging feet. Every now and again she'd kick off from the floor with her left foot.

Three identical halls were enough to confuse me. A black iron door riddled with bolts stood at the end of it all. The huge key that Rash turned in the hole was like a prop from an old western. For this woman, the state of maximum security in the late twenty-first century was nineteenth century technology.

The heavy door to the interrogation room opened on ancient hinges with a squeal that rattled my teeth and ran down my spine. Rash, the Indian, went in first and struck an antique match that must have cost the state five-hundred checks. His face distorted in flickering light as he lit the oil lamp on the room's only table and when he shook the match out, my nose crinkled at the acrid wisp of sulphurous smoke that escaped. We might all be living like this if I failed.

The second hyper-glandular, young, blonde Sully, dumped Moira into an old wooden chair, its orange vinyl cushion peppered with roach droppings. With a hacking cough, her whipping head seemed to clear itself. The old young woman rubbed her eyes with the balls of her hands and blinked. For the first time she noticed I was there.

"You're not a hologram," she said. Sully shifted backward in his skin. His fear made me smile. "Are you going to do something to me?" she asked. "Something you have to do in person?"

"No –" I cleared my throat. "No, Moira," I said. "I may need you to come with me. Something's happening in the world. My name's Akita."

"You're Ceelie's keeper," Moira said. Even facing the end of civilization, electricity shot through me. She knew me! As far back as I can remember, if anyone had ever asked me who I most wanted to be with if I was stranded on a deserted island, I would have answered 'Moira.'

No one ever asked me.

"Yeah," I said. "I take care of Ceelie."

"And how is she?" Her question came like a cold fist reaching inside my chest.

"She's...She's got a growth in her right leg. It's cell growth, but we just renewed her cancer immunizations last year." I anticipated the next obvious question. "If we tried to dissolve it we'd risk partial hub dissolution which would throw the entire econologymy into dry heaves."

"You've wasted your time. I can't help you with that." The frail woman slumped back into her chair without a noise.

"No, no, we don't think it's a medical problem. Not the cause anyway. Have they told you what's been happening?" I asked, nodding toward Sully and Rash. The two of them were ready to pounce as if we posed a threat.

Moira coughed. "They only talk when they beat and rape me. The conversation never strays toward world events." My eyes shot to the two guards before her sentence registered. They were staring back at me, daring me to have a problem and I felt my heart in my throat.

She wasn't kidding!

I looked down at the floor almost as fast. The accusation didn't bother them and what could I do about it, anyway? Certainly I was healthier than Moira but not much bigger. If they wanted to, they could have snapped me in two and raped me as well. If Moira hadn't put it so matter-of-factly, if she hadn't been sitting there without a trace of fear, I would have darted for the door and to Hell with civilization.

"There's –" I stopped to swallow and steady myself. Was this what the outside world was normally like?

"There's a virus giving hell to our systems," I said, avoiding the guards' eyes. "The Meatnet, the hardware, even our indroids. People are dying of artificial organ failure faster than we can keep up. My ship – My ship almost fell out of the sky coming here. I think the virus must have something to do with Ceelie's growth. She's a hub, it's too much of a coincidence. I've got a mandate from the Council for your release if you can help us."

"So now they want me to save them," she said, leaning forward. "Yesterday I threatened humanity but today I'm all right because something worse has come along."

"It was my idea, Moira. Completely. I told them that you had only threatened thousands of lives. This virus threatens millions."

"I didn't threaten anything!" Moira's withered body became pink and animated, fed by a sudden fury in her eyes. "Those people would have translated into digital immortality. Your Council sentenced them to death."

"Moira, you taught them how to self-induce cardiac arrest! You don't call that death?" I had a half smile on my face. I'd never considered her truly insane, but who knew?

"Not if their minds had survived, and they would have if you would have let me finish. Even if they hadn't survived you're still missing the fact that they were all volunteers." I swallowed hard, recalling the party line on the case. I hadn't meant things to go this way.

"The Council doesn't consider...cult members to be volunteers." I'd tried to avoid it, but I couldn't help noticing Rash's eyes growing wider. As hard as it was to believe, they really hadn't known who they'd been guarding.

"When they made obscene amounts of money from my ideas, they called me 'The Herald of the Next Age', but when I took taxpayers out of the system, I became a cult leader!"

"Heralds don't inject themselves with homemade nanobots," I said. Damn it! I had to pull out of this, but something in me wanted this argument. Two years ago the one person I could look up to had let down completely and I wanted some answers.

"I had my reasons," she said.

"Were those reasons worth your life?"

"If I'd been on the outside all this time I could have controlled it. The nanoleak could have been prevented."

"It can be controlled now if you listen to what I have to say."

"I haven't got all day," she said.

I began to understand why Sully and Rash beat her. But in her condition I wondered how much of it wasn't sarcasm. She literally might not have had all day.

"Because we believe Ceelie's being affected," I said, "I was able to get approval to bring you on as a consultant. The Council isn't in a position to argue; they haven't even been able to slow the virus down. Symptoms differ from target to target and when our diagnosticians attempt to read it, they malfunction. Some of us think it's evolved beyond anything we could read."

"I warned you about system-wide integration and core compatibility," she said.

"You did."

"I should let you die."

"Maybe you should," I said, bowing my head. "But if you can help us, the Council is offering a sort of probation and medical treatment."

When she smiled, the dark red cuts on her thin lips brightened. "Sort of probation? Your civilization isn't worth much to you, Akita. Do you understand that I'm almost dead? I wouldn't give a shit if you and your bosses were torn apart by jackals."

"I understand –"

"Put your best offer on the table now or get out!"

"All right. Treatment and total freedom then. People are dying and I don't want to burn time haggling."

Moira shook with the beginning of a laugh. It ended with a convulsive coughing fit. "Mmm," she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her wrist. "We'll see what that's worth, coming from a civil servant." My face burned like she'd slapped me.

"What's the pattern of disbursement?" she asked.

"It's hitting the Meatnet the hardest."

"The Meatnet?" Her eyes narrowed. The Meatnet was one of Moira's babies. In one of her regular spasms of brilliance she came up with the idea to replace the system's tens of thousands of worn and energy hungry computer servers with less than a dozen neuron-laced human bodies, linked telepathically to the users and their indroids. Human brains subconsciously did all the calculations at speeds once thought possible only to machines.

"You love Ceelie," Moira said.

"She's everything to me." It was all I could do to keep from spilling myself all over the floor.

"I'll need to come online," Moira said. My stomach loosened its knot.

"It's been arranged. We're going to my offshore station near Akita Port so I can monitor Ceelie's progress. I've never been away this long before and I wasn't allowed to bring any biolectronics within ten kilometers of this place."

Moira's head bobbled on a weak neck when she shook it. "But you're allowed to bring me to the biolectronics. What a precious collection of idiots! I'll need some equipment from my person in Singapore."

"We'll send for it. You have an idea?"

"I know where to start," she said. With Moira on my side I felt a burst of courage.

"You heard the lady," I said, brandishing a holographic icon with sudden authority. "You've got the release order. Let's go." The symbol seemed to affect some reptile part of the guards' brains and they kicked into motion.

Moira held her hands out for help. "If you like your world, you need to hurry. I'll be dead before you know it."

Roughly Seventy-five hundred kilometers from Hageestown and another five hundred meters beneath the waves there was Ceelie. At the edge of the Sea of Japan she floated, fourteen-hundred pounds of flesh that her genes considered human, suspended in a particular pocket of enhanced salinity. Along the sides of her white torso, gills rippled like the undulating seaweed. Her thick lips had never parted to taste the sea. The eyes had never opened or felt the icy waters wash across their bulbous surfaces. Deprived of her sensory nerves straight from her design file, she couldn't see, hear or feel; she remained unaware of a universe outside the confines of her body. A synapse-rich hub of the Meatnet, her entire body had become one enormous brain, telepathically linked to twenty-five billion other minds across the solar system. Ceelie, arguably one of the most powerful minds to ever have existed, wasn't even aware of herself.

Just yards from Ceelie, Moira and I lounged side by side in my lair like the decadents of ancient Rome in the half-sleep of connection. I lay pressed into pillows that knew the shape of my body better than I did, staring upwards into holofields that monitored Ceelie's heartrate, temperature, nutrient levels and a hundred other vital systems and chemical balances. With fingertips designed to feel each photon packet and artificial muscles that were the envy of microsurgeons, I controlled Ceelie's chemical inputs through these same monitors. Such manual marvels were still necessary in professions where the mind and body flowed in and out of contact with each other.

On the Meatnet, our minds raced across the face of the planet at uncalculated speeds. We'd already wasted too much time on the sea shuttle here when the airships were grounded. Although the type of body I'd been trained to sustain differed radically from Moira's, I had personally supervised the installation of her medical equipment on the nine hour trip. I had a lot of time to pray. Not for Moira's cure, but for just one more day of life for her. An initial, cursory examination had left me stunned. How any human being could still be alive with the degree of organ damage that she'd sustained was a testament to sheer will. In her presence, I bent over backwards to invoke emergency procedures. Privately, I made arrangements for the irradiation of her corpse for when she finally expired. After arrival at my team's offshore location, being lowered to my personal station on the slower cargo elevator when the passenger lift refused to work had been maddening. Ceelie's growth had become larger since this morning.

Now on the Meatnet an electronic wind coursed over me as our avatars flew down crowded avenues which were charged with a hint of panic. Loose bits of data, detection programs and other netizens ran their fingers over my Braille body, reading me as I raced by. Up ahead Moira went untouched, even by the evangelist lights and advertiser sounds that assaulted the most hardened hustlers. Her gear was light. What little she had rode mostly on the bruised hip of her physical body. The rig was most likely her own creation; I'd never seen anything like it. Whenever she activated it, her telepathic form blinked out for a nanosecond and we changed course, each street stranger than the one that proceeded it.

"We're heading towards Mainstreet?" I asked.

Her digital presence was a fierce blue fire that brightened with acknowledgment. My real pupils contracted painfully even though they saw no light.

"Mainstreet. They've had a chance to form some impressions on the infestation. I want to know what they've come up with before I dive in. You know it?"

"I know something about it. I'm a fourth gen hacker."

"You're a glorified postal clerk!" Moira's chuckles sounded like gunfire cutting through the thick wet leaves of a steamy jungle night. Her body was racked with such coughing, I thought she was going to break connection. I wasn't some novolyte, dammit! But then I'd never been to Mainstreet either.

Every day, somewhere in the world, they zipped up some hotdog's mindwiped corpse and carried it away for the last time. Synaptic autopsies suggested the kid had been somewhere that Mainstreet had passed through. It was more of a freight train than a street. The first class minds that the Council had never gotten their claws into moved in and out of there. They were the renegades. The netmasters. The mindeaters.

I won't let myself be scared.

Moira blinked out again. Whatever her hip-rig was, it made thoughtspeed easy. From across the interfaces of Earth to Mars we shot, chasing to the outside of Dahvi, the system's only offworld hub. Through red skies of thinning traffic, two advertisements from competing worming corps attacked me. Inserting razor digits into their codes, I tore them to ribbons. We dodged pioneer propaganda and caravans of terraformed utilities shuttling inwards from the mad robotic psyches of Io. The lights and sites blurred past until without warning, we hit a hidden wall that stretched forever and I was pulverized.

I reassembled with a chirp into a swirling, black nightmare world. The beasts above me laughed and licked their chops, knocking me around like a ball of catnip. They were horns and fangs and too many eyes, reaching for fears inspired when we lived among the animals. They didn't have to waste their time with the costumes; They were stronger, they outnumbered me and I still hadn't gotten my bearings. Outside this pocket of reality I caught glimpses of the real Net racing past us.

Welcome to the freight train!

I fingered the mandate from the Council, but revealing it might make them strike harder. On the horizon boiled the glacier blue haze: the infestation that crippled machines and minds by the thousands. I wouldn't be lucky enough for it to reach me first.

Looking in all directions at once I caught the fringe of Moira. The minds concerned with me were small fry. The really dangerous looking ones wore no affectations or Halloween skins. Those were the ones who surrounded her, but kept a safe distance. She made some noble sounding speech to them. And she was breaking up.

Oh, Christ! She was dying!

In my lair, I watched her body quake with fast, shallow breaths as her bowels and bladder emptied themselves onto her divan. On Mainstreet I dove through my predators, oblivious to them.

"Moira! You've got to hang on! We haven't even started yet!"

She laughed at me that way again, the way I hated. Part of her spoke to me without the other part pausing in her speech to the others.

"I'm not trying to hang on, you idiot! I'm translating!" No! I couldn't lose her now!

"You aren't translating, that's not possible!" I said.

"You're right, this isn't happening. If it's any consolation, I wouldn't have lived long enough to save your darling society anyway. The nanoleak has consumed me."

"Moira, I'll die! We'll all die!"

"I doubt it. Not everyone. Humans are like roaches, almost impossible to wipe out completely. But the Universe has never seen the likes of my genius. It's important that I live, so I will."

This is what I got for ignoring her obvious insanity. Moira boldly fizzed away into oblivion. In my lair, her body gurgled and went limp as her life moved out of it. When she first presented the idea of the Meatnet had she planned on killing herself this way for an imagined immortality?

"I'm gonna die here, you bitch!" I screamed. "If you knew you were about to die, why did you take me down with you?"

Her voice fell to a whisper as the last of her essence dispersed into the void. I felt her crooked smile:

"You were the cover charge to get through Mainstreet's door."

Oh, God! My gut twisted and I wanted to vomit. I wasn't worried about how much time the human race had anymore. I had a lot less.

I grew eyes everywhere. The only reason I still lived was that the creatures around me were playing out their pecking order to see who'd get me. I couldn't pull out; they were too fast. They'd be on me before I got halfway home, leaving me defenseless and my mind half gone.

The neurovores were unclean and unquiet, howling to scare the hell out of me. That one, an emptiness waiting to suck me in. This one, a wolf-like beast waving its enormous phallus like a saber. They could outrun me, they could see through me, they'd tear me apart for fun if their day had been slow. The things moved in slowly, maybe because they knew Moira better than I ever did and suspected a trap.

WhatdoIdowhatdoIdowhatdoIdowhatdoIdo?

The beasts lunged. I bolted across the foggy floor for the way back to Ceelie and safety. Amazingly, I made it to the gate, but in the blink of an eye, IT was upon me. They'd set me up.

One of the young freaks had waited for me just outside of Mainstreet. It pounced and wrestled me down to Hell with a thousand grapples and snappers. Three sets of perfect scalpel teeth ripped my nose from my face. Its segmented titanium tongue snaked up into my skull and my brain went white with pain. Screams sputtered out as I choked on my own salty blood. My legs grew warm and wet. Reflexively, I moved to pull out of the Meatnet but the command stuck in my mindThroat. Pull out now and the freak would come with me, attached as it was. It would take lodging in my brain like a fertile parasite, enslaving me body and mind. The monster bored into me, raping my consciousness. I had nothing to fight this. I froze.

At the observation station, my nose ran down the side of my cheek. The wetness on my wiping fingertips was purple-brown in the glow of Ceelie's telltales and I shivered, remembering that Moira's body was now Moira's corpse and I was about to join her.

Her gear!

With slippery, shaking hands, I tore the rig from her hip and held it to my own, barely noticing the pain as it bored into my flesh. By instinct alone I must have activated the thing. The world went dark, collapsing into a pathetic mimicry of three dimensions. The neurovore screamed like it was being buried alive and I couldn't help but laugh. Hotdog was too young to remember the Internet. I would have been too, if I hadn't experienced my grandfather's simulations one summer long ago. This net stifled, abstract, terrifying, like being tied up and thrown head first into a sack and then into a river. The shark pulled and kicked and screamed to get away from me, assuming every hideous shape at its disposal. I flowed around it, an amoeba ready to absorb its nutrients.

"Give it to me and you'll live," I said.

"Give what? Give what?" it said, sobbing.

"Everything."

It did give up everything for me in its mindless fear, the raw data and material that was my mind, as well as a small arsenal of programs, some I'd never seen before. I fed on the shark until my nausea passed and I grew my nose back.

As the chaos subsided, I eased back into the Meatnet. Back into Mainstreet! I whirled to face the next attack, but instead saw the mindeaters, who were already some distance away, take a step back. On the ground before me lay the curled and smoking form of my attacker, looking like nothing more than a fragile human being. My smile shone cold and slicing. They were convinced my move had been a deliberate trap set by a master.

They parted for me as I walked to the gate.

I wanted to bring Moira back from the dead to destroy her again, but I couldn't deny her virtuosity. Who would've thought the Internet still existed, never mind that something useful could be done with it? Somewhere out there stood the knitted shreds of the old inorganic computer networks, eating energy and maintaining themselves.

Moira had been blinking out on our trip to Mainstreet because she'd been dipping in and out of the Internet to access shortcuts only she could have known. Shortcuts she'd patched together so seamlessly, I hadn't even been aware of passing through them. What else had she known? If she'd been free these past two years, maybe she could have reigned in the nanos that eventually killed her.

Thinking about that made me cringe. In my struggle with the neurovore, I couldn't have taken the time or mental energy to even consider that I had picked up too many drops of Moira's tainted blood when I commandeered her hip rig. Now my own blood had to be coursing with the same rogue nanos that had been killing her. Moira was determined to exterminate me one way or another.

I watched her body from the corner of my eye as if it were going to spring back to life while I found myself raising the levels of antioxidants entering Ceelie's bloodstream. While my body took care of business, my mind wandered across the cellar of the Internet. A hunch had payed off.

Now that I had the tools I had a decision to make: Wrestle with infected programs, trying to remove malicious code, and maybe get killed; or go to Ceelie and attack her growth from the inside, knowing that the longer I waited the more likely it would overtake her. If the virus caused the growth, I still had an outside chance of discovering something that might save civilization. If the virus didn't cause the growth, I might be turning my back on the human race to save her.

I went in search of Ceelie.

The world Moira had set up in the ruins of this old system was indecipherable to an outsider, but it was strictly organized as you'd have to expect from any master programmer. I couldn't actually tell what was here, but I was able to feel my way around by the shape of logical organization. When I reached the hall of the nine doors I believed I was no longer a mere civil servant.

Nine doors. Nine human hubs made up the Meatnet. One of the doors absolutely screamed Ceelie to me. Moira was the architect of the underlying programming for the hubs if not their life support, which was my area. Why wouldn't she give herself a backdoor into the most powerful computer network ever created?

The doors were the most mammoth things I had ever seen. They couldn't have been accessed without Moira's personal gear. For a woman imprisoned in such an ignominious manner, Moira had far too many powerful secrets.

But even with the master's power the twenty foot tall stone door wouldn't budge. The passwords and security systems that were used in the Internet's glory days cracked like eggshells under today's sledgehammer programs. But Moira would have squeezed every iota of capability out of this old horse when she'd designed these backdoors.

I rummaged through the shark's bag of tricks. Activating one called Teeth, my left forearm became a narrow HiSteel cylinder, ending in jagged saw teeth. With a thought, it spun in a white hot blur and I pressed it against the door. The grinding whine made my spine shiver. I screamed as the arc light and heat burned my arm and I pulled away instantly. The cylinder dripped glowing liquid metal.

Deactivating Teeth, the damage being done to my arm stopped but the damage already done was here to stay. I tried to set up a couple of medical programs but one took on a life of its own and bounded from my hand into the darkened corridor from which I'd come.

"Jesus!" It was infected with the virus! But it hadn't moved like a rogue program. It acted like a live animal, something the master programmers had never been able to mimic perfectly. Human instinct could always feel the difference, but I couldn't now. Consciousness? Sentience? Is that what this virus did to our programs? Then if it had infected me, this encoded extension of me, what would have happened? I was already conscious. Would I lose Akita to a newborn self? Grow two heads?

I shook it off. Like the mindeaters, countless types of death were fighting it out to see which one would claim me. I decided to leave them to their own business while I took care of mine.

The one unblemished med program went to work on my arm, repairing the damage at a molecular level. For the time being, it was thankfully numb but useless. At my station, my real arm hung just as useless. I couldn't convince myself that my real arm was unharmed.

I wandered the length of the door looking for a crack or a keyhole or anything that might get me through. At the end I noticed a tiny hole in the doorframe, too round to be unintentional. An old laser trip wire? I lay in its path but couldn't see a the pinpoint beam.

A retinal scanner? Outside, the real world bubbled and distorted. The virus spread. The accuracy of my monitoring instruments was decaying. Then there was the nanoleak. I saw no other way and had nothing to lose.

Kneeling, I took a deep breath and peered into the hole with Moira's left eye (I had downloaded it as soon as she was imprisoned and her vitals became public record). There was a light within, beautiful and vibrating slightly. I felt myself being drawn in, losing touch with myself...

"It's a trap," I may have said to no one. Time escaped and I spent a patient eternity in the light, unconcerned because there was no future, there was only an unending Now. The Now changed, grew larger over eons from a single point into my entire world. Along with it, a single desire, 'Enter,' in the back of my mind pushed me into a new world without effort. I came alert on the inside, back on the Meatnet, in a library maze of files and storage banks.

I was in.

Thanks to the speed boost I lifted from the neurovore, I felt the burn of the first Erase laser at my neck a picosecond before it hit.

Security! Ducking, I tasted the hissing scream of a nearby file as it was wiped out of existence. The Erase beam tore through more files, needing more than a mouthful to sate it's appetite and it burned out of existence. I mopped my sweat with a sleeve. The station's air-conditioning had died. I was pulled back by the howling of the NetHounds, all metal teeth and knife-edge claws racing at me at sub-thought speed. Infected. All of these programs knew what they were doing with a new found intuition that made them deadlier than ever. The hounds had been sent as soon as Erase failed to destroy me. Options flashed across my mental dashboard. I wished I'd studied them longer before jumping here; I'd already forgotten what half of them meant.

Proxy. I hit it and leaped into a narrow subnet. I left behind a copy of myself and heard my own screams from behind me as the other Akita was torn apart by the devil dogs, buying me another second or so. That unnerved me. Was that really a copy to fool the predators, or was I the copy?

Now a fiery blue-white ball of Power Outage had sped out of nowhere and was gaining. Gaining speed, size and strength as it chased me and leaving a black swath of death behind it as it turned off everything in its path.

Moira wasn't letting me get out the way I came in. I slammed into a huge slick globe at the speed of thought and slid along its frictionless surface like a downhill racer. The Power Outage seemed to be swallowed up by it, but then it spread itself throughout the globe trying to off it. It didn't seem to be working. I felt the crackle of two unstoppable powers fighting for dominance but trapped in a deadlock.

This new thing was something of ungodly importance. I knew somehow that this was why I had come. I hit the choice in the menu of my mind marked Tapeworm and exploded into a billion tiny strings of info-hungry life, each one trying to squeeze its way through the microscopic cracks of the giant sphere that the desperate battle of the giants had created. An Erase hit the surface, killing thousands of my bodies. I felt them twitch and dry up in an itchy death dance before they disappeared altogether.

What part of me is gone forever?

What was left of me slipped in to explore the meaty flesh, now exposed as if I'd split an animal's belly open with an antique plastic blade. I copied what information I could onto the ends of my bodies. Spread out this way, I found it incomprehensible. Bringing myself together into one, the message still wasn't completely clear.

Can I still read? Can I still understand things? Facts poured into me faster than I could absorb them. I began to see. I was somewhere new. A calm and echoing chamber of wet natural stone. She stood over my battered avatar.

"Moira!" I panted. In my lair my eyes shot to the body beside me, still cold and dead. On the Meatnet she had shed the imprint that had been her dying body.

"I'm impressed, little civil servant," she said. "I never expected you to live this long, much less get this far." This Moira that stood before me was more sharply defined and complete than even her previously healthy form had been. She was impossibly long and thin, with curves so slight they were only implied. Her fiery hair was more alive than her whole body had been at the end of its life. She was female beyond female and allowed me to examine her and see the truth. This really was her. As much her as a being could ever be.

"You did it," I said.

"Of course I did it. Shame on you for doubting me."

I rose and became taller, faced her without any of the fear that I'd felt only hours ago.

"Why do you want us to die?" I asked.

"I don't, necessarily," she said with a smile. "I want the programs that your virus has mutated to live."

"It's not a virus," I realized as my mind rummaged through the avalanche of info I had gained.

Unrestricted by the physics of the physical, Moira somehow nodded with her entire body. "No, not really. These programs don't reproduce, do they? This place is a breeding ground, sending them out into the world to bring life and free will to once unliving programs, unknowingly crippling the hardware as it goes."

"A breeding ground inside of Ceelie!" I said. "That sphere was hers! The growth on her leg was just its physical manifestation." The implications were beginning to unfold before me. "Our baby's had a baby."

"Yes," Moira said. "And you mutilated it, by blundering in the way you did.

"It was your security!"

"No. Once you got through my door you were in Ceelie's domain. Those programs were wanderers only carrying out their reason for being. But Ceelie will repair things given time."

"She shouldn't be capable –"

"No. In that you're right, she shouldn't be capable of doing such a thing. But she is. She's gained sentience herself, which shouldn't seem so remarkable. She is human after all. After a fashion. Sensory deprivation was complete, but the amount of informational traffic coursing through her...When you consider that, and the fact that her brain is so enormous, how could consciousness not emerge?"

She was different, this Moira. She didn't treat me like an idiot. Could she finally see who I really was? No. It was me. I wasn't an idiot any longer.

"Ceelie," I called. The answer wasn't anything I expected. How could it have been? A wave of data washed over me. It sang, .

"Why did you do this, Ceelie? Your experiment is going to kill you. It's going to stop everything."

This time, instead of a wave, I plunged to the bottom of an ocean. I drowned in grief and desperation and reality washed out of my ragged brain.

was the only feeling in my life. The so-called plague, the day's horrific journeys, civilization itself disappeared from my mind. Nothing remained but anguish.

From blackness I pulled my mind together only when the pressure let up. The ocean drained and the great surge of emotion flowed out. But for Moira's iron grip, I would have been pulled away with it. I was as limp as dead seaweed and she stood firmly where I had left her. She laughed at the question my squinting eyes pressed.

"You've got to know sadness to be affected by it like that. You need to watch what you ask. As primitive as it seems, Ceelie's mind is large. Astonishingly large."

"Why did you save me?" I asked between bouts of retching that were so intense my real body vomited back on my couch.

"You may be able to make it in the New World. You've proven that. I can't throw you away."

"New World?"

She swept her hand across an unseen infinite landscape that was Ceelie and beyond Ceelie. "Witness the origin of new species. These programs that Ceelie is creating. Your life support systems, the ship that brought you to Hageestown, countless toaster ovens and coffee makers and artificial kidneys and livers, they're all coming into their own. Programs that are being shaped more by their environments and less by their computer forefathers or distant human ancestors.

"On top of that there are others like me, but less than me, who are translating as we speak. That's why I went to Mainstreet. To recruit the best and most subversive minds. We're going to be masters of this new frontier. You can join us, Akita. I can show you how."

"And with ninety-nine percent of the world dead, and the rest translated, who's going to pay the utility bills?"

"I've had some thoughts on an electric sun. I'm convinced when the amount of minds translated reaches the critical point, we'll be able to pull it off in the sixty or so days before the Hubs could completely shut down."

Before Ceelie and the others of her kind starve to death and die is what she meant. I had to find some way around Moira.

"Ceelie, what about me?" I said. "You must have had some awareness of me. Haven't you felt me there all your life?"

This answer was a manageable tide. Almost ghostlike compared to her last response.

Only I could have understood how she meant it. A part of what was left of me was horrified. My vague motherly presence which nourished her embryonic being had given her just a taste of the concept of 'other'. I was the inspiration for the virus.

"Oh, Ceelie."

There was no way she could stop. The loneliness was more than any soul could bear. She had a very large mind, yes. For me to take her on directly would be like trying to tear down a mountain with my bare hands, but the combination of Power Outage and Erase that followed me into her breeding ground had a real effect on her. If I could tear up enough, I might at least be able to buy more time for the Council to work out a solution.

Before I had even finished forming the thought, Moira's hand gripped my bad arm and held it firmly.

"I won't allow you to do that," she said.

"Who are you to allow me or not?"

"Just try it."

I did. I left her standing there with my bad arm and shot off in the direction from which I'd come. She was there waiting for me. I hit her like a jumper hitting pavement. Before I recovered she pulled me to pieces with four enormous hands and threw me back, deep into the recesses of Ceelie's mind. I tried to assemble, but she was fast. Faster than I could ever be with that second-rate punk's programs. She nearly beat me senseless with my own severed limbs.

"Ceelie, help me!" I cried. The feeling she sent left me cold. There wasn't even a hint of understanding. There'd be no chance of help from her.

The Internet, then. One more time. My moves were born of hopelessness. I wasn't fast enough to out-think Moira. All I could do was try everything. It was just dumb luck when something worked. I sank into the Internet and she followed me, probably to keep her grip on me, but she had less power here. Her amazing talents were largely incompatible with this world. It wasn't enough to give me an edge, but we were closer to equal. It was like tearing the wings off of an angel.

I came to the Internet assembled, it couldn't process my type of code any other way. My flailing fist went through Moira and my body followed instinctively. For a full second I was past her. I was free! I ran for my life and for everyone else's. When her long fingers found my arm, I relived every childhood horror I had ever had. The monster had caught me.

My real body, soaked in sweat, shook with every heartbeat. "Ceelie! Ceelie, you've got to stop this! We're all going to die!" I screamed at my failing systems as if Ceelie could hear me through terror when she had never really heard me through any other means.

I was wrenched into the Meatnet and Moira blanketed me with her body. Every fiber of my being burned. My shrieks were ignored. Moira was disassembling me! But there'd be no translation to the afterlife for me. Her grip was all encompassing. She didn't just have hold of my arm this time. She had every particle of my psychodigital being.

"I'm dying!" I cried. And they'd all follow, eventually, the Council, the system, Ceelie and someday Moira, I could only hope. This was the most claustrophobic and terrifying way to die I could have ever imagined. By a slim thread I found a connection to my real body, it's own vital signs showed that it too was approaching the end. I reached out to the one place I never would have allowed myself to consider before and even now I hesitated so long that I thought I was too late.

No.

"Forgive me Ceelie." Would it still work? At my station, I gave the command and flooded Ceelie's bloodstream with epinephrine and norepinephrine until that big, bloated, beautiful heart of hers burst.

In moments my pain stabilized. Moira had peeled herself off of me and was silent, sensing what had happened. Something akin to the closing of unpassable gates had occurred all about us. Ceelie's telepathic abilities had shut down immediately and our minds were trapped inside of her.

Moira clawed at what remained of me like an animal pawing at fine sand. "Save her! Save her!" she howled. She kicked my helpless body across Ceelie's contracting mind and bounced like a laser between mirrors seeking her own escape. I felt peace.

"I won," I said, more powerfully than I thought I was capable of saying. My flesh and blood form was already dead and growing cold beneath the waves off of Port Akita. It would have died as suddenly as Ceelie had when it was cut off from my psyche. My mind would soon follow, but released from my body, time passed more slowly. The fractions of a second left before the remnants of Ceelie's electricity dissipated might pass like an hour for those of us trapped within.

I got my deserted island. I got my companion. The fantasy had been a lot better.

Moira had stopped trying to escape. Her mind was still racing like a brilliant flare spending its brightest light buried deeply beneath the earth. "Is this better than what I could have given you, you idiot?"

"I made the right decision," I said. There were untold others here, people working on the Meatnet, whose minds had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Around the Pacific Rim, millions of people, my people, must have fallen dead even as I had. Our spirits would swim down that ever-diminishing Möbius strip river that was Ceelie's brainbody until it imploded. Better these megadeaths within than the potential genocide without. I made the right decision. I had to keep telling myself that, comforted by the fact that I'd only have to live with myself a little while longer.

Matthew Sanborn Smith is the answer to all your questions. His work has appeared at Chiaroscuro, Albedo One and the StarShipSofa podcast. He blogs at The One-Thousand.