Work was a little iffy, though.

Virtuelle’s campus — all paid for by the unexpected profitability of the world’s first successful virtual reality e-zine — was a carpet of neat quadrangles of grass, separating three-storey office buildings like children’s blocks, gleaming blue glass, identical save for their red numbering. The bottom storey of each building was an open car lot, so that the buildings were fat, top-heavy boxes held up there by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete, all of it a little rickety in the eyes of a Californian.

She spent most of her first day sitting in a cubicle before a blank screen, waiting for her magnetic photo-ID key and her e-mail address to be allocated her, without which, as far as she could tell, she didn’t really exist here, and she certainly couldn’t go anywhere or do anything.

The cafeteria — where a kindly security guard bought her coffee and a sandwich for lunch pending the day her IDs arrived — seemed to be the centrepiece of the campus. It was a spectacular multi-level glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide Berlin Wall, laden with graffiti, and giant posters of happy customers, overlooking a sparsely populated food hall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little stone bridges spanning it.

White security vehicles openly toured the campus. There seemed to be video surveillance in most office areas. She couldn’t receive faxes; these arrived at a central drop point and were distributed throughout the campus. A notice over her desk reminded her that even her e-mails could at any time be subpoenaed by the Justice Department.

A slow start, then.

On her third day, though, once her e-mail alias had been allocated, she arrived to a blizzard of mails, almost all of them utterly irrelevant.

She met her boss once, a pushy New Man who insisted on bringing his three-year-old kid into work every day: fun, but it made serious progress impossible, although he didn’t seem to recognize that.

Still, he gave her a first assignment: a major feature on the Rainier blow-out.

There was no shortage of material, of course, a lot of it gripping and dramatic, much of it in IMAX or 3-D formats. Here were the first ash eruptions, small, but sufficient to shroud Rainier’s snow-capped peak with black streaks. Here were the geologists earnestly studying the bulge that had grown out of the hillside at a rate of yards a day, in a time-lapse sequence visible to the naked eye.

Then came the sharp earthquake that dislodged the giant avalanche of ice and rock from the northern face of the mountain, releasing the pressure on the superheated groundwater and magma beneath the volcano.

And the explosion. Half of the remaining peak was torn off, like a cork popping, hurling the fragments across five hundred square miles of forested ridges, the biggest seismic event in the Cascades since Mount St Helens.

A whole set of last words, distorted and stark.

Here was the geologist from the USGS who had been measuring the bulge, and when the explosion came, just had time to radio his headquarters: Vancouver — Vancouver — I think… Here was the old Navy guy who had been manning a Department of Emergency Services volunteer warning station a mile north of the avalanche, who had coolly described the avalanche, and how it overwhelmed his partner a half-mile away, and even how, in the end, it came to get him too.

Great pictures, of course. Gas, billowing out of the exposed magma body for twelve hours, jetted ash high into the sky and sent ash flows down the shattered north flank. Rivers of mud flowed down the miniature valleys that drained the mountain. A little town called Orting was overwhelmed with ash, but not before heroic feats of evacuation led by the guys from VDAP, lots of human interest stuff.

Volcanic ash even rained down on the Seattle-Tacoma area, in some places inches thick, covering cars and pedestrians and sidewalks, tyre marks like snow.

Well, it was a hell of a thing, and even given the coverage it had already, would make a great virtual feature.

And of course the most interesting aspect was how this was all connected to the Edinburgh explosion.

She tapped into the buzz about the volcano plague that was spreading around the world. But she couldn’t get any responsible geologist to comment on that.

Most of them said they weren’t too surprised by Rainier’s eruption. For hundreds of years Rainier had been subject to erosion from the weather outside, and from simmering magma inside. The magma had cooked the innards of the mountain to unstable clay. Rainier had, they told her, gone rotten, and the big bang had just been waiting to happen; it hadn’t taken much of a seismic jolt to kickstart the eruption.

But why now?

Of course the volcano plague was the world’s biggest story: a string of disasters, big and small, widespread and localized, following in the wake of Edinburgh. In addition to those directly affected — including the injured and the dead, already too many to count — everyone was feeling the knock-on effects.

Air flights and shipping had been disrupted. The ash in the air worsened what Venus had already done, and disrupted crops worldwide. In the US, prices in the stores were sky-high on some items. Elsewhere, people were already starving. Or rioting. Or going to war.

Right now things — the world — seemed to be holding together. National governments were handling their local emergencies — but the services were stretched. International co-operation was collapsing. Peacekeeping troops were being flown home. Trade was crumbling, and some nations were threatening protectionism.

There were already politicians calling for a “Fortress USA” mentality.

It was bad, and getting worse, steadily.

But what interested Joely was Rainier. Was its eruption part of the plague? If it was, could they expect more of the same?

Just coincidence, the geologists said. Probably.

Some of them admitted to her they didn’t know enough about the plague to be sure.

Of course there was always the nutty fringe, who held that the whole planet was doomed, like Venus.

Still, when you thought about that, the assumed geological stability of the Washington region was kind of odd. After all you had Alaska up the coast and California to the south, both plagued by devastating quakes. Why should Washington be spared? The locals just assumed it was so, despite Rainier. Not here, not in Seattle…

She spent some time digging a little deeper into the online libraries. And, slowly, she began to piece together an answer.

Seattle-Tacoma was sitting on top of an area where one tectonic plate was diving under another.

An ocean floor plate called the Juan de Fuca Plate was spreading out from a centre somewhere in the Pacific. When it hit the North American Plate, a little ways offshore, it dived beneath it, back towards the mantle. Subduction, this was called.

So in the place where the plates were in contact, they rubbed over each other.

But not smoothly.

Part of the fault that separated the two plates remained locked. So the continental plate was bending, like a board bent over a table, folding under itself to follow the ocean plate.

The continent could bend so far, as if it was made of rubber. But eventually it would snap back into place. And then—

Well, the technical journals were a little light on detail on what would happen at this point.

There were few severe earthquakes in the area’s historical record, she found. But then it was only two hundred years since the first Europeans, including Captain Cook, visited the region, and “history” began. And there were plenty of earlier disasters reported in the oral histories of the region’s original inhabitants. Such as the big quake that struck Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, one winter night: in the morning the village at the head of the bay had gone…