Then the lips came apart with a shuddering tear as the face began to scream…

The agonizing wail was still echoing in Ansen's mind as he tore the goggles away from his face. Just as it had before, when he had confronted the mist-filled tunnel icon, the system had dumped him. The goggles were dead, their speakers silent.

Had Ansen turned to look behind him at the flatscreen monitor that served as his apartment's "window" on the world outside, he would have seen an image similar to the one he'd just seen on-line. Down on the street below his building, a woman in a tailored skirt and jacket staggered down the sidewalk, her face twisted in agony and her hands clenched in her hair. Oblivious to the traffic that surged past her, she turned suddenly on her heel and ran out into the street

The window did not show what happened next, for the woman had disappeared into the gray static that obscured the center of the display. But the traffic came to an abrupt halt, and in another moment drivers closest to the blank space were spilling out of their vehicles with grim looks on their faces.

Ansen, bent over his deck, was oblivious to the drama that was unfolding on the wall screen behind him. He frowned down at the Vista, trying to puzzle out what had gone wrong. The sensor board still glowed with life. And the flatscreen display was active. But all background color had been leached from the screen, leaving it a blinding white. Across this blank field scrolled blocky red letters. The same message repeated itself, refusing to clear no matter what commands Ansen executed with his data gloves.

ACCESS DENIED. LEAVE ME ALONE. GO AWAY.

Ansen frowned. The first part of the message made sense. Some glitch in his deck was routing him somewhere strange, then dumping him before he could log on to any system. He thanked the spirits that he didn't have a direct neural interface; suffering dump shock twice in one day would have given him a serious skull ache, for sure. But the second part of the message made no sense. Who was "me"?

It was starting to sound like his deck had picked up a virus. And the only way to be rid of a virus was to replace every meg of memory in the Vista. To re-slot every single chip.

Ansen sighed. He wished he knew another decker well enough to call on the telecom unit at the end of the hall. Brother Data would be able to tell him what to do. Or Digital Dawg or Sysop Sarah. But he was used to interfacing with them only over the chat stations of the Matrix. He didn't even know their real names, let alone their telecom numbers.

Grabbing his tools, he began to replace the optical chips that made up his deck's active and storage memory banks.

09:52:05 PST

Timea had no idea where she was. She'd logged onto the Seattle RTG through the clinic's Redmond address, but instead of the familiar grid she found herself in a tunnel whose walls blurred past as she rushed toward an impossibly bright light. The dizzying sense of uncheckable mo mentum brought back a painful memory. She'd experienced exactly the same hallucination after she'd taken the straight razor and…

The scene had shifted then.

What followed had proven equally horrific. She'd regressed to the size of an embryo, and had gone through the whole miraculous process of development. She'd felt her tiny body changing, growing-then experienced the Painful wonder of being born. Until an abortion cut that experience short. She was the aborted fetus, the embryonic being whose life was being terminated. Except that she had been full grown, an adult with full awareness of what was happening to her…

The trash. They'd thrown her dying body in a trash can. And then the lid had started to close. Frantically, Timea had scrambled upward with bleeding and broken hands, had managed to pull herself partially out of the dumpster. With one last Herculean effort, she tumbled over the lip of the dumpster and landed on-linoleum tiles?

After a moment of disorientation, her surroundings came into focus. She found herself lying in a corridor that stretched to infinity in front of her and behind her, with impenetrable darkness at one end and brilliant white light at the other. The linoleum floor beneath her was stained and heavily pitted with scratches, as if some wounded creature had dragged itself along the floor with its claws. Somewhere in the shadows at one end of the corridor the beast waited for her, ready to take its revenge…

Shuddering, Timea stood up. She looked back over her shoulder, waiting for the beast to emerge from the shadowed end of the tunnel-like hallway. In the opposite direction, the bright light somehow seemed equally menacing.

The walls on either side of her were painted a faded white and were covered with graffiti. None of the graffiti was legible-the tags were meaningless scrawls and the Pictures were just smears of paint. Dull reds and blacks and blues, like the ink in a faded tattoo.

Timea tried touching one of the pictures, thinking it might be an icon. It looked vaguely erotic, the outside suggesting a couple embracing in a tight clinch.

Shame. She was disgusting, dirty. They all knew what she had done. They'd watched in revulsion while she did this to him, looked on in disgust while she took him into her Timea yanked her hand away. The wash of raw emotion left her shaking. It was like a simsense recording in which only the emotive track remained. Sex had never been like that for her. This had to have come from some twisted porn upload.

She shivered as she looked closer at the other kons on the walls. The smears of paint now looked frightening, dangerous. Some suggested acts of violence, others had the outlines of people cringing in fear or doubling over in pain. Timea's eyes narrowed. Had the kids at her clinic blundered into this place and touched one of these emotive icons? Was that why they had started screaming? If so, where were they now?

The hallway was empty except for Timea. Doors lined the walls on either side. Each was inset with a tiny pane of glass that was reinforced with crisscrossing wires. Timea stood on her toes and peered in through one of the windows, but as soon as her eyes came level with the window, it shimmered and became a mirror.

She glanced at her own reflection, wishing now that she had chosen a different persona icon. The kids at the clinic knew what she looked like on-line, but in their terrified state they were unlikely to recognize her as a friend. The sallow skin, the discolored bandages that hung from her forearms like funeral wrappings, the elaborate Egyptian style headdress with its grinning jackal head-none of these would inspire confidence or reassurance now. The kids would probably run in terror from the desiccated mummy that was Timea's on-line persona.

The door had a handle-probably the access node for whatever system or host connected to this one. Timea tried it, but the handle did not turn. The window cleared, however.

Peering inside, Timea saw what looked like the virtualscape of the teaching program that came with Renraku's MatrixPal cyberdeck. Brightly colored spheres, rectangular blocks, hexagons, and pyramids-all UMS icons for the various forms of node to be found on the Matrix rotated gently in a vast room. Other icons represented the most commonly used system operations and utilities: a cartoonish hollow glove with pointing finger for log on/log off operations; an old-fashioned hardcopy book and quill pen for read/write and download/upload; a digital compass for locate file or host operations.

Floating in the air amid the icons was a silver-skinned, hairless human. Its naked, metallic skin was utterly featureless and Timea could not tell if it were male or female. Its knees were drawn up into its chest and its arms were wrapped around them. Its head was tucked into its chest, concealing the face. It was the standard UMS icon for a decker's persona except for one detail. Instead of being metallic like the rest of the body, the head was made of clear glass. A scene was being projected inside it, like a hologram inside a decorative glass sphere. It was difficult to make out details from this angle, but from what Timea could see, the scene involved a crashing VTOL and exploding nukes. The images of destruction strobed back and forth, every now and then juxtaposed against the close-up of a bearded dwarf's screaming face. The holo looked like the preview for some sort of action simsense experience.