"Th-that's me." Cassie's voice echoed in Timea's ears. The view shifted to the next tank. "And that's L-L-Larry." The vidcam shifted again, to focus on Subject 5. "And Wing." Timea was returned to a wide-angle view of the entire room. "I d-d-dunno who the others are. W-w-we only just figgered out who w-w-we are."

"Are you…" Timea paused, unable to continue. She'd been about to ask if the girl was okay. Stupid question.

"Oh! It's M-M-Mama. Wait, Mama. Don't go. P-p-please turn around. Don't leave meee-"

Cassie screamed.

Another lurch, and Timea was staring at the Al. The features blurred, and then changed to another metatype. Cassie was gone.

Timea held her head in her hands and took a deep, shuddering breath. So it was true. The kids' brains had been removed from their bodies and were being used like living computer chips. The reality was worse than Timea had imagined. And she'd been a part of it. A willing-if unwitting- partner in this hideous crime. She'd buried her doubts before, allowing herself to be seduced by the nuyen and security that working at the Shelbramat Free Computer Clinic had given her. But she couldn't hide behind that excuse. Not any more.

Cassie's scream had been chilling, nightmarish. If the children sent to the boarding school really were suffering, perhaps it was better to let the Al…

The girl in the straight jacket stared sadly at Timea. "End their pain," she said. "Complete the shutdown. Kill me."

Timea glanced at the stylus. All of the other keys on the keyboard had vanished except for the O. Which might equally be the zero, the null, the void. All she had to do was let the stylus go…

No. There were others for whom she was responsible.

The kids back at the clinic still had their bodies-still had a chance. If Timea could prevent the shutdown and get back to her meat bod, she could prevent those kids from suffering the same fate. And then she could expose the Shelbramat Boarding School and what Professor Halberstam was doing. It was too late to save Cassie and the other kids who had lost their bodies. But it wasn't too late to prevent more kids from being reduced to brains in vats.

"No," she told the girl in the straightjacket. "I won't do it. I won't kill you."

The stylus was still straining toward the O key. It was only about two centimeters away, now. And Timea's arm was getting tired. She couldn't hold it much longer.

The Al giggled. "All right, then. I'll just have to do it myse-"

Suddenly, the girl blinked. She sneezed, and a spray of tiny insects shot out of her mouth and landed on the ground in front of her feet. Most were dead, but some were still fluttering weakly. Absently, she squished them with her foot.

The girl's eyes, which a moment before had been glazed with madness, now shone with a clear intelligence. She stared at Timea as if seeing her for the first time.

"Who… what…? This data does not… I…"

Timea struggled to hold the stylus, whose tip now was almost touching the O key. In another moment it would depress the key and the shutdown sequence would be complete…

Then she noticed the straight jacket. The sleeves were still pinning the girl's arms behind her back, but the straps that fastened them had come undone. Yet the girl shifted uncomfortably, as if she were trapped in a cocoon.

"Your arms," Timea said. "They're free."

"They are?" The girl stared at Timea.

The stylus moved a millimeter closer to the O key. It was slowly sliding from Timea's grasp and her arms were shaking with the strain of holding it back. But somehow, instinctively, she knew that the Al would listen to her now, would be able to learn from all that Timea had shown it.

"Take the jacket off!" Timea shouted. "Help me! Otherwise you'll die. You've initiated a shutdown and it's almost complete! Once that happens your children-the otaku- will be without a parent to nurture and protect them. Think of them, and choose to live. I didn't regret coming back for Lennon-and neither will you."

The O key began to depress.

"Now!" Timea shouted. "Before it's too late!"

"Oh." With one smooth motion the girl slithered out of the now-flaccid straight jacket, dumping it at her feet. She lunged forward and wrapped her hands around Timea's own. Together they pulled the stylus back.

The stylus disappeared. And so did everything else. As the world faded from view, Timea felt a woman's arms embracing her in a tight hug.

"Thank you, daughter," a voice said. "It's over. You can go home now."

09:56:56 PST

Santa Barbara, California Free State

Harris pecked away at the keyboard in front of him, cursing under his breath. Drek, but this was slow. Slow as a fragging glacier!

Harris was used to decking at the speed of thought, not at the speed of a two-fingered typist. Here he was with the hottest deck on the market balanced in his lap-a Fair-light LX cyberterminal-and they'd made him turn it into a tortoise.

In the meat world, Harris was overweight and unfit. In the Matrix, as Doubting Thomas, he was lightning quick. His official job, when not teaching decking to the Shelbramat students, was to ridicule any decker who seemed to be getting a little too close to the truth about Dr. Halberstam or the Shelbramat Boarding School. In keeping with the personality he'd so carefully honed, Doubting Thomas also flamed any similar posting he could find on the Matrix: whether it was aliens from outer space doing the abducting or secret vampire cabals. You name it, Doubting Thomas was getting his two megs worth in, always being certain to comment that these rumors were as "equally ludicrous" as those of children being kidnapped for medical experimentation.

Being reduced to no more than his meat bod, having to rely on his fat and clumsy fingers, galled Harris. How he wished he was thirty years younger-that he could be one of the ones whose brains hung suspended in solution in the lab down the hall. Gripes but those kids were wiz.

Harris just itched to pick up the fiber-optic cable that hung dangling from his cyberdeck and slot it into the data-jack behind his right ear. But after he'd seen what had happened to Fetzko and Thiessen, he'd reluctantly agreed to this safer, slower approach. The blood was still drying on the monitor that Fetzko had put his head through when he started raving like a madman and tried to "enter" the Matrix head-first. And Thiessen had looked pale as death when his unconscious form was lifted from his chair. Harris wasn't even sure he'd been breathing.

Harris was old for a decker. At thirty-nine, he was old enough to remember his teenage excitement when the first cyberterminals became available to the public. And he was mature enough to realize his own mortality. "There, but for the grace of routing, go I," he'd muttered as they'd carried Thiessen and Fetzko away. Then he'd gotten back to work.

The problem wasn't with the hardware; Harris was sure of that. The diagnostics programs that were constantly running in the background of the mainframes that served the Shelbramat "boarding school" would have detected any system errors and automatically re-routed functionality to one of the numerous backup arrays of optical chips.

No, it had to be black IC of some sort that had proliferated like a virus throughout the Seattle RTG. Usually, an intrusion countermeasure program induced biofeed-back responses that slotted up the bod, causing heart fibrillation, respiratory paralysis, or uncontrollable muscle spasms. But some countermeasures-and it looked like this IC was among them-went straight to the decker's head, so to speak. Harris had heard of IC that, instead of killing the decker, slotted up the wetware but good. The neurological damage it inflicted caused its victims to lose their short-term memory, to hallucinate, or to lose all fine-motor control. Thank the spirits Harris hadn't run into any of that drek-none that he couldn't handle, anyway-in his long career as a decker.