A vibrant logo zoomed out to confront him; it read 'Olsen Insurance.' A chatbot in the form a friendly old man ambled out from behind it. "Welcome to Olsen Insurance," he said, "your source for insurance with a personal touch."
Five cobble stone paths radiated from the corporate logo. The chatbot continued its sales-spiel as Devin searched desperately for a place to go. The chatbot squawked, like a record needle ripped across the grooves, and bubbled away into black crud, dissolving into the green grass. Veins spread out from the black pool it left, infecting the surrounding ground.
Devin sprinted away just as the spot erupted into a fountain of living chaos. Tendrils whipped through the air where he just stood. The link Devin took was chosen at random.
"Ooof!" he crumpled over a mahogany desk, stopped dead in his tracks.
"Hello, I'm Tracy Johnson," a cheerful woman's voice greeted. Devin looked up to find a sales-woman beaming an artificial smile at the thin air above him, "and I want your business! As your agent..."
He stood up and looked around. There was no door. He ran to the large window with a view of the ocean and opened it. Reaching through, his hands stopped on a smooth flat surface like a television screen.
The room trembled and Tracy fizzled slightly. The walls and ocean view cracked, oozing black. Devin backed away from the window and into a bookshelf.
Of course, he thought and scanned the titles there. Most were documents and policy options, but one title leapt out at him, "Favorite Links." He pulled the book down and it opened automatically in his hand. Without reading he stabbed his finger at a random hyperlink in the list.
He was running along a dirt path, following a stream of water. A park ranger came up to run along side of him, "Hello! And welcome to the Official web site for the Shenandoah national wildlife refuge! Is there anything I can help you with today?"
"Yes," Devin shouted between breaths, there was no hope of finding the others. He needed a non-local system to put some distance between him and the cyc tide, "Direct me to the National Park Services web-site."
"We lost that man!" Samantha exclaimed. Zai had sensed Devin falling behind them with dreadful fatalism. He was lost when they shortcut through the Associated Press Newsfeeds. Zai could only hope for his safety.
Zai's system described a subway terminal. This was good. The hyperlink would deliver them directly to ideonexus. Then they could locate a network still free, maybe China or Australia.
"Access hyperlink to ideonexus-dot-com," Zai commanded and was rewarded with the sound of a rushing train. Samantha gasped in either awe or discomfort. She was piggybacked to Zai's avatar so long as they held hands, meaning she saw the world Zai heard. One second they stood in a subway station, the next they were whooshed along at hundreds of miles per hour to the ideonexus portal.
Zai squeezed Samantha's hand reassuringly, "Stay close. I'm going to move pretty quickly to find our way home."
"Okay," Samantha said, squeezing back. Zai found the fear in the girl's voice upsetting on so many levels, and it left her confused, but the present crisis allowed no time for cognitively sorting the emotions out.
The rushing air stopped and Zai was confronted with hundreds of people conducting their everyday business online, transferring to and fro across the Web. Zai let go a quick sigh of relief; people meant the cycs were not here yet. Now she had to find a way back to her body.
"Hold on Samantha, I'm going to send us home," Zai hit the home key on her wristband-bzzzzzzt! "Dammit!"
She checked the network status, the portal replied, "Address not found. Please try again later."
Then Zai heard the signature rumbling and whispers. Samantha cried out in alarm, and other user's exclamations quickly joined her. Clenching Samantha's hand, Zai bolted ahead, trying to distance themselves from the swelling doom behind them.
From Samantha's perspective, the crawling mass flooded in from the subway where they just emerged. Users all around were swept into the whirlpool of chaos. Others tried to run, but were snatched up in black tendrils.
Zai fled through the station, testing links as she ran, "Access entertainment."
"Site unavailable, please try again-"
"Access society."
"Site unavailable, please-"
"Access current events."
"Site unavailable-"
The entire portal was a cacophony of fear and panic. Screams cut short as the biomass consumed them. The cycs were conquering the Web too fast; Zai's human reactions could not hope escape it.
"I can't log out! I can't log out!" a man shouted in fear to Zai's left as she tore through the stunned crowd.
No human can escape it, Zai stopped and crouched to grab Samantha's arms, "Samantha, I need you to find a way out of here fast. Can you do that?"
Zai's system told her the girl was nodding. Then she vanished, leaving Zai holding thin air. Zai dropped to her knees and waited tensely, humming softly to herself, attempting to block out the surrounding horrors. Samantha was now her only hope.
The rumbling grew into a roar and the panic intensified. The situation was too nightmarish, not being in an SDC, but actually separated from her body. Was she like Samantha, a ghost, running loose in the circuitry?
Zai took a fragmentor off her utility belt and primed it. If the cycs ingested her, they would swallow it as well. When she ceased to exist, the primer would release and the device would detonate, causing insignificant damage, but it provided a minor comfort knowing she would cause some indigestion going down.
The rushing water roared in her ears, and then Samantha was taking her free hand, "I found a way. Let's go."
Zai laughed thankfully and let Samantha take her through the open link, pausing long enough in the connecting portal to drop the fragmentor. It exploded behind them, destroying the passageway. There were millions of other ways to reach them, but this route was now closed.
Zai hit the home key on her wristband. It chimed and she was greeted Devin's voice.
"Thank god you made it," he said breathlessly. "Let's log out of here."
"No," Zai shook her head, griping Samantha's hand. "I'm not leaving her."
"The area is clear," the ISF commander said, his earlier sarcasm absent. "If you have no further need of us..."
Dana merely nodded, and the commander excused himself, taking what he'd witnessed here to haunt him the rest of his days. The forensics team had made quick work of the girl's machine, and now Dana searched the feedback scrolling along the technician's monitor for anything recognizable.
They were running a data-harvesting program over Samantha's flash drive. Even if she had taken precautions to delete all evidence from it, bits of data always remained. Every time something was "deleted" from a computer, it was simply marked for overwriting. Completely cleaning a machine was nearly impossible. So much information was stored in temporary and log files that traces always remained.
While the technicians brought in the mobile lab, Dana was learning more about the girl. At eight years old, the complexity of her computer crimes defined her as a child prodigy. Her parents, Dana guessed, were oblivious. Samantha was not enlisted in any special school programs, and there were no aptitude tests on record in the public education database. She was eight years old, but her parents had kept her out of public school. Dana dwelled on how, thanks to technology, the apple could fall very far from the tree.
Samantha's body was at least a week old. The cause of death was neglect. The child's ribs were apparent, the cheeks and eyes sunken. She starved to death standing on her feet.