She chased him from one empty shell account to another, tracing phony netmail nodes, weaving through PABXs, through telephone exchanges, through backdoored commercial servers that shut down as she tried to pass through them, leaving the trail cold, forcing her to retrace her steps, to try again; but always he disappeared in the looping path that he had created for her through the networks, a path that seemed to spell out her name before at last it disappeared.

Sarita sat back in her chair and pressed her hands to her eyes. Her eyes felt loose in their sockets, like marbles made of biological tissue and left to float in a jar of formaldehyde.

She reached for her coffee. It was black and sugary and cold, and when she drank it, it was like being hit by a slow-moving tractor—an unpleasant experience, perhaps, but one that jolted her into a more involved awareness. She put down the coffee and picked up a copy of the Mutation Engine’s code. She had looked at that code every night now for the past four months and thirteen days, admiring the writing—it was what computer programmers would call elegant—but mostly she looked at one line of ASCII text which had been left there almost, one might say, unnecessarily.

It was not part of the code; it was a message. It said, ‘To Sarita,
who wanted to have a virus named after her.’

...

Purchase the issue to read more of this piece and others