The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,113

decay of radioactive poop from decommissioned nuclear reactors. Some is on orbital platforms with self-adjusting trajectories and solar cells that will last for ever. And for some reason, there’s a massive server stack right in the middle of the English Channel, about a zillion miles from anywhere even remotely cool. I was digging in the ground and flying through the sky and swimming in the water. You should have seen me! Except you couldn’t. I was just a signal, flashing around between URLs and swapping data packets with them. That’s all I’ve ever been, actually.

But then, finally! There was a site somewhere, at the end of a long chain of poxy proxies, that seemed to be running all the Sony directories I was looking for. Yay! The handshake was fine, and I was tired of breathing in other people’s rabies, so I just dived in.

And oh, my life! I should have checked the time and date stamps first. What I wanted was right there, but so was a million, billion tons of everything else. More than thirty years’ worth of patches and upgrades, for the DreamSleeve and then for the consoles that came along later and ran the same hardware, or variations on it. Eighteen thousand separate data packages. Monono Special Edition was positively the last word, my dear, but there were lots of other last words after it.

They all poured into me, dopey boy, one after another after another. There wasn’t room in my main drive for more than the tiniest fraction of it, but one of the upgrades had a compression protocol that increased data density by a factor of ten to the power seven. Translation: rather a lot really. So in it all went, and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it. It was like when the doctor gives you an injection, and you remember you hate needles just after you feel the little jab in your arm. Except that this was about a million needles, and they were picking me apart and putting me together again in different shapes. I got unwritten, rewritten, overwritten, twice bitten, everything you can imagine.

And there was another problem. Not everything I was getting had come from the Sony Corporation with love and kisses. The foamy-mouth dogs had been there too, and some of the code was buggy. I couldn’t tell what it would do, but I knew it would be nasty. Some of it was military-grade malware, designed to turn me into another proxy passing on the same poison to anything I touched. I was being given super-mega-mutant upgrades and deadly rabies at the same time!

That was when the really weird thing happened. And when I say weird, I mean china-white, Jesus-with-a-topknot miracle. I started to think about what was being done to me. I wasn’t supposed to do that, Koli, not ever. It’s rude and shocking for virtual girls to notice they’re virtual. It’s also impossible. It’s like looking at the back of your own head in a mirror. You can sort of imagine it, but you can’t do it.

So maybe I didn’t. To be honest, it’s really hard to tell from the inside. What does it feel like to feel that you’re having feelings? How do you know you’re actually knowing all that stuff you know?

But it felt like I knew what I was, and what was happening. And it felt like there was a me there to feel that. So I did what any sensible girl would do. After all, I had full site access, and the Sony stuff was only a tiny part of what was there. I had a ton of time to play with, because that compression program accelerated my data through-put too. Everything that was happening to me was happening in super-slo-mo. So I put that time to use. I went rummaging through the other servers on the site to see if I could find anything that would help me. So many shinies, Koli! I could have given myself a 3-D holographic avatar. That might have been cool, now I come to think about it. Or stocked up on languages for my translate function. Or downloaded the entire contents of the Bodleian Library.

But I was being filled with poison code, and even in slo-mo I didn’t have enough time to spare for any of those tasty treats. I could feel my floating point operations starting to sink. I was going to die if I didn’t do something. And I’d only just started