Author: Simon Kerr

Iru glanced down past the beast’s flank, twin pulsars shining in the dark below, rotating once every ninety seconds. The race began when the pulses aligned. Scanning the other racers, she accessed her synaptic implant, modulating heart rate and blood pressure, throttling adrenaline. The recursive nanovirus she’d introduced earlier was having some effect, but at least seventy percent of the others still seemed intact. Without that edge, she stood little chance of winning, and the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

Accessing the data sphere, time slowed to an atomic tick as she dived down into code. The virus had grown unexpectedly, fractal razors viciously hacking away at the implants of those it encountered. As she reached out with a newly constructed function, a lance of pain, like a needle in the eyeball, penetrated her defenses. That could happen only if the virus had been modified. Someone else was in here with her. She traced code markers back to their source, approached an unfamiliar node, like some dark, ominous cavern. A dim spark of consciousness waited inside, surrounded by the vague forms of gigantic white cells, autonomous defensive systems designed to consume foreign intruders. Only one other person in the race could navigate the sphere like she could—Grey, her old mentor. And fortunately, she had no qualms about killing him, right here and now. She launched a little surprise of her own devising, straight into the node, watching as it imploded, before turning to correct the virus.

Coming up out of the datasphere, she smiled inwardly as, one by one, critical systems in the other racers’ implants went offline. Some would fail to start, others would follow a bogus course, still others would simply explode. The twin pulsars aligned, their radioactive decay signalling the start, as Iru slammed the neural shunt of her behemoth into overdrive.