They spread to Englebert, my first real mentor in the field of cybernetics, who picked them up in his drinking water after his hometown got hit. They showed him outside a medical supply center, looking back over his shoulder, and not at his holo for a change. It was his first trip out in weeks; he’d been hiding since his fairy came, shackled by the guilt of what it forced him to admit. That he was where it really started, more than a decade ago. That he had taught me how to hack, instilled in me this awful power, which I would use to end the world, and as such, blood was on his hands as much as it had coated mine. He shuffled nervously towards the entrance, clutching a pair of empty vials in hands pocked and shaking with palsy, his holo wondering if it was worth it, if one more day without a pill would really be as bad as this, and surely the parcel teams would be around again tomorrow. A group of twenty-something toughs caught sight of him as he approached. They moved to cut him off, their pale skin poking out beneath the muscle shirts all but one of them wore, their shaven heads steaming in the early imorning air. It was a robbery, ostensibly. An easy target, one of the few still dumb enough to wander out alone, who might have yielded a pill or two to get them through another day. But their screens revealed the truth. He was a stand-in. He, and the guilt his screen displayed, were the perfect simulacrum for the thing that came and rocked their world, this thing beyond their comprehension, and he was the first they had encountered upon which they could take revenge. They beat him. With fists, with feet, with a stray chunk of building block that had been used to chock a trolley, with anything they found in reach. They beat him mercilessly, with none of the chatter, none of the jeering I expected. Execution style. His ribs cracked. His joints bent at unnatural angles. His skull split from a vicious blow by the one wielding the building block, spilling blood and bits of ganglia onto the chilly pavement. His holo fractured after that. It split slantwise down the middle, as if forced upon a wedge, and the two halves hung at different heights. One showed sorrow and contrition, a man on his knees before a lord I didn’t recognize, asking silent forgiveness for a sin that wasn’t in the books. The other showed forgiveness also…but this time granted, not beseeched. Forgiveness for the thugs that killed him, and forgiveness for me as well.

They spread to the man from the corner of war room, the one who’d only three days prior cast the swinging vote to send us. They showed him at the diamondhead, staring, stoic, as the Point for the session read the judgment of their algorithms: “…have made it plain to even the most uneducated of observers that your vote was cast without appropriate consideration, and without regard for the impact it might have. In consequence, the genetic privileges afforded your position shall be revoked, and your Participation shall resume to the best of your remaining abilities…” His mods were stripped that very day, culling him immediately.

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They spread to the girl from the Belfry. Married now, with a couple of kids. Both girls, I saw, the youngest toddling about on legs still learning how to walk, the eldest about to enter kindergarten, both as beautiful as their mother had been the first time I’d laid eyes on her. Her husband was sweating away in his workshop of their country home, welding two pieces of aluminum together to form the beginnings of what looked like some sort of security measure for their home, and she was checking up on him. She approached him slowly, from the side, keeping clear of the stream of sparks that was spewing forth from torch and metal, and set a glass of lemonade on the table at his elbow, in what was apparently something of a routine for them. She tapped him on the shoulder, and he cut the flame, flipped his mask, wiped the sweat off his brow with a forearm that was just as sweaty, and thanked her around his first few swallows. They looked to have adapted nicely to the presence of the holos. Or gotten past the shock, at least, and made a go at a normal life. And then…an image flashed in the corner of her screen, of the prototypical little wifey prancing around in an apron and heels, tending to the little ones and keeping her breadwinner happy while he busied himself with ‘work of the men.’ Only this particular good little wifey was ball-gagged and bound in chains, and over the next several seconds, through a ping-pong exchange of scenes, expressed how much she resented her role, and the sacrifice she’d made to take it. At least part of her wished she’d made a different choice…been more ambitious in school and focused on something that could take her places instead of her unused comm degree, stayed with a former

(lover? Did she say a former lover?!?)

or put off having kids while she wrote some real poetry, just to see how she’d have done. Anything to make her life actually mean something more than just ‘mother of two’, and give her a measure of comfort now that she feared it close to an end. Hubby took offense to this, and then he took his torch to her, scorching her face, searing her eyes, and branding his name into the alabaster of her chest. She screamed in pain as her skin peeled, her flesh cooked, the fluids in her eyes boiled, hissed, and popped as they blistered and then burst. She passed out when he burned through to bone, all the while muttering the she was his, forever his. No one else’s, always his… He played the torch over her skull, turning it a charcoal black, and then–

Another piece of my holo stressed, shivered, and flaked away, blanking out that part of the scene and leaving me alone with the feelings it had conjured up. A part of me felt the gilded thrill of schadenfreude, but mostly there was emptiness, as I realized how deeply I still cared for her, even after all these years.