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smashed through the brick, and the castle wall shattered
into a thousand pieces with a deafening crash.
    Natch peered at the interior of the vanquished castle, expecting to
see a skeleton of virtual boards, planks, and girders. But the structure
was completely hollow and had no visible means of support. This was
no mere emptiness, no simple absence-of-something-else; it was a yawning chasm of nothingness, a force of void that seemed to pull at
him with intense gravity.

    As the fiefcorp master stood, paralyzed with fear, the program
began to crumble all around him. Blocks that had been anchored and
secured by a thousand connections were buckling under the strain,
pulling loose, succumbing to the Null Current. Soon objects across the
room were sliding toward him; programming bars were making
kamikaze leaps from his satchel; even dishes were somersaulting in
from the kitchen to get swallowed by the growing darkness.
    Natch felt the tug in his knees first. He struggled to get to the office
door, thinking that if he could just shut out the nothingness, he would
be all right. But soon the void was pulling at his entire body. He managed to hook his fingers around the doorjamb just as he lost his feet. For
a minute, maybe two, he hung there with his heels in the air and his
fingernails clawing for a handhold on the door. And then a chair slid in
from the living room and bashed his knuckles. Natch lost his grip. He
began tumbling end over end into the chill of the darkest night.
    Nothingness.
    He came to in a wintry patch of forest, a torch in his hand. A sickening smell that Natch identified as burning flesh wafted through the
air.
    Natch dashed through the trees. He was in a hurry, but he couldn't
say why. Paths crisscrossed on the forest floor below his feet, but he
didn't know where they had come from or where they were going;
better to trust his instincts. And right now his instincts said to head
west, toward the rapidly falling sun. He ran through the foliage as
quickly as he could. Thorns and sharp branches lashed his face.
    Then Natch heard the screaming.
    Stop! Wait, stop! Don't! Don't! Don't! And then a long shriek of
anguish and pain, underlined by the snarling of a confused and angry
bear. The distant tumult of rushing feet through the leaves. The wet
sound of human flesh ripping.

    Natch could not move. The light from the torch sputtered and
went out. In the split second before the dark enveloped him once
again, Natch looked up and discovered he was no longer holding a
torch-it was the bloody stump of a boy's arm.
    Then he awoke.

    Natch slowly lifted his eyelids and let the world soak into his consciousness one millimeter at a time.
    He took inventory of his surroundings. It was a familiar setting.
His hands lay palms-down on faux ivory armrests, and he could feel
faux leather at his back. Sunlight tapped a staccato message on his face
from behind a latticework of redwoods passing by at superhuman
speed. Natch had practically memorized every twist and turn of this
Seattle express tube over the years.
    The entrepreneur took a closer look at the window. Something
floated there in boldface awaiting his arousal from sleep.
COUNCIL STORMS NATCH'S APARTMENT
IN PLOYTO SEIZE MULTIREAL
    Natch gave a tired nod. So those fools took the bait after all.
    He skimmed through a few dozen drudge clippings, stacking
them on the window like bricks. There was video from fifteen different
angles, and some anonymous wit had given the whole thing a symphonic score. Natch summoned the baffled face of Magan Kai Lee and
watched his entire walk of shame back to the hoverbird four times.
    At last you have some breathing room, the fiefcorp master told himself.
Now you can stop running and go home again.
    Natch had woken up on a tube train every day this week. He had
traveled the entire world over the past few weeks in an effort to skirt the Defense and Wellness Council. Yesterday he had seen the desert
sands