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of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, had shut down shortly after the Extermination in a belated response to a “terrorist attack,” while the hospital of the Pacific State Medical University didn’t have a backup router.
    Only the fourth copy of Bartek hadn’t allowed itself to be devoured after waking by the malware spread across the web.
    “If it is malware. The people on the western edge of our hemisphere had twelve hours to move, a whole half-rotation of the Earth. And yes, you’re right, most of them uploaded at the very last moment – a few dozen people, maybe a few hundred. It makes sense that some of them wouldn’t have had time to complete the process. The Meridian cut through them in the middle of the IS. There’s even a theory – you can read about it on the forums – a theory/cult claiming that this is exactly where all those rabid mind-eating programs came from.”
    “From not-quite copied minds, neuro-chunks, remnants of brain structures?”
    “Yep. But it gets even more necro-crazy: the idea that Death itself was scanned in, I mean, the moment their protein brains were fried. They were plugged into the IS3 when the Meridian went through them. And now it’s spreading across the servers, copying itself and infecting everything.”
    “You mean… what’s spreading?”
    “I just told you: Death.”
    Meanwhile, a mobile police bollard (a ten-kilo mech) was chasing a factory mastodon hoist (a two-ton mech) through the Expo in a Wild Hunt of steel and plastic. Bartek and SoulEater had to flee their corner to avoid being crushed.
    “The idiot IS’d his beloved sausage dog.”
    The sausage dog was the elephantine carrier mech.
    Bart had the overwhelming impression that he’d been dropped into a pastiched cartoon created for nerds.
    SoulEater winked at him with his LEDs.
    “Bit of a shock, eh?”
    Bartek displayed Animal the Muppet beating his head against a wall.
    “Like I’ve been buried alive – and all this is just the dreamy itching of the cerebral cortex.”
    “Check out the MTL, the Moscow list, and you’ll see transformers split into separate copies. That’s how they test coping mechanisms on themselves: which applications and plug-ins stabilize your psyche and which ones drive you to suicide. Because there’s nothing simpler than deleting yourself. We all feel the same itch.”
    Bartek instinctively searched with his lens for SoulEater’s face, but there was only a screen, which was still displaying the world transformer map.
    “You must have all done a lot of thinking in those three weeks.”
    “And where were you?”
    Bartek flashed his lights gloomily.
    “It got me down. I slowed myself down to a torpor.”
    “Well, some people had the opposite problem. They sped up as much as the processors would allow. We’re three depressions ahead of you.”
    Suddenly SoulEater39 wrapped a spidery arm around Bartek and yanked the heavy mech to one side. He was just in time too, as the hulking titanium hoist rolled past once again. It would have crushed Bartek like nothing.
    “Daddy?! Has anybody seen my daddy?!”
    Bartek zoomed in on the display of the bellowing cargo mech. It showed family photos and films, lolcats and Cartman.
    “A kid.”
    “We’ve got a few of them. If you have a choice, who do you IS before the Extermination? First you save your children – it’s an instinct imprinted in your DNA. Then yourself.”
    SoulEater pointed to some colored dots on the American continent. A few dozen toddlers had logged in from right under the last meridian.
    “The Californian Orphans.”
    “Who looks after them?”
    SoulEater undulated on the spot (arms up, arms down).
    “We do,” he said. Then he displayed the logo of the GOATs: horns locked into horns in a tangle that flowed into the lines of an integrated circuit. “The guild.”
    At that moment Bart, understood that he was being recruited.
    “I don’t even know your name.”
    “Yes you do.