With a shudder of revulsion, Markram shouldered past the…zombies? No, not zombies. Oddly-behaved people, that was it. Keeping a nervous eye on them, he sat down at the Internet terminal, entered his library card number, and pressed the hotkey that would bring up his virus-app’s console window. He entered the password that would give him operator privileges, and pulled up the neural network display.

The display was supposed to show a map of the computers that were acting as neurons, and statistics on the bandwidth they were using to relay information to and from the central computer at the lab. But the thing was, it was showing they had started sending the information to each other instead. Markram blinked and rubbed his eyes. The cloud wasn’t just running a simulation—it was acting like a real, thinking brain.

As Markram stared at the screen, he started to notice a sort of pattern flickering in the background, behind the display. If he unfocussed his eyes just a little, he thought he could see—