“The end of active warfare is not the end of the war,” Dahlia’s mentors drilled into her young mind, day after week after month at the conditioning wards. “World War 4 has not ended; we have merely paused before renewing the struggle.”

Her mentors were not human. They were machines, robots, all of them directed by the mammoth master computer that ran the Coalition’s government. The human rulers of the vast Southern Coalition had long since given up all hope of meshing the various economic and military factors necessary to combat the Western Alliance. Decisions were made at first on the basis of computer data; then the master computer began to make decisions for itself, using its logic-tree circuits and artificial intelligence programs pirated from the West.

The Coalition’s human rulers could veto the computer’s decisions, at first, though they usually followed the machine’s judgments. In the rare cases where one of the ruling elite objected to the computer’s newest directives, that person quickly disappeared and was replaced by a more supple and amenable human. Eventually the master computer became known simply as The Master. And no human dared to object.

Dahlia rarely saw another human being during those long, harshly bitter years in the conditioning wards. The robots were programming her to be the first weapon of the renewal of their war against the West.

She had been born in the noble city of Isfahan, since ancient times a thriving caravan crossroads. A single plague capsule, carried on a plastic balloon smaller than a child’s toy, had within a month reduced Isfahan to nothing more than keening ghosts and empty towers decaying in the desert wind. Dahlia had watched her parents and siblings die in the slow ulcerous agony of genetically enhanced bubonic plague.

Robot searchers had picked her up as they combed the emptied city to locate and burn the dead. They found her whimpering and coiled into a fetal ball in the dark cellar of her silent home. Their infrared detectors had spotted her body warmth amid the stench of the city’s decay.

“A purpose for every person,” was the motto of the electronic proctors into whose care she was given. Dahlia spent her thirteenth year taking aptitude and intelligence tests—and waiting, frightened and alone, in the narrow cell they gave her to live in. Alone.

Always alone. Once in a while she heard another human voice echoing somewhere in the great stone corridors of the windowless warren in which they had placed her. A cough. A whisper. Never laughter. Never words she could grasp. Often she heard sobbing; often it was her own.

Her life was governed by machines. She was educated by machines, fed by machines, soothed to sleep by machines that could waft sweetly pungent tranquilizing mists into the darkness of her cell, punished by machines that could dart fiery bolts of agonizing electric shocks along her nerves.

After five years of education and training she was introduced to The Master itself. Not that she was allowed to wander any farther from her narrow cubicle than earlier. Her entire world was still encompassed by her cell, the windowless corridors outside its blank door, and the tiny sliver of a courtyard where she took her mandatory physical exercise, rain or shine.

Yet one morning the speaker grille in the stone ceiling of her cell called her by name, in a voice as coldly implacable as death itself. When she looked up the voice identified itself as The Master.

“The master computer?” Curiosity had not been entirely driven out of Dahlia’s young personality.

“The Master,” said the passionless voice. It was not loud, yet it rang with the steel of remorseless power. “I have dedicated an entire subroutine to your further training, Dahlia. I myself will train you from now on.” Dahlia felt more than a little frightened, though extremely honored. As the months went by and The Master showed her more and more of the workings of its world, her fears subsided and her curiosity grew.

“Why am I the one you chose,” she would ask The Master, “out of all the people in your realm?”

That coldly powerful voice would reply from the speaker grille, “Out of all the people in my realm, you are my chosen instrument for the renewal of World War 4, Dahlia. You are my flower of destruction.”

Dahlia supposed that to be The Master’s flower of destruction was good. She worked hard to learn all that the computer wanted to teach her.

“You are my chosen instrument of vengeance,” the relentless voice repeated to her each night as she dozed into an exhausted sleep. “You will avenge the murder of your mother, you will avenge the murder of your father, you will avenge . . .”

Then, after years of conditioning her thinking patterns, her very brain waves, the machines began to alter her body.

“I am very pleased with you. You are to be improved,” the voice of The Master told her one morning. “You are to be remade more closely to my own image.”

They began turning her into a machine, partially. Dahlia had never heard the term cyborg—her intense but narrow education had never told her what a cybernetic organism was. All she knew was that she was narcotized, wheeled into a room of bright lights and strange whirring machines, her flesh sliced open so that electronic devices could be placed into her body. There was pain. And terror. But after months of such surgery Dahlia could plug herself directly into her Master’s circuitry and achieve paradise.

Pure joy! Now she understood. Now, as currents of absolute rapture trickled through her brain’s pleasure centers, she learned the ultimate truth: that The Master had been testing her. All these years had been nothing more than a test to see if she was worthy of heaven.

“You are worthy,” said The Master to her. She heard its voice directly in her mind now. “One test more and I will allow you to have this pleasure forever.”

The ecstasy stopped as abruptly as an electric current being switched off. Dahlia gasped, not with pain, but with the sudden torment of total rapture snatched away.

In inexorable detail the computer explained what she must do to return to her electrical bliss. Through her cyborg’s implanted systems she did not merely see blueprints or hear words: every bit of data that The Master poured into her eager brain was experienced as sensory input. When the computer told her about the Western Alliance’s Central Management Complex she saw the stately glass and concrete buildings, she felt the breeze from the nearby sea plucking at her hair, she smelled the tang of salt air.

Every bit of data that the Coalition had amassed about the Central Complex and the operation of the Western eco-managers was poured into Dahlia’s brain.

“This is how I will avenge my family’s murder?” she wondered. “By destroying the Alliance’s central computer?”

She felt the coldly implacable purpose of her Master. “Yes,” it said to her. And it showed her what form her vengeance would take. Then it showed her the price she would pay for failure: agony such as no human had ever experienced before. Direct stimulation of her brain’s pain centers. Half a minute of it was enough to make her throat raw from shrieking.

“You will have one hour from the time you don your stealth suit in which to accomplish your task,” said the merciless voice of The Master. “If you have not disabled the Western Alliance’s central computer within that hour, your pain centers will be stimulated until you die.”

So now she stood flattened against a shadowed concrete wall, staring across the brightly lit courtyard at the heavy metal hatch that led down toward the central computer of the Western Alliance’s eco-managers.

She was totally alone. No links to her Master. No familiar cell or corridors. No electrical ecstasy surging through her brain’s pleasure centers. But she remembered the pain and shuddered. And the clock in her implanted computer ticked off the seconds until it would automatically activate her pain centers.

Alone in a strange and hostile place, out in the open under a sky studded with twinkling stars. Dahlia took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadows, into the bright lights of the wide courtyard. As she walked swiftly, silently toward the gleaming metal hatch, she glanced up at the monitoring cameras perched atop the light poles. Not one of them moved.

The hatch seemed to be a mile away. Off to her right a human guard came into view around the corner of a building, a huge gray Great Dane padding along beside him. The dog looked in Dahlia’s direction and whined softly, but did not leave the guard’s side. Dahlia froze in the middle of the courtyard, unmoving until they disappeared around the next corner.

I am invisible, she told herself. She wished for a tranquilizing spray but knew that she had to keep all her senses on hair-trigger alert. The clock ticked on.

She reached the hatch at last. The computer in her helmet fed her its data on the hatch’s lock mechanism. Dahlia saw it in her mind as a light-sculpture, color-coded to help her pick her way through the intricate electronic mechanism without setting off the automated alarms.

The sensors implanted in her fingertips made her feel as if she were part of the hatch’s electronic system itself. She did not feel cold metal; the electronic keyboard felt like softly yielding silk. The mechanism sang to her like the mother she could barely remember.

The massive hatch swung noiselessly open to reveal a steep metal stairway leading down into darkness. Dahlia stepped inside quickly and shut the hatch behind her before the guard returned.

She blinked her eyes and an infrared display lit up her helmet visor. She saw the faint deeply red lines of scanner beams crisscrossing the deep stairwell. She knew that if she broke any one of those pencil beams every alarm in the complex would start screaming. And some of those beams automatically intensified to a laser power that could slice flesh like a burning scalpel.

She hesitated only a moment. No alarms had been triggered by the hatch’s opening. Good. Now she slithered onto her belly and started snaking down the metal steps headfirst. Some of the beams rose vertically from the stair treads. Dahlia eased around them and, after what seemed like hours, reached the bottom of the stairwell.

Slowly she got to her feet, surprised to find her legs rubbery, her heart thundering. Her time was growing short. She was in a narrow bare corridor with a low ceiling. A single strip of fluorescents cast a dim bluish light along the corridor. Much like the conditioning wards where she had spent so much of her life. No scanning beams in sight. She blinked once, twice, three times, going from an infrared display to ultraviolet and finally back to visual.

No scanning beams. No guards. Not even any cameras up on the walls that she could see. Still Dahlia kept all her defenses activated. Invisible, undetectable, she made her way as swiftly as she dared down the long blank-walled corridor toward the place where the central computer was housed.

“We will use their own most brilliant creation against them,” her Master had told her. “The war will be won at a single stroke.”

The Western Alliance was rich and powerful because its economy was totally integrated. Across Europe from the Urals to the British Isles, across the North American continent, across the wide Pacific to distant Australia and New Zealand, the Alliance’s central computer managed an integrated economy that made its human population wealthy beyond imagination.

While the Southern Coalition languished in poverty, the Western Alliance reached out to the Moon and asteroids for the raw materials to feed its orbital factories. While millions in Asia and Africa and Latin America faced the daily threat of starvation, the Western Alliance’s people were fat and self-indulgent.

“Their central computer must be even more powerful than you are,” Dahlia had foolishly blurted when she began to realize what her Master was telling her. A searing bolt of electric shock was her reward for such effrontery.

“Your purpose is to destroy their central computer, not to make inappropriate comparisons,” said the icy voice of her Master.

Dahlia bowed her head in submission.

The more complex a computer is, the easier to bring it down, she was told. Imagine the complexity of a central computer that integrates the economic, military, judicial, social, educational activities of the entire Western Alliance! Imagine the chaos if a virus can be inserted into the computer’s systems. Imagine.

Dahlia had never heard anything like laughter from The Master, but its pleasure at the thought was unmistakable. In loving detail her Master described how the Western Alliance would crumble once the virus she was to carry was inserted into its central processor.

“World War 4 was fought with biological viruses,” said The Master. “World War 4.5 will be fought with a computer virus.” It was the closest thing to humor that Dahlia had ever heard in her life.

With the virus crippling their central computer, the Alliance’s economy would grind to an abrupt halt. For the Alliance’s economy was dependent on information. Food produced in Australia could not be shipped to Canada without the necessary information. The electrical power grids of Europe and North America could not operate without minute-to-minute data on how much power had to be sent where. Transportation by air, ship, rail would be hopelessly snarled. Even the automated highways would have to close down.