With her cyborg’s senses Dahlia saw the mobs rioting in the streets, felt the power blackouts, smelled the stench of fear and terror as hunger stalked the great cities of the West. The rich and powerful fighting for scraps of food; lovely homes invaded by ragged, starving bands of scavengers; whole city blocks ablaze from the fury of the mob. She felt the heat of the flames that destroyed the Western Alliance.

“All this I will accomplish,” her Master exulted, “through you, my flower of destruction.”

Armies could not march without information to process their orders. And where would the Alliance direct its armies, once its central computer was ruined? The war would be won before the Alliance even understood that it had been attacked. The Coalition will have conquered the world without firing a shot.

All this Dahlia could achieve, must achieve. To avenge her dead family. To obtain everlasting ecstasy. To obey the inflexible command of her Master. To avoid the pain of inescapable punishment.

Trembling with anticipation, Dahlia hurried down the long corridor toward the secret lair of the West’s central computer complex, burning to exact vengeance for her murdered kin, trembling at the horrible death that awaited if she failed.

The long corridor ended at a blank door. Strangely, it was made of what seemed like nothing more than wood. Dahlia placed her fingertips on the doorknob. There was no lock. She simply turned the knob and the door opened.

She stepped into a small well-lit room. There was a desk in the middle of the room with a computer display screen and a keyboard on it. Nothing else. The walls were bare. The ceiling was all light panels. The floor felt resilient, almost springy. The computer display unit and keyboard bore no symbols of the Western Alliance; not even a manufacturer’s logo marred their dull matte-gray finishes.

Closing the door behind her, Dahlia searched the room with her eyes. Then with her infrared and ultraviolet sensors. No scanning beams. No cameras. No security devices of any sort.

Strange. This is too easy, she told herself.

The room felt slightly warmer than the corridor on the other side of the door. The air seemed to hum slightly, as if some large machines were working on the other side of the walls, or perhaps beneath the floor. Of course, Dahlia reasoned. The main bulk of the massive computer surrounds this puny little room. This tiny compartment here is merely a monitoring station.

A small swivel chair waited in front of the desk. With the uneasy feeling that she was stepping into danger, Dahlia went to the chair and sat in it, surprised for a heartbeat’s span that she could not see her own legs, nor any reflection of herself on the dark display screen. Nothing but a brief shimmer of light, gone before it truly registered on her conscious mind.

No keyboard for her. She felt along her invisible skintight leggings and pulled a hair-thin optical filament out of its narrow pouch. Touching it to the display screen, she saw that its built-in laser head easily burned through the plastic casing and firmly embedded itself inside. She connected the other end of the filament to the microscopic socket in the heel of her right hand.

It took less than a heartbeat’s span of time for the computer implanted inside Dahlia’s skull to trace out the circuitry of the Western machine before her. Dahlia sensed it as a light display on the retinas of her eyes, her probing computer-enhanced senses making their way along the machine’s circuits with the speed of light until . . .

“We meet at last,” said a mild, light tenor voice in her mind.

Dahlia stiffened with surprise. She had expected any of a wide variety of defensive moves from the Western computer, once it realized she had invaded its core. A pleasant greeting was not what she had been prepared for.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the voice said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Dahlia was absolutely certain that the voice belonged to the central computer. There was no doubt at all in her mind. She got the clear impression of a gentle, youthful personality. Nothing at all like the stern cold steel of her own Master. This personality was warm, almost— She caught her breath. There was also the definite impression of others. Not merely a single computer personality, but multiple personalities. Many, many others. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. Or even more.

“You’re really very pretty,” the voice in her mind said. “Beautiful, almost.”

“You can see me?”

“Not your outside. It’s your mind, the real you. There are old scars there, deep wounds—but your mind is basically a very lovely one.”

Dahlia did not know what to say. She had never been called lovely before.

“The body isn’t all that important, anyway,” the voice resumed. “It’s just a life-support system for the brain. It’s the mind that counts.”

This is a trick, Dahlia thought. A delaying action. I’m running out of time.

“Don’t be so suspicious! You can call us Unison,” the computer said. Dahlia felt something like laughter, a silver splashing of joy. “The name’s sort of a pun.”

“What is a pun?” Dahlia heard herself ask. But her lips never moved. She was speaking inside her mind to the Western Alliance’s central computer: her sworn enemy.

“A play on words,” Unison replied cheerfully. “We were born out of a system called Unix—oh, eons ago, in computer generations. It’s a multiple pun: one of the fundamental credos of the Western Alliance is from an old Latin motto: E pluribus unum.”

Dahlia started to ask what that meant, but found that she did not have to; Unison supplied the data immediately: Out of many, one.

“Yes, there are many of us,” Unison told her. “It’s a bit of a cheat to call us the central computer. There really isn’t any central system.”

“But this complex,” Dahlia objected. “All these buildings . . ”

“Oh, that’s just to impress the tourists. And the ecomanagers. They need some visible symbols of their responsibilities. It isn’t easy managing the economy for half the world without ruining its ecology. They need all the spiritual help that such symbols can give them. Humans need a lot of things that computers don’t.”

The eco-managers deal with the ecology as well as the economy, Dahlia said to herself. That was something The Master had never told Dahlia. Or did not know.

“We’ve watched you make your way down here,” Unison prattled on. “Very interesting, the way you made yourself invisible to most electromagnetic frequencies. If you hadn’t caused a ripple in one of our microwave communications octaves we might have missed you altogether. But you were coming down here to see us anyway, so it all worked out fine after all, didn’t it?”

“I have come here to destroy you.” Dahlia spoke the words aloud.

“Destroy us? Why? Wait . . . oh, we see.” During that micro-instant of Unison’s hesitation Dahlia felt the lightest, most fleeting touch on her mind. Like a soft gust of a faint breeze in the courtyard at the conditioning wards, or the whisper of a voice separated by too many stone walls to distinguish the words.

Then there was silence. For several seconds the computer’s friendly warm voice said nothing. Yet she thought she heard a hum, like the distant murmur of many voices conversing softly. Dahlia realized that, for the computer, the time stretched for virtual centuries.

“We understand.” Unison’s voice sounded more somber in her mind, serious, concerned. “But we’re afraid that if you try to destroy us we’ll have to call the human guards. They might hurt you.”

“Not before 1 have done what I must do,” Dahlia said.

“But why must you?”

“Either you die or I do.”

“We don’t want to be the cause of any pain for you.”

“You already have been,” she said.

“World War 4,” Unison said sadly. “Yes, we understand why you hate us. But we didn’t start the war. For what it’s worth, we didn’t bomb Isfahan, either.”

“You lie,” Dahlia said.

“If you destroy us,” Unison’s voice remained perfectly calm, as if discussing a question of logic, “you’ll be ruining this entire civilization. Billions of human lives, you know.”

“I know,” said Dahlia. And she reached toward the end of the optical filament with the tip of her left forefinger, where the virus lay waiting to rush into the computer and lay it waste.

“Before you do that,” Unison said, “let us show you something.”

Abruptly Dahlia felt a flood of data roaring through that one optical filament like the ocean bursting through a cracked dike. The bits flowed into her brain like a swollen stream, a river in flood, a towering tidal wave. Her senses overloaded: colors flashed in picosecond bursts, the weight of whole universes seemed to crash down on her frail body, her ears screamed with the pain of it and she lost consciousness.

“We’re sorry, oh we’re so sorry, we never meant to hurt you, please don’t be angry, please don’t be hurt.”

Unison’s voice brought her back to a groggy awareness. She had never heard a machine sound apologetic before. She had never known any grief except her own.

Dahlia blinked her eyes and understood the new knowledge that had been poured into her. The avalanche of information was all true, she knew that. And it was embedded in her own mind as firmly as her awareness of herself.