The download is complete.
"Okay," Miles whispers to the empty room. "Okay. Who sent you?"
The CAPTCHA entity turns its incomprehensible face toward him. Select all squares containing a god , it says. digital insanity download
He laughs. A dry, rattling sound. Good. Normal was boring.
He tries to pull the neural link from his temple. His fingers pass through it. It was never hardware. It was always an idea. And you can't uninstall an idea. The download is complete
The year is 2089. The download finishes at 3:17 AM. A progress bar doesn't creep; it bleeds —a thick, black line across Miles’s retinal display. The file is called Digital Insanity v.9.2 . No source. No refunds. No fucking manual.
He selects none. He selects all. He screams. Who sent you
The air answers. Not a voice. A blue screen of death flickers across his consciousness, and in its pale glow, he sees the truth: he is not the user. He is the cache. His memories—his mother's funeral, his first kiss, the three-digit PIN for his bank account—are being indexed, compressed, and uploaded to a server farm on the dark side of the moon.