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Inside Chelsea’s head 1,715 crawlers were waiting at the base of her skull. As a unit, they released enkephalins and endomorphins into the blood pouring through her brain. These powerful natural opiates spread through her brain, locking onto opioid receptors and stopping them from receiving any information—in particular, messages of pain.

Which, considering what was about to happen, might have been the only humane thing the crawlers would ever do.

The crawlers surged upward, expanding through her frontal lobe like a gas. Once dispersed, they unbundled, turning back into individual hacked muscle fibers ready to rebind in new ways with entirely new functions.

The “I am here” signals began again, but this time the fibers latched onto each other end to end, forming long strands. These strands crossed over each other on all axes, X and Y and Z and everything in between, creating a ropy mesh that ran through her frontal lobe, her parietal lobe, her hippocampus and, in particular, her orbifrontal lobe. In many places fibers formed dendritelike fingers that connected to Chelsea’s brain cells on one end and to the mesh on the other.

In just a few hours, 1,715 crawlers morphed into a neural net lacing through the parts of Chelsea’s brain that controlled higher functions. Functions like memory. Thought. Reason. Abstraction. Emotion.

Finally, the remaining fibers wiggled and converged at the center of Chelsea’s brain. If you could have seen in there, you would have sworn they were attacking each other, ripping each other to pieces. But the fibers weren’t alive, and they weren’t individuals; they were part of a larger function. They weren’t tearing each other apart; they were rearranging, rebuilding . . . melding.

When they finished, they formed a ball some one thousand microns in diameter. Tendrils reached out from this ball, connecting with the neural net of converted crawlers. Once those connections were made, the ball did what it was designed to do.

It sent a signal.

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE

The Orbital had monitored early biofeedback from the new strain. Based on initially high levels of apoptosis, the Orbital had logically a.s.sumed that this batch of crawler-building seeds was a total failure. The growing workers would once again have to fend for themselves, try to avoid the sonofab.i.t.c.h as they built a gate.

The Orbital was already working on creating a second crawler-building batch with a modified code. This would be the last chance, the eighteenth and final probe.

When it received the signal, however, it abandoned the modified code. It focused all processing power on the new situation.

This signal, this lone signal, meant potential success. It provided a direct point of entry. And if the Orbital could communicate clearly enough, gather enough information, send enough reprogramming code back down the signal chain, then that lone signal meant a vector.

The Orbital sent a signal of its own and started gathering information.

SENIOR PICTURES

“Daddy, wake up.”

Donald’s mind swam in a sea of subdued pain. His body burned. Every inch seemed to be deep-fried, and his left hand felt even worse than that.

“Daddy, wake up!”