Adlai walked slowly down the centre of the lane, staring at his shoes, letting the rain drip down from the brim of his hat. He enjoyed the rain. It had been someone else’s idea to darken the areas off Grid, make them less accessible to the casual user, less attractive. Perhaps it had come from the Grid itself, Adlai had never bothered himself to check. He found it comforting, almost romantic. It left him alone with his thoughts.

It would only be a matter of time before Gretchen or one of the others took their weapons and turned them on him. He knew that, expected it. He would have to be ready to act first. Besides, his work was greater than all of theirs combined. He knew what he planned would be seen as a betrayal. Perhaps in time it would be recognised for what it really was.

His thoughts turned back to the world around him, to the sound of his feet on the road, the rain on the rooftops. There was something else there, something new. He let his feet continue on and switched his awareness to searching it out.

There.

Very slight, almost not there at all. A humming. A female voice, lilting across a simple tune, repeating them over and over.

Adlai felt the air around him charge with danger. He stopped his walk and looked into the shadows, knowing that he would find it there.

A single figure, a woman, dressed all in black, grim, pale face drawn tight around the lips. Adlai felt fear and panic course through him, up and down his spine, grabbing him by the back of the head and holding him still. She began to drift towards him.

Her body never moved, but she came closer. Watching him, a promise of misery in her eyes. Her green eyes.

Adlai snapped his eyes away from the figure and called out.

“Gretchen!”

The fear and electricity around him melted away instantly. The figure vanished, as did the subtle tune that started it all. A moment later Gretchen finally made herself known, stepping out from the shadows of the lane, a small smile on her lips.

“I thought you’d like it.”

Looking back, she hadn’t had to stop. Perhaps she was nervous, unsure whether it was quite ready to take him out. He wasn’t sure either. It would have been a close run thing.

Or perhaps it was all just a display, a flexing of her muscles, a reminder of what she could offer. You could never tell with Gretchen. Adlai doubted she even knew herself.

Her creation was a stroke of genius, you had to give her that. She was one of the cleverest of the programmers, one of the most promising. Was it wrong to think of them as disciples?

Adlai took another sip and let the liquid wash around between his teeth. He swallowed with a grimace and set the glass down. One benefit of being alone is that there’s no-one around to argue with you.

She’d designed the virus to enter the user’s consciousness through music. Drift in and get stuck inside, through the ears, into the brain, a constant tune repeating on itself, growing like a culture in a petri dish. Crawling up into the amygdala and squeezing. Linking into the user’s fear centre, rendering them helpless. Hallucination feeding on hallucination until there was nothing left, until the users themselves were eaten away by fear and panic. It attacked the consciousness behind each dream, the hardware. Take that away and the dream itself dies, as sudden and sure as waking the dreamer.

The intention was to attack the Grid, attack the consciousness behind it. Get in underneath the radar and infest the great quantum computers that ran the constructs. If it knocked out a few genuine users on the way, well, think of them as acceptable losses.

That’s what Gretchen had claimed, anyway. Adlai had reservations about her motives, and besides, he saw much greater potential in it.

He was beginning to realise the limits he had imposed on the Boulevard. They had been necessary to begin with, but were they still? Was it time to begin practising what he preached?

A cell needs to split to grow, only then can it go on to become what it needs to. An organism, a virus. Consciousness is not alive, it is a collection of life, an environment for it. A world of possibility.

Time would prove him right. Break the connection between the two worlds, force the dreams to realise themselves, force the users to face reality. They’d come to call it the Separation. He preferred the term emancipation, but perhaps that was asking too much. Just get it done and sit back and watch the show. Have a drink. What needed to go around would come around again.

Sooner or later everyone’s dream would walk into the bar. Even your own.