'They'll make me vanish, will they?' Kelly asked.

Mr Bashful turned his face away. 'They'll make us both vanish.'

Kelly stared down upon the man. Perhaps, she thought, she had been just a little hasty. There might have been a more subtle way of doing this. And one that did not leave her as a criminal on the run. And on the run from Mute Corp, who were hooked into everything, her personal records, her bank account, they knew where she lived and where she went. They knew everything.

But then.

But then. There was a big man all tied up in a shed. An innocent man who had said he'd 'been to Hell' and all because of something that had issued from the Mute Corp Organization. Something dark. Something evil. Something that didn't care at all for a man.

'You're in deep shit,' said Mr Bashful.

'Yes,' said Kelly. 'I am. But do you know what? I don't care. Now speak to me, tell me all about the Mute-chip and all about go mango or I'll knock your hand down onto that mouse and see some of it in action for myself.'

'All right. All right.' Mr Bashful glared at Kelly. '-I'll tell you. What harm can it do? You won't even get out of the building.'

'So speak,' said Kelly.

And Mr Bashful spoke. He spoke very fast, almost to the point of incoherent babble. It was as if he had been wanting to get all this off his chest for a very very long time. But hadn't dared to do it. He was scared. Everyone at Mute Corp was scared, he said. Everyone feared that they might be the next to be 'possessed'.

'Now let me get this clear,' said Kelly, needing a break from the babble and trying to get it all clear. 'What you are saying is that sometime back in the 1970s…'

'1972,' babbled Mr Bashful. 'It was a significant year. That's when he gave the thing birth.'

'OK. In 1972, Remington Mute developed the original Mute-chip, from his own digitized DNA. It was basically a chip that could learn and then make decisions based on its knowledge.'

'Effectively yes.'

'And the chips were put into games. Computer chess and so on. But he saw a greater potential for them in other systems. Playing the stock market and so on.'

'Became a millionaire, a billionaire, a zillionaire,' babbled Mr Bashful.

'And Mute Corp started off all the scare stories about the Millennium Bug and Mute's operatives, pretending to debug computer systems, installed Mute-chips into those systems.'

'Across the whole World Wide Web and they linked up into a vast thinking network.'

'Not thinking surely?' said Kelly. 'These chips aren't alive.'

'So what exactly is life?' asked Mr Bashful. 'If something can talk to you, communicate with you, reason \vith you, be more intelligent than you are, is that something alive? You tell me.'

'And this game? This go mango?'

'Men play computer games,' said Mr Bashful. 'So why shouldn't a thinking computer play men games?'

'The mainframe plays games with people?' Kelly was rightly appalled.

'Ironic isn't it?' said Mr Bashful. 'The tables well and truly turned.'

'And you at Mute Corp let this happen?'

'We didn't let it happen. It happened by itself. We're trying to find a way to stop it, before it gets completely out of control.'

'So what was I to be, another laboratory rat?'

'Something like that. But your death would have been for the common good.'

'My death?' said Kelly.

'Nobody survives the infection,' said Mr Bashful. 'Once the virus has passed from the computer into the human host, it will play the human until the human dies.'

'So you would have locked me in this room until the virus killed me and then what? Dissected my brain?'

'We have to find a cure. An anti-virus.’

‘You bastards,' said Kelly. 'You utter bastards.’

‘You don't understand.' Mr Bashful jerked about in his bondage. 'It's clever. Very clever. It knows everything. It could have infected everyone by now. But it doesn't. It hasn't. Myself and a few others are working behind its back, so to speak. In secrecy. The autopsies are carried out manually, using no computer technology. Nothing that could have a Mute-chip inside it. That's why there's no CCTV in this part of the building. Mr Pokey doesn't know what we do with the bodies, he thinks we just dispose of them in a tasteful and discreet manner. Once it has finished playing with them, they are surplus to requirements. It is in control here, don't you understand. People don't control this company, it does. And it has some kind of purpose. We don't know what it is yet. We few who are trying to stop it, we don't know what it wants.'

'What it wants*. You really believe that this virus is alive, don't you? Not that it's just some kind of rogue program that's gone out of control?'

'It's much more than a program,' said Mr Bashful. 'And it's much more than alive. If your particular skills hadn't earmarked you for this room and you'd got some other job in the organization, you'd have learned in time. You would have been told when you'd reached sufficient status in the company. When your rank admitted you into the inner circle. To the elite. Then you would have been taken to the chapel.'

'The chapel?' said Kelly. 'You have a chapel here?’

‘Not here,' said Mr Bashful, shaking his head. 'It's in Mute Corp Keynes. In the black hole of cyberspace.

Only the elite are taken to the chapel.’

‘And what do the elite do in this chapel?’

‘We do what it tells us to do,' said Mr Bashful. 'We worship it, of course.'

'God?' said Kelly. 'It thinks it's a God?'

'And why not?' Mr Bashful wriggled uncomfortably. 'It's well enough qualified for the position. It knows virtually everything that there is to know. It's hooked into every network, it is the World Wide Web. Every time you make a telephone call it listens to your conversation. It knows more about you than any human does. It can remember more about you than even you can.'

'This is very bad,' said Kelly, twisting strands of her golden hair into tight little knots. 'This is very bad.'

'You don't understand the situation, this is far far worse than very bad. Now will you please untie my hand from this mouse?'

'No,' said Kelly. 'I don't think I can do that.'

'But why not? I've told you everything. I'm on your side. You want to stop this. You wouldn't have done this to me if you didn't. Which group are you from?'

'Group?' said Kelly. 'I don't know what you mean.'

'There are anarchist factions everywhere. Hackers, well-poisoners.'

'Well-poisoners?'

'Don't pretend that you haven't heard of them. Factions dedicated to destroying the Web. They overload the information wells with irrelevant rubbish or bogus information.'

'I'm not with any faction,' said Kelly.

'Oh come on, of course you are. You can tell me. What harm can it do? Come on, I told you everything.'

'Not, perhaps, everything.'

'Please release me, let me go,' said Mr Bashful, which rang a distant bell.

'No,' said Kelly. 'I think not.'

'Then what are you going to do? You have my Unicard, you can let yourself out. If you're careful you might escape the building.'

'And what of you?' Kelly asked.

'I'll say you attacked me, or something. What does it matter? You'll be on the run anyway. And you'll have to run hard and run fast. Although you'll have nowhere to run.'

'It's tricky, I agree.' Kelly released her tangled hair. 'But you're an intelligent man, you should be able to reason out just what I'm going to do next.'

'Probably,' said Mr Bashful, guardedly. 'Where exactly is this leading?'

'I am thinking', said Kelly, 'that there might still be a job opportunity available to me here at Mute Corp.'