It had grown cold again overnight, and Juli's breath clouded when she stepped into the courtyard the next morning. Shivering, she drew her coat around her and went back inside, setting down her teacup and her connection gear on the kitchen table.

A few minutes later she heard MOMO come in. "Morning," said Juli absently, distracted by a headline on her connection gear. The incident in Patmos had monopolized the AMN news feeds for the last two days; already some of the tabloid channels had begun calling it a scandal, and now the term had spread to the mainstream media as well.

So far none of the sources mentioned any names in connection with the incident, but general consensus held the DIRE responsible for mishandling it; the articles all had halfheartedly clever titles like "A DIRE situation in Patmos," or "DIRE in dire straits." The Federation Parliament had criticized the Patmian government for obstructing their rescue attempts, and in return Patmos had turned down requests for further diplomatic talks with the Federation. It was a scenario Juli had witnessed countless times with minor variations in the last year and a half, and she could already guess the outcome.

At least Ziggy's mission had remained a secret. Official reports held that the terrorists had killed off the hostages before the DIRE could respond, then deposited the bodies in the chapel of a long-abandoned Immigrant Fleet base as some sort of cryptic political statement. There was no mention of the refugees Ziggy claimed to have seen there.

Juli suspected her own involvement in the crisis would make headlines sooner or later. The press rarely missed an opportunity to smear another handful of dirt on the Mizrahi legacy; her own name rarely appeared in the news unaccompanied by words like "eccentric" and "shameless," and those were the flattering terms. At least the mainstream publications stuck to criticizing her political actions rather than intruding on her private life. She had avoided reading tabloids since they began speculating about her personal connections with the escort who had accompanied her to some of the DIRE talks in the last two years; there had been the inevitable jokes about what constituted an inappropriate use of government equipment, with answers that hadn't even occurred to her.

At the moment, however, her reputation was the least of her worries. She raised her eyes from the screen to find MOMO waiting beside the table.

"Mommy, do you have a minute to talk?" MOMO stood with her hands behind her back and her head bowed, the way she did when she thought she was distracting Juli from something more important.

"Of course," said Juli, turning off the display of her connection gear. "Why don't you sit down. What's the matter?"

MOMO took a seat in the chair across from her. "Um, the data from the mission, did you look at it too?"

"Yes, Doctus sent me her analysis yesterday," said Juli. "Apparently they were sending and receiving network transmissions outside the AMN, using another system to access the imaginary domain--something like the corporate networks, but on a much larger scale."

MOMO nodded. "That was what Doctus wanted me to look at, the program they were using to transfer information. She thought if I figured it out, maybe we could learn more about the network too."

"It's possible. If we can access this other network without our presence being detected, we might be able to find out who constructed it, and for what purpose. We might even be able to use it to monitor activity on the network from our own terminals. Have you taken a look at the code yet?"

"Yes, I ... I think I may have figured out some of it this morning."

"This morning?" Juli looked at her, startled. "I didn't know you got up that early. How long have you been awake?"

"Since last night." MOMO rubbed her eyes. "I stayed up late trying to decode it, and then I couldn't get to sleep, so ...."

"My goodness. You really are my daughter," she said, surprised at how easily the words came. Admitting that, even half-jokingly, would never have crossed her mind a few years ago.

Before MOMO could answer, a muffled bark sounded from behind the doors to the courtyard. Juli hadn't seen Alby go out this morning, but he must have managed to sneak past her when she opened the doors. MOMO jumped up from her seat. "I'll let him in."

"No need," Ziggy called from the living room. "I've got the situation under control." The doors slid open and closed, and a few moments later he appeared in the kitchen doorway with the dog at his heels.

"Good morning," said MOMO, sitting down again belatedly.

He looked at each of them in turn. "Am I interrupting something?"

"Not at all." Juli waved a hand toward an empty seat at the table, inviting him to join them, but as usual, he remained standing. "We were just discussing the data you brought back from the mission."

"Um, actually," said MOMO, and they both glanced in her direction, "I kind of overheard you talking last night. I didn't mean to, but my window was open, and ...."

"It's all right," said Ziggy. "We were going to discuss it with you anyway. You ought to be informed of what's going on, since it appears we're all working on this investigation together."

"As a family!" She laughed, but just as suddenly grew serious again. "Ziggy, why were you and Mommy talking about your memories? Does the incident in Patmos have something to do with your past?"

"We're not sure yet. It's possible there may be a connection."

"I was asking him if he'd consider using the AMN's encephalon software to reconstruct his memories in a logical order," said Juli. "He has difficulty retrieving them on his own, but if we projected them into a virtual location on the AMN, we might be able to link them up sequentially."

"But isn't that dangerous?" said MOMO. "We still haven't finished testing the environmental simulator, and there've been errors ...."

He nodded. "Juli, I forgot to mention this last night, but MOMO and I encountered an error the last time we tested the battle program. The server running the simulation didn't record anything abnormal, but there was some kind of distortion in the virtual environment. It seemed as though the structure of the network itself had been disrupted."

"Oh!" MOMO almost jumped out of her chair again. "Ziggy, I forgot about that too! Do you suppose ... I mean, do you think it could be possible that ...." She hesitated. "Well, if my calculations are right, this other network in the imaginary domain ... since it isn't registered with the AMN Bureau, it should be completely invisible from the AMN under normal circumstances. That means the flow of data from that network could be intersecting with the AMN all the time without leaving any traces that we can observe. Um ... they might still be able to observe us, though."

"That would certainly explain how they've managed to escape our notice so far," said Juli. The apprehensive feeling she'd been having for the last few days sidled up to her again, and she tried to ignore it.

"But anything passing through the AMN would create a slight disturbance at the point of intersection," MOMO went on. "Just enough to cause a ripple effect in the immediate area without any permanent damage to the structure. A monitoring program wouldn't pick that up."

"Which might explain the strange phenomena we saw in the battle simulator," said Ziggy.

"If so, then we have a serious problem," said Juli. The server running the encephalon program existed in a highly restricted part of the network, deep within the central administrative complex behind a labyrinth of barriers and encryption. "If they've managed to construct a network that not only intersects with the AMN, but can pass through our security measures as if they were nothing ...." She made eye contact with Ziggy, and his expression confirmed the fears she hesitated to acknowledge.

"This could be a lot worse than we thought," he said. Juli wouldn't have put it as mildly herself.

"Then we need to do something right away." Juli stood, pushed in her chair, and cleared her breakfast dishes from the table in what she hoped was a decisive manner. "MOMO, I want you to call Doctus as soon as you get to the AMN Bureau this morning. Tell her everything we just talked about and ask her opinion on how to proceed."

"Got it," said MOMO.

"Please ask her to call me, too; I'd like to speak with her myself." She set her plate and half-finished cup of tea in the sink, and turned toward Ziggy. "Jan, depending on how the situation turns out, we might need your help. Are you up for another mission so soon after ... well, after the last one?"

"I'm always ready to assist in any capacity, as required." Then he must have noticed the concern in her eyes, because his expression softened. "Don't worry about me; I'm all right now." His reassurance sounded unconvincing, and Juli wasn't even sure he had managed to convince himself.

She decided to play along anyway, for his sake. "All right. For now, just stay with MOMO and stand by until we figure out what to do next. In the meantime, I'll try to get clearance from the Subcommittee to proceed with the investigation."

At work later that morning, she held a remote conference from her office with the other Subcommittee members. Since the shadow network existed entirely within the imaginary-number domain, even though it appeared to be the deliberate work of humans, it would probably fall within the expanded jurisdiction of the SOCE. Juli had hesitated to reveal the data to anyone else in the government, but she wanted to proceed with their approval in case she had to account for her actions later on; besides, she trusted the other six members of the SOCE's core group, having chosen and appointed most of them herself.

"We'll leave it to you to proceed with the investigation for now," said one of the other members, reflecting the group consensus after Juli had given her proposal. "Please inform us of your findings."

"Thank you. I'll have a report ready for our next meeting."

She got off the line with the Subcommittee and managed to distract herself with other work until Doctus called.

"Good morning, Dr. Mizrahi. MOMO said you'd be expecting me?"

"That's correct." Juli closed the files she had been working on and shifted the call window to the main screen. "I had a chance to look over the data you sent me yesterday. Have you managed to trace anything else back to this Nov-OS company? I've heard of them before, but ...."

"You won't have heard much about them," said Doctus. "And there's a reason for that. Several reasons, actually. One is because the company was formed less than two years ago, by former executives of Hyams and a few other corporations you might recognize. Another, because they keep their records hidden and conduct a lot of their business sub rosa. And the third--or so we speculate--is because they may be providing more than just material assistance to the Ormus groups."

"You mean, you believe they may have something to do with the shadow network?"

"Let me put it this way. Your daughter's involved with the department of the AMN Bureau responsible for approving and overseeing private networks, right?"

Juli recognized the patronizing tone in Doctus' voice and tried to remain civil in spite of it. "Yes, she handles a lot of the cases herself. I've advised her on a few of them."

"Then you're probably also familiar with the government restrictions on network size and the functions they're allowed to perform. You know, communications only within a limited range, no large-scale transfer of objects over a certain mass, no transferring units with live passengers, et cetera. But did you know those regulations were established after a legal battle between the AMN Bureau and a group representing the interests of several large companies, including Nov-OS? It was a little over a year ago, when MOMO was still on the Development Committee at Vector. You may not have heard much about it then, because, if I recall correctly, there was another big scandal making headlines at the time."

Now Juli stared at her incredulously, forgetting to take offense at her attitude. "You don't mean the anti-Ormus hearings?"

"You've got it. The timing couldn't have been better for companies like Nov-OS. Before the Ormus scare, the government had been all set to shut down private corporate networks entirely; for a number of reasons, they didn't think the existence of multiple networks in the imaginary domain, cut off from the AMN, was such a hot idea. Incidentally, that's what we concluded here at Scientia as well."

"Of course," said Juli faintly, steadying herself against the arm of her chair. Every time she had learned something new in the past few days, she felt as though the world had flipped on its side, and everything she thought she knew and had taken for granted appeared in a new perspective, a new angle of the light. By now, the world had turned over so many times she didn't even recognize what she saw anymore. "So you think they took advantage of the Ormus controversy to push for regulations that were more ... favorable to their interests."

"Let's just say I don't subscribe to the idea that it was a coincidence. I suppose if they really wanted to develop a secret network, there'd be nothing to stop them even if corporate networks were outlawed, but it'd be so much more convenient to have an alibi, wouldn't it? At least they could pretend they were operating within legal parameters. Now here's the really interesting part. I did some research on the NSN itself--that's the private network administered by Nov-OS--and trust me, there's not a lot of information out there. Publicly, anyway." A smile flickered briefly across her face, followed by a note of self-satisfaction in her words. "But we do have our sources. Apparently whoever created the NSN architecture knew a hell of a lot about the information substructure of the original UMN, but not much about how to build hyperspace columns. In fact, that's a pretty closely guarded secret even within Vector; not many people outside the AMN Development Committee have the knowledge and expertise to do it. So while Nov-OS may have been able to establish communications with Ormus very early on, in order to provide material support to these groups, they would've had to wait for AMN access to the regions in question."

"So they're still partly dependent on the AMN and the Federation; I assumed as much. But how could they transport equipment to the outer regions without being detected?"

"I'll let you work that one out," said Doctus lightly, "since, at the moment, I still don't have a clue."

In the afternoon, Juli returned to the AMN Bureau and met MOMO and Ziggy in the lab where they had been testing the battle simulator a few days before.

MOMO sat in front of one of the computer terminals along the outer wall of the room, and Ziggy stood to one side watching her work. They both faced away from the door, but when Juli arrived, MOMO swung around in her chair. "Mommy, you're just in time! Come and look at this."

Juli made her way over to the workstation. The main screen displayed a map of the conceptual structure of the AMN, a geodesic sphere that spanned the real and imaginary domains, with a helical axis across its diameter, the core system of the AMN, connecting the two. During the preliminary stage of its development, when the network was still an abstract concept, someone on the AMN Committee had come up with the metaphor of a hollow ball of mesh suspended in water: one hemisphere of the ball appeared above the water's surface, in the domain of real numbers, while the other remained submerged in the realm of the collective unconscious. Although the actual structure of the network looked different when viewed from the physical domain, more like MOMO's earlier diagram showing a web of connections plotted on a map of the stars, the image of the sphere had proven useful in creating theoretical models. A few peripheral screens hovered around the larger one, displaying charts and flows of data.

"MOMO has been using the program she decoded to track the other network," said Ziggy.

MOMO nodded. "I made some adjustments to the code and installed it on one of our AMN terminals here, so now we can access both networks from the same machine. I've been monitoring it all afternoon, and, well ...." A worried look crossed her face, driving out any pride she might have felt for her accomplishment. "Maybe you had better see for yourself. It looks pretty bad."

MOMO entered a command into the keypad, and the screen flickered and refreshed. Juli blocked a gasp behind her hand when she saw the updated image. In an instant one hemisphere had filled with dark swirling tendrils, twining around the struts of the dome and groping toward the central helix. "Is that ...."

An idle communication screen to one side of the main window suddenly flickered to life. "Oh, there you are, Dr. Mizrahi. Glad you could join us. It appears we have a dragon eating the roots of our world tree." Doctus smiled, but as usual, she somehow contrived not to look very happy.

"Yes, I noticed," said Juli. "This is a nightmare. It looks as though the entire imaginary-domain hemisphere has been contaminated. How long has this been going on?"

Doctus' grimace deepened. "Well, from what MOMO and I have been able to determine after I spoke with you this morning, that network appears to have evolved symbiotically with the AMN. I'd say it's probably been with us since we started laying out the infrastructure."

"So it couldn't have been the work of Nov-OS," said Juli, at once relieved and more deeply troubled by the new implications.

"Then who or what is responsible?" said Ziggy. Juli turned, startled by the harshness in his voice; she hadn't known him to get upset this easily, and she wondered again whether he had really had enough time to recover from the trauma of his last mission. To her relief, after a few moments he seemed to relax again. "Could a scattered alliance of Ormus followers really have created all this?"

"It's not likely," said Juli. "Doctus and I were talking about it earlier, and we thought it might have been the work of a corporation in league with the terrorists, but looking at it now ...." She stared at the screen again, and fought a shudder. "That thing doesn't look like anything humans would create deliberately."

"No, it doesn't," said Doctus, "which is why I suspect it may have been there to begin with. But not knowing where it came from didn't stop humans from using the UMN after they'd found it, either. It's possible the entity behind all this might even be the network itself, or some sort of consciousness attached to it."

MOMO stared at the dark blot on the screen. "You mean that thing is alive?"

"Well, it might be more accurate to say it appears to have a will of its own, like the Gnosis or U-DO." Doctus brought up the terms with marked indifference, as if she were referring to nothing more sinister than a mildly unusual weather phenomenon. "My guess is that it's either some sort of augmented consciousness that's been performing all the functions of an artificially-constructed network, or else it's a network that managed to evolve a will of its own somehow."

Juli pulled her gaze from the main screen and studied the peripheral displays. "Its signature waveform is very similar to that of a human consciousness. But it's been altered somehow, expanded. How is that possible?" She stared at the graph in case she had read it wrong, and then something else occurred to her. "MOMO, could you get a close-up of the formation around the central axis?"

"Certainly." MOMO entered another sequence of keystrokes, and a section of the diagram expanded to fill the screen. The shadow network swirled around the base of the helical column like a hurricane around its own eye, a few stray wisps uncoiling toward the center. This time MOMO gasped. "Oh, no! It's moving toward the axis! It must be trying to reach the source code!"

"What will happen then?" said Ziggy.

MOMO twisted around in her seat and looked up at him, biting her lip in desperation. "I--I don't know. Something very bad, I think."

He nodded grimly and turned back to the screen. "Assuming it does possess some sort of consciousness, what could its intention be in trying to hack into the operating system? Is it trying to take over the AMN?"

"Right now its influence appears to be limited to the imaginary domain," said Juli, "and there's a reason for that. Do you understand why there have been no reported instances of Gnosis activity in the last few years? It's primarily because of the actions of chaos and the others on Michtam, but that's not the only reason. When we created the AMN infrastructure, we also fundamentally changed the relationship between the two domains. The safeguards we programmed into the operating system were designed to prevent imaginary-number existences, like the Gnosis and Testaments, from directly influencing the physical universe. Unexplained Gnosis-like phenomena still exist, but they're of a different nature from the incidents that occurred before. And the axis itself, even though its main purpose is to link the two domains, also functions as a neutral zone between them. The AI that resides within the axis is like a gatekeeper, regulating access from one realm to the other. But if a highly-developed consciousness from the imaginary domain were to seize control of that link, it could potentially begin to manifest itself in this domain, as a phenomenon similar to the Gnosis."

"And in that case," said Doctus, "all hell would break loose. To put it mildly."

MOMO jumped to her feet. "Then, we've got to do something! Otherwise, everything we spent the last two years rebuilding is going to be destroyed all over again. We can't let that happen. How much time do we have?"

Doctus shrugged. "You have the data in front of you; do the math. But if you want my opinion, that particular formation appears to have developed in the last twelve hours. I'd say we have another day or two before it cracks the source code."

MOMO swallowed hard, her eyes fixed on the screen. "I think I know what to do. But I'll have to start as soon as possible. And I'm going to need everyone's help."