By the time I’d been at the office an hour, I was already profoundly drunk. I had started before Koizumi’s goons had shuffled out of my apartment, continued through the shower, ran out on the drive to work, and re-started with enthusiasm as soon as I reached my desk and fresh reserves. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and it hurt to breathe. I’d already had a gun to my head and a vase thrown at me by one of the most powerful men on the West Coast. And he wanted to meet in less than twelve hours, in the dark, out of the way. You’re damn right I was drinking.

The front office buzzed, and the overhead display sprang to life, showing Chet out in the hallway, hunched more forward than to the side. He went through his particular access ritual — I turned my head so I wouldn’t see what I had been licking for the past two years — and the front door slowly ground open.

I swung my feet off the desk, picked up the bottle and tottered out to see him. He lurched through the door and we stared at each other, bleary-eyed and blinking.

“You look like crap,” I said.

“You look even more like crap than usual,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I raised the bottle and tapped it. “Analgesic isn’t working. What’s wrong with you?”

He put a finger to the right side of his head. “Virus,” he said.

The first implant virus was a quarter of a century old, the product of a Palestinian anarchist group and the remains of a captured U.S. Army private. The cryptography now shot-through implants was largely a result of that fiasco — it shut down most of the military for the better part of a week and continued to cause problems for months afterward. The virus payload was nothing sophisticated — it identified targets in order-protocol messages and substituted a random, nearby location — but friendly-fire and unintended non-combat deactivation statistics exploded. A cascade of bad messages led a platoon of Marines to invaded a supermarket in Ohio instead of the red-team terrorist camp on their live-fire test range. Over sixty people were killed, many for wielding baguettes, back when you could get real bread.

Another reason that implants are so tightly protected now is that the public has always been a bit hinky about the idea of someone taking them over, getting in their head and doing unhappy things. A lot of rumors went around before the government started standard issue — Mind control! Mind control! — and a lot of effort went into debunking them. There were outside auditors, calming voices and lots and lots of P.R.

The weird thing is, most of it was true. Implants can’t do much of anything to your mind — control it, read it, certainly not improve it — that a small computer stapled to your forehead couldn’t do. They’re not magic. They’ve got audio and video interfaces, just wired in a little deeper than they used to. They’re off-the-shelf parts powered by blood glucose.

Which doesn’t explain why Chet suddenly winced, wrapped his arms around his head and fell to his knees, grunting in pain. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, shit. Not again.”

“What?” I said. “What?”

I squatted down and put a hand on his back, but he didn’t acknowledge me. He was doubled over, rocking slowly, letting out little punctured breaths and muttering a pretty impressive list of violent obscenities to himself. “Chet?” I said, patting him. “Chet?”

No response. I poked him a couple of times in the side with a finger.

“Hey, Chet?”

Nothing.

I wet an index finger with my mouth and stuck it in his ear.

He raise his face to me, sweat slicking his forehead, and said, “Jesus fucking Christ. Gimme a second.” His eyes unfocused, he closed them, and near as I could tell, he went back to screwing with his implant. OK. Not a good time. I get it. Don’t bother the geek when he’s passing a kidney stone.

“Geez,” I said. “Touchy.”

Chet thrashed around on the floor for another half hour, at one point sobbing to himself, at another letting out a sort of primal, guttural roar. He ran through a list of technical babble — implant hacker jargon, near indecipherable to me — while punching himself in the side of the head. He rolled onto his side and lay very, very still for a while, and then suddenly began gritting his teeth so hard that I swear I could hear them creak and pop under the pressure. I finished my bottle, got another, and waited.

Eventually, finally, Chet’s body slowly uncoiled and went slack and he lay panting, on his side, in the center of the room.

I got up, nudged him with my foot and said, “You’ve been spending an awful lot of time in your own urine lately.”

He pushed himself up, and slumped against the side of his desk. He ran his hands over his face and pushed a sweat-heavy mop of hair back out of his eyes. He moaned a little and ran a sandpaper dry tongue over his lips.

I squatted down next to him, handed him a cup of water I’d had waiting and said, “What the hell was that?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t manage it. He raised the glass and sipped some of the water, gagged a little and let it cascade down his chest. “You couldn’t… find… a clean glass?” he said.

“Your history with liquids isn’t good enough to be lecturing me,” I said. “What the hell was that?”

He put a finger to the side of his head again. “I said. Virus.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You may not have been paying attention, but I saw what just happened to you and there’s no way that was an implant virus. They can’t do that.”

“Didn’t think so either,” he said. “This is… different.” He let the cup of water fall out of his hand and took the bottle from me and drank a long pull. Chet doesn’t go in for the booze all the much, but you could see it relax him top to bottom as it burned down his throat. “I’ve been attacked half a dozen times like that since I left your apartment last night. Each time it’s something new.”

“Worse than that?”

He drank again, swallowing hard, his strength returning. “Not worse. New. Seizure inducement. Subliminals. Visual and auditory hallucinations. Ultrasonics. This thing…” — he waves his hands feebly around the office. “All-sense feedback loop, everything deafening and blinding and… Jesus. Man. Whoever designed this thing is an evil son of a bitch.”

“Is it gone?” I said.

“Don’t know. No. Each time I think I’ve shut it down, it comes back. The hallucinations really shook me up. They integrate into the environment and then jump out. Awful stuff. Nightmare stuff.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “When’s it going to happen again?”

“Now,” Chet said and he grunted as he climbed into his chair. “There’s an attack going on now.”

“What?”

“Here. Feel the side of my head. The virus has overclocked the implant, and it’s heating up. It’s at 38.3 C now. If it hits 40, I’m in a lot of trouble. I’ve tried a couple of things, but running a lot of light-weight jobs has worked the best so far. Steal cycles from it.”

His head was weirdly hot, like he had a localized fever. “Brain damage?” I said.

“At 40 C. I’m working on it. I’ve got a couple of days. I’ve slowed it down a lot.”

“Well, what the hell, Chet? I thought you were careful about this stuff.”

“I am. I run black I.C.E. and—”

“What?”

“I run black—”

“Ice?”

“I.C.E. Intrusion counter-measure—”

“Oh, God. Shut up. I swear you guys can’t change a set of batteries without giving it an acronym and making it sound like part of an S&M starter kit.”

“That’s not true!”

“‘Black I.C.E.,’ Chet,” I said. “It’s like the unholy union of exclusionary jargon and impotence fears.”

“Fine. I run security. I log everything. I asked a few friends to take a look at the traffic dump for last night and they only thing they can find is some encrypted stuff in the protocol handshake I got from Danning. It’s documented for extensibility, but nobody has the keys. You can’t use it.”

“But Danning did.”

“But Danning did. He must infect everyone who queries his implant. The guy’s Typhoid Mary.”

“So why aren’t all his co-workers doing spastic little jigs? How does he get through a day?”

“I suspect it had something to do with you shooting at him, Boss. I checked the logs and I got an emergency-band broadcast of encrypted data while I was… Uh…”

“Catatonic.”

“Upset. Just after you tried to kill him.”

“Hm,” I said.

“And, hey, nice job with that, by the way,” Chet said.

I grabbed the bottle back. “I already took enough of that from Koizumi,” I said. “For a nobody, Danning has a lot of contingencies and convenient hobbies.”

“The guy’s not a nobody,” Chet said. “He’s connected. This is black box stuff. He kicked your ass. He kicked my ass. Koizumi’s been lying to you.”

“I know,” I said, and dropped the bottle in the trash, to dispose of itself. “I’ve been meaning to ask him about that.”