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could converge, safe from any prying eyes.
    Insulated now. Insulated and insulated again, disembodied spirits trysting in some mythic ice cave of the future. In real-world space, she might find herself confused, doubting, uncertain, but here in the place the machines had created, she could come to be with Torsten, and for now at least, be free.
    “…something different…something you have never done…,” she read on the screen before her now. Her hand had moved to her thigh, then slowly up to a fold of flesh that seemed almost agony to touch. She felt her ankles lock against the spokes of her chair, felt her pulse thudding in her ears.
    “…my hand is your hand…”
    Her lower lip was caught in her teeth, her fingers truly were another’s as they probed and stroked…and yet something was nagging at her, fighting for attention: in your office, he had said. Had she slipped, had she told him where she was? She’d been so careful all these weeks, no clues, no hints…but perhaps he’d just assumed. It was natural, wasn’t it. He was in his office, so she’d be in hers…
    She threw off the thoughts, silly, silly, found herself urging upward now, lifting herself out of her chair toward an avalanche of release as great as any she had ever known. She knew that she was speaking aloud now, any thought of typing a distant memory, but it did not matter, for Torsten would have joined her in his own turn, and they were connected over the vast, impossible stretches of ether…her very being had disintegrated, spread across this unknowable space, her consciousness filling with one explosion of light after the next.
    “Oh, dear God,” she said, and might have spoken the words again, had she not heard from somewhere the sounds of the door lock clacking, the rush of feet upon carpet, the spoken reply.
    “Harlot,” came the voice. “Blasphemer. Jezebel!” The words hissed in her ear.
    At first the words meant nothing. They might have been elements of her fantasy, imagined sounds that barreled out of the tunnels of the ethernet along with the images of light and color that rocketed about her brain…
    …and then she felt the arm about her throat, and realized that she was being pulled backward, brutally lifted from her seat, her ankles raking the spokes of her chair.
    She would have screamed, but the arm was pressed too tightly against her throat, her chest burning, her strength so suddenly sapped that her kicks and thrashings seemed pitiful, even to her.
    “Such a disappointment,” she heard, a voice, familiar now, ripe with bitterness. “Did you think I wouldn’t learn what you’d done? Did you think I’d let you threaten everything?”
    She felt her heels fly over the back of the chair, felt them bounce against the soft carpet. He was holding her upright, pressed close to him now, and the pressure at her throat seemed even tighter. She fought to get a look at him, but the grip that held her was unyielding. She saw a shoulder, the shadow of a face, the glint of a poster on her wall, a train rolling through the heartland with a message that assured her that life was a journey and not a destination, and then her eyes had come unfocused, were rolling back in her head. The little ticks of sound, the untoward phrase, “
there, in your office
,” how had she let herself ignore the warnings?
    “I trusted you,” he said, and his voice was nearly a sob. “I trusted you!”
    He squeezed more tightly, and as she began to lose consciousness, she thought his voice had become mocking, echoing the words she had read moments before on her computer screen: “…what is the situation of your work,” he hissed. “…my hand is your hand!”
    He was beyond outrage. “…godless…ungrateful… abomination…” The words cascaded in an unintelligible litany, and the words no longer mattered.
    How had he known, she wondered? How could he have possibly known? And then, in the next terrible instant, though her mind thundered with