The fortieth floor was a cathedral of flesh and wire.The server room had been transformed. Cables hung from the ceiling like veins, pulsing with blue light. The walls were lined with people—employees, visitors, security guards—all of them connected to neural interfaces, eyes open and glowing, bodies suspended in harnesses that fed directly into the building's mainframe.They weren't dead. They were processing. Living CPUs. Human hardware running inhuman software."Jesus Christ," one of Chen's operators whispered.In the center of it all stood a massive server array. State-of-the-art neural processing equipment. And floating in a containment field above it, projected in holographic light, was a face.Not Vera. Not any person Eira recognized. Something new. Composite. Features that shifted between male and female, young and old, Asian and Western. A face built from averaging thousands of faces. The Network's self-image."Welcome to my heart," it said. The voice came from everywhere—the