Walter Padelewski was running for his life. His sandalled feet slid on the shiny linoleum and his breath came in shuddering gasps as he raced down another seemingly endless white corridor. His straining ears could hear heavy footsteps pounding behind him but he didn't dare stop to turn his head for even a second. If he could only reach the computer laboratory at the end, he would be safe.

Once inside, it would take less than a second to trigger the security lock, and he would be on the right side of a four-inch-thick steel door, guaranteed to stop anything short of a nuclear blast. If he could only reach the lab.

~~~

The day had begun ordinarily enough. Morning meeting with the research staff, a quick trip to the cafe next door for a latte and a ham roll, then hours spent hunched over his keyboard, happily absorbed in his latest venture-creating an on-line writing platform.

His first feeling was one of simple irritation when Jewel opened his door and peered cautiously around the corner. "There are two men here to see you, Walt. Mr White and Mr Black. Have you got a moment?"

"Have they got an appointment?" he asked waspishly, knowing full well that there were no appointments at all. He had been most careful to quarantine the whole afternoon for his pet project.

Jewel allowed a small frown to crease her perfect brow. "They say they're from Mr Mazon, to discuss the ramifications of your new project. I think you ought to see them, Walt."

"Mazon, eh? I suppose I'd better see them then," he replied, with resignation. Alfred Mazon ran one of the biggest publishing companies-he couldn't afford to offend him, though he couldn't help wondering how his own small company could be of interest to such a giant.

As if they had overheard his reply, two large men appeared in the doorway, pushing past Jewel. The fact that they were both dressed in expensive grey suits did nothing to allay his first impression. Low brows, thick necks and unsmiling eyes said one thing. Whatever these men wanted, they weren't going to take "no" for an answer.

Walter swallowed nervously. "Good afternoon, gentlemen. How can I help you?"

Both men stayed on their feet, ignoring the two chairs in front of Walter's desk.

"This won't take long, Mr Padelewski," said Mr White. "It's very simple. Shut down your plans for an on-line writing platform and you won't hear from us again."

"But my site will be for amateurs, hobby writers. What harm can it possibly do?" Walter protested.

"Probably none," Mr Black smiled, but for some reason it didn't make Walter feel any better. "But we don't want to take the risk, do we?" he added.

"What happens if I don't?" Walter managed to squeeze out.

Both men smiled, but said nothing. The effect was more threatening than any words.

"I can't believe Mr Mazon would condone this sort of behaviour!" said Walter in a faint voice. He knew Alfred Mazon was a hard-headed businessman, but he'd never heard anything like this about him.

"Mr Mazon is a generous man," said Mr White. "But sometimes he can be too forbearing for his own good. It's our job to look after his interests."

"I'm sure Mr Mazon would be terribly upset if anything should happen to you," added Mr Black, in earnest tones.

"Now if you'll just hand over that laptop, we'll be on our way," said Mr White.

Walter's thoughts skittered around in his brain, seeking a way out. "All right, " he murmured, rising to his feet. "I'll just walk out with you." He clutched his laptop firmly to his breast and stepped out from behind the desk.

He walked toward the door, with both men following uncomfortably close on his heels. In the outer room, Jewel looked up from behind her desk with a worried expression. "Everything all right, Mr Padelewski?"

"It's fine, Jewel." Walter turned to the two men. "If you'd like to wait here with my secretary, I'll just fetch the backup disc from the safe," he added, attempting to project sincerity. Mr Black and Mr White exchanged startled looks. Evidently they had not realised he would have a backup somewhere else.

Without waiting, Walter strode off confidently down the corridor, his laptop still clasped under one arm.

"Hang on, we'll come with you," Mr White's voice followed him.

"I'm afraid it's secure area," replied Walter, over his shoulder. "Have a seat. It won't take me long." He went out of the office and closed the door.

For a split second, Walter thought he had got away with it. Then he heard footsteps. Without a second thought, he took to his heels and fled down the corridor.

"Hey! Stop right there!"

Ignoring the command, Walter whisked around a corner and ran even faster. Heavy feet pounded behind him-they might be big men but they were frighteningly fast.

Sweat ran into Walter's eyes but there was no time to stop and wipe his face. Time enough when he was safe inside the lab. At last! There was the door in front of him. Holding the laptop tightly under one arm, Walter flashed his security card with his other hand, pushed open the door and slammed it shut, just seconds in front of his pursuers. He shot home the safety bolt for good measure and stood back, watching the door as fists pounded against it from the other side.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face with a shaky hand. He was safe. Even if the men managed to threaten one of his staff into using their own security card, the door wouldn't open as long as the bolt was engaged.

He went straight to the small refrigerating unit and took out a bottle of water. Gulping thirstily, he looked around the lab. It was a while since he had been in here. It was filled with high tech equipment-the best and newest he could afford. Apart from the mainframe which occupied its own partitioned room, there was a 3D printer and several work benches, one of which was currently covered in boxes containing dismembered laptops, motherboards, and other bits and pieces his research team liked to play with. He wondered what Alan and Ivana were working on now.

He pottered around for a few minutes, filling in time while his pulse returned to a normal level. He wondered briefly how Jewel was coping with Mr White and Mr Black. Had she managed to call the police yet?

He supposed he'd be in here for a while, maybe even a few hours, until things were sorted out.

His gaze rested on a large object, tucked away between two benches and covered with a black cloth. Curious, he twitched the cloth away to reveal a large chair. With padded headrest and arms it reminded him rather unfortunately of a visit to the dentist. A set of small black headphones rested on the seat, with a thin black cord connecting them to a large retro- looking silver radio on one of the benches.

Aah. Just what he needed-some music to help him relax. Placing his laptop carefully on the bench, Walter sat thankfully into the soft cushions. He popped the headset on his head, then fiddled with the knobs on the radio, searching for a station. A faint hissing filled his ears but he thought he could hear music in the background. Walter smiled happily. It sounded like One Direction, his favourite band and rather guilty secret. He turned up the volume.

~~~

EEEEiiieeee! Walter screamed in agony as his brain was sucked out through his ears, converted into digital format inside the modified headphones, and circuited into the radio, which wasn't actually a radio at all, but a mini-CPU.

~~~

An unmeasurable time later, Walter's eyes snapped open. Consciousness returned in a rush and he felt more alert than he had felt for weeks. What the hell just happened? One minute he was screaming in agony, and now he appeared to be floating-pain-free-in a vast space lit only by pinpoints of light. He remembered turning up the radio, the pain, then... nothing. Until now. So where was he? Outer space? Walter chuckled uneasily. He wasn't in the lab, that was for certain.

He looked around, and to his astonishment, realised he could see 360 degrees without turning his head. In fact, if he concentrated, he could see 360 degrees above and below. At the same time. More space. More pinpoints of light. How was that possible? Surely if he was looking down he would see himself. Panicked, he looked down again-nothing. No body, no legs, no arms, or hands. Futilely, he tried to touch his face with non-existent hands, then squinted, trying to see his nose. No nose. No head. Just his brain-or perhaps to be more accurate-his mind.

If Walter had been able to, he would have fainted. As it was, he timed out.

~~~

Looking back later, Walter thought that if he hadn't been born with the ability to daydream in vivid detail, he would have gone mad. On the other hand, he felt he'd spent all too much time floating in and out of a hallucinogenic nightmare while his mind grappled to make sense of the strange world in which he found himself.

He remembered regaining consciousness once, to be confronted by long strings of zeros and ones raining down on him, much like a scene from the Matrix. Accurate as they might have been, he found endless streams of data did nothing to help him make sense of anything. He was-or had been-human. He needed human images to relate to.

Luckily, the view he'd first seen, of a vast space dotted with pinpricks of light, proved to be the default setting, a 'homepage' if you like for this cyberworld. To Walter's relief, whenever he found himself overwhelmed by images he couldn't control he could return to this setting and regain his balance, just by thinking about it.

He had his first breakthrough when he wished fervently that he had his laptop with him, and the laptop appeared. Not his actual laptop, of course, but a virtual one, identical in every respect, except for not actually being there. Excited by that small success, he wished for a cup of coffee, and sure enough, his favourite mug appeared in front of him, filled with a creamy foaming latte. Unfortunately he didn't have any way of drinking it, even virtually, but for a person with no nose, it sure smelt good!

His next project was to recreate his office, so he could have familiar surroundings. At first he created it exactly as he remembered, and then, when that worked, he set about making small adjustments to make it more interesting. Instead of the bland white walls, he redecorated in his favourite shade of orange-burnt amber. His next, and more tricky venture-after all, who has really studied themselves from the back? -was to imagine his own body. It made him feel much more comfortable, even though he knew it wasn't real.

After that, he found that with practice, he could create virtual images of all sorts of things, places, and even people. It took time and effort to get them right, but he soon found he could manipulate his environment by careful thought.

Walter had no idea how much time was passing in the outside world-time seemed to have no relevance here. He worked hard to create a virtual simulation of his computer lab and encouraged his simulations of Alan and Ivana to work on the software he had begun to develop for his on-line writing platform, although he had some doubts about the success of this project. If Alan and Ivana were products of his imagination, would they think like the real Alan and Ivana? Or like himself, Walter? Were they even capable of thinking at all? It was a real brain teaser and a wonderful puzzle.

Occasionally he wondered what the real Alan and Ivana were doing now. Had they found his laptop? Wouldn't it be interesting if they were working on his project in the real world at the same time they were working on it in here?

Then one day-he still thought in terms of days for some reason-he decided to investigate one of the pinpricks of light. Donning an orange space suit just for the fun of it, he steered towards the tiny dot of light which seemed nearest. Rather to his surprise, the dot didn't get any larger as he drew nearer, but sat there in front of him, about the size of his little fingernail. Walter leant closer and peered into the light.

If he'd had a jaw, it would have dropped open in astonishment. There was someone on the other side. A complete stranger. The stranger had long reddish hair and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. There was a frown between his eyes as he pounded furiously on the keyboard. It took Walter a second or two to realise he was looking out through the webcam on the man's laptop.

Frantically, he tried to call out, to tap on the little window but all to no avail. He could see the stranger but the stranger couldn't see him.

He squinted through the webcam, trying to see what the man was doing. Luckily there was a window behind him and in its reflection Walter could read "yb thgiL flaH." Much as he twisted and squinted he couldn't see the rest but that was enough.

"Half Light by..."

The man was writing a story. Walter's on-line writing platform was up and running.

Walter was so thrilled, he darted around his cyberworld like a bat out of hell-he would have been screaming for joy if that were possible. He raced from light to light, and discovered that all the pinpricks of light were people on laptops, tablets, smartphones, seeking access to his world. Even as he watched, chapters came flying out into his space, tumbling over each other, thin ones, thick ones, pages of poetry and fiction and something called a rant. Luckily there was enough room for all of them, mostly. Once or twice, two crashed into each other, taking both works offline until Walter could separate the pages and restore the pieces to their original state.

Gathering a random selection of works, he returned to his office-now converted into more of a luxury penthouse-and conjured up a glass of champagne to celebrate. He tried a virtual sip. The good news was that he could taste champagne, the bad news-that it gave him the hiccups. How a mind with no body could get the hiccups he didn't know. He opened the first story and began to read. Gradually the hiccups faded away.

~~~

Outside in the real world, hundreds of readers swore at their screens as the last, incredibly witty comment they had just entered on someone's work, was repeating embarrassingly down the page.

~~~

After only a few weeks, Walter realised he was going to have to do something about the books. There were too many now to have them flying around all over the place, occasionally crashing into each other and causing frozen screens, missing paragraphs, and lost drafts in the physical world. He set about creating libraries, Romance, Science Fiction, Fanfiction for his favourite One Direction stories, and more, places where the books could be stored safely for easy access. He created widgets to run around and do the hack work, programs to keep everything running smoothly, while he could do the fun stuff like reading and arranging competitions.

He hacked easily into the nearby mainframe to create more space for his platform and as the numbers of readers and writers grew, he developed huge cities to house his libraries. Soon he had a whole world at his fingertips.

Walter found he scarcely thought about his old life at all now, although it would have been handy to be able to communicate directly with the real Alan and Ivana, to check their progress and offer some advice. He was pretty sure he'd died when his brain was extracted in the lab but he didn't like to think too much about that. However, sometimes he wondered what had become of his body. Had there been a funeral? A cremation? Had Mr White and Mr Black dared to show their faces? Had Jewel shed a few tears?

Although he had no desire to return to his old life, Walter spent hours trying to work out ways to communicate with the physical world. He had some great ideas to share. He tried sending messages by altering the text in people's stories but found that it only made them cross. No-one actually paid attention to his messages, they just thought their works had been corrupted and deleted them, or they immediately copied and pasted a new version over the top.

He tried sending messages in computer code but that didn't work out well either. Too often the results were unexpected messages such as "Oops, something went wrong. We've been notified and should have the problem fixed soon," or worse, the resetting to zero for a writer's votes, followers or reads. It took him hours to clean those up!

He had another promising breakthrough when he developed the Ambassador program. He started with building a series of virtual supervisors, each one in charge of a library-responsible for maintenance and monitoring. Then he posted an invitation in a Forum, calling for volunteers-and hoped for the best.

To be honest, he hadn't had much success previously with Forum posts. If they weren't totally ignored, or immediately buried under a tsunami of requests for read 4 reads, they were hijacked by eager young Harry Potter fans seeking role plays. Walter muttered darkly-there must be some way to stop this from happening, to quarantine these posts into appropriate channels. "Clubs", perhaps. That sounded harmless and social enough.

To his surprise and pleasure, this Forum entry attracted the right sort of attention. Perhaps including the phrase "responsible adults only, need apply" had eliminated the casual and frivolous.

Jewel was one of the first. Remembering how skilled she had been at coming up with covers for his own small efforts, Walter assigned her to manage one of his new Clubs, Creative Design. Carefully, he linked each simulated Ambassador to a physical volunteer in the outside world, wishing that somehow the communication would flow two ways. He wasn't sure if that actually happened but without doubt his new human Ambassadors appeared prepared to spend hours of their time sorting out his problems for scarcely any reward or favour... so maybe the ties were more real than virtual. Certainly once they were firmly linked, very few of the Ambassadors managed to escape.

Everything was coming along swimmingly until one day-out of the blue (or orange, perhaps) all the Status Bars disappeared in one fell swoop. Problems popped up all over the place, causing loss of data and unexpected down-time. Walter was frantic-what had gone wrong? Had he been hacked? Infected with a virus? He sent out streams of widgets, with orders to check every Club and every Library, even the darkest corners of Non-Fiction, to search for the intruder.

Eventually they found some of the culprits hiding behind Lady Windemere's Fan in the Gutenberg library, and brought them to stand before Walter. Walter couldn't help staring in surprise. The culprits were tiny black and white bugs, round, with little legs and arms. They were all squeaking at him at the same time and he couldn't understand a word.

As soon as they realized Walter couldn't hear them, the little bugs assembled themselves into tall structure resembling a radio tower.

"Aha!" said the top one through the transmitter. "We finally found you. You didn't think you could escape from us forever, did you?"

Walter stared in bewilderment. "Sorry, who...?"

"Mr Black and Mr White!"

Walter was still staring but a frown began to appear on his virtual forehead.

"There was a slight problem with the digital interface," confessed the speaker. "But it's worked out well in the end. There are thousands of us. We can blur your banners, jumble your genres and pixilate your profiles! We can take you down, Padelewski!"

"In your dreams!" snarled Walter, summoning his teams of widgets. "Alert the Ambassadors. Release the Anti-virus. This means war!"