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 roles 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!"

(Author's Note:  This is the end of this short story, a new one, Orangepunk, begins on the next page)