I'm psychologically equipped for this.

...while the stony bones of the world tore past and the air grew dark and howling. The last thing he saw as the gulley became a torrent of dust and rock was the Jeep, plucked backwards into space.

Simon stopped listening. He realised he'd had enough. Enough of the theories, enough of the mystery, enough of the bullshit. Enough of the soldiers and guns and MI5. Enough of bugs in phones and in people he cared about. Enough of not being cared about back. Enough of uncertainty and lies and civilisation, collapsing or not. Enough of is part in it, his place, his role; the character of Simon Parfitt and all the baggage it entailed.

Fear is quite the anaesthetic

His desire for this to be a joke was quickly replaced by a desire for whiskey.

Max?' he asked.'Yeah?''...What are you doing?''Shooting people.

For a moment, Simon's sympathetic nervous system forgot he was arachnophobic. The sight of those spindly legs rising, like an ink drawing popping out of paper into three-dimensional space, should have caused a surge of adrenaline, a yelp of panic, and at least three feet of involuntary back-peddling.

Something was wrong with the devices themselves. Digging deep into the internal structure of the circuit boards with powerful microscopes, Simon's team had discovered broken and incorrect connections, electronic dead-ends, short circuits, and nonsensical pathways.

The unfortunate 8075 hadn't survived his assault, splintering apart, fragments of its casing skittering across the bench. The battery within had split along its plane, revealing something as out-of-place as a missile in a bathtub.

He had no problem with flies or bugs or beetles, even creepy ones like earwigs and cockroaches...Six legs were fine, but eight were alien and unnatural.'The same number of legs as four fully-grown serial killers!

Odessa sighed. 'When I said you were one of the smartest people in the company, I was referring solely to your technical abilities. Now get to work.

But the things in the batteries couldn't be spiders. It just wasn't possible. There had to be another explanation. But of what kind?

He reached the ground floor and flung the door open, fleeing into the street. He glanced back and saw that she wasn't following, so he slowed to a halt. His pulse raced. The entranceway was dark, the door swinging slowly closed. Movement to his left caught his attention: the camera on the corner of the building that covered the resident's parking. It swivelled to point directly at him, and he stared at it for a moment, suddenly doubtful it was a closed-circuit system after all.He ran for his car, and the camera followed.

Simon shook his head. 'I don't want to be a hero. I'd rather abandon the technology altogether, sit on a hill and speak to my neighbours by smoke-signal.

...a fissure appeared. Splinters of plastic broke away around it, and the fissure widened, radiating further fractures.When the first leg broke out, Simon tried to shriek.

Who gave you a gun?''The army.''Why?''That's what the army does, Simon.

The military operation swiftly became one of disaster management and damage control, search and rescue.

He realised he was in a chair. The world was white and blurry in half his vision, and it took him a few moments to realise a sheet of paper was stuck to his face.

You state here that you believe your daughter, Amy, is no longer with you; that the girl living in your house - who looks and sounds exactly like Amy - is not in fact your daughter. Is this correct? Is this still the case?

She stared at Raven in a long second of shocked silence, before sagging to the floor.

Yes' Simon nodded. 'This would suggest that these patterns grow inside the batteries until a critical point is reached, when the shapes develop no further, and the phone ceases to function.

Partnership means she is of equal rank to you, Raven', Obiakor continued...'Don't play games with her.

The attack came without warning, in the pre-dawn stillness on the day they were due to leave. A series of solid concussions shook the walls and sent Simon scrambling from his bunk. Max thrust a handgun at him, which he immediately fumbled and dropped.

Are you a house-wife, Mrs Silvers?' he asked. 'What would you recommend for getting burger relish out of a white shirt?'The seething woman cranked the venom-level of her gaze up to eleven, and Raven smiled pleasantly back.

Well, whatever happened here today...' he said, turning back to Popescu and donning his own sunglasses so he could discreetly cast his gaze over her figure,'...it was only the beginning.

Raven briefly pondered the phrase, "staring down the barrel of a gun". It wasn't really that accurate, he decided. After all, it was too dark to see any features down a barrel, only a black circle at the end of it.

Raven scowled at her. 'Fine. But if I accidentally shoot you because my aim is shaky, because I'm too tense, because I wasn't given the chance to relax before going into a potentially very dangerous situation, you'll be happy blaming only yourself?

Every scrape, site, range and page; every game, download, hack, song, movie and virrie on the Web. Everything on your phone. Everything on your 'puta. Even the content directories of your cupboards. Almost every system has been brute-forced; passwords cracked, firewalls breached. Nothing has been left untouched.

He felt like a baked bean in a can, soaring through the air on a downward turn of a parabolic arc...

On the TV he found cartoons and movies, music videos and game shows, repeat broadcasts and reruns, but there was nothing current, and no news. Many channels were just blank, or displayed brightly coloured test cards.

But as Max tugged him out the door a different feeling stole over him, something strange, behind the regret, deeper than the mourning. It wasn't until much later that he was able to identify it.Excitment.

Did you consider anything like the Infected?' Simon had asked.'Not quite. But some of our other contingency plans might help us out with this particular mission.

Anna, like most English speakers, thought GASP was a silly name for the project. But the name got the point across. If there were modern wonders of the world, GASP - and Kali - stood as far above them as the Colossus of Rhodes had stood above man.

The Gobi wasn't completely devoid of life; its ecosystem was unexpectedly extensive and varied given the extremes to which it subjected its denizens, but some of those forms of life weren't the kind that Anna wanted to admire too closely.

Oh, man, she's gonna love you,' Max said. 'Physically. A lot.