An instant after the explosion, trillions of bytes began to transfer to the core communications center, which then relayed them into pubic space. Comm channels connected, information passed through personal identifiers.
Around the world, processing cortices in thousands and thousands of people — some sleeping, some eating with their families, gaming, entertaining, some working on new stories, or building a piece of furniture for their kids, some picking on each other, joking, trying to one-up the one-uppers, some making love, others skiing gently down slopes — thousands and thousands of people received a gift of themselves that unwrapped inside their minds and took hold once again.
When it was done, the initiator ran a final stage, destroying itself from code space.
In a small house in Los Angeles, two rebels shared champagne.