Once, he was called Nikolai Naren. But those days were long gone. Now, he was known only as the infamous Shadow Virus. He found it a fitting title. He was the shadow of a man, slowly being consumed by the virus that had invaded his body. Everybody thought he was a monster. He did not bother to argue. He knew what he was.

It bothered him, though, that nobody ever cared to ask him how he became this way. Nobody cared to learn about the virus that possessed him. All anyone ever cared about was getting rid of him, so that their precious electronics would no longer be endangered.

The Shadow Virus was an outcast. The other victims of the Cyber Initiative were, too, but that didn’t make him feel any better. The other Digitized considered him their mortal enemy, all because his ‘bug’ was so much worse than theirs. Even among the few other people like him, he was someone to be hated and avoided. It enraged him, and his rage fed the virus, making everything worse.

The Shadow Virus watched the young woman he’d rescued, quietly waiting for her to awaken. He had saved her twice, now. The first time, from a research facility in which ‘normal’ people — exceptional only in their cruelty and ignorance — sought to control her for their own personal gain. The second time, from her fellow Digitized, who had turned against her, assuming she was on his side. But the Shadow Virus didn’t want there to be sides in the first place. He wished the Digitized could be allies, not split down the middle, battling over a misunderstanding.

The three insecure Digitized had estranged the Shadow Virus out of fear. But the Shadow Virus would have sacrificed anything for a friend – or three – to encourage him to fight the monster within, to remind him that he wasn’t really so terrible, that his abhorrent actions were the virus’s fault, that one day he could be saved... He smiled ruefully. He supposed he should just give up on hoping for a friend. Even this lonely woman, whom he had freed from a dismal life, who hardly knew anything about the outside world, had already decided he was evil.

He shut his eyes. Damaged pixels peeled from his skin and swirled through the air around him. The virus was exhausting him. He could feel it in him, a parasite creeping through his veins, a sizzling electric sensation all over his body, sending flares of dull pain through his nerves. It was eating away at him, little by little. He often wondered how much time he had left, before he was entirely burned away.

A jolt of pain hit his chest, and he found himself free-falling into a memory.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” his mother asked him, gazing intently at his young, handsome face, which glowed with excitement. “The contract said there might be side effects…”

“Mom, I’m going to be fine,” Nik grinned. “They’ve done this, like, a million times. A-Corp would never have approved human testing if it wasn’t safe. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have volunteered if I thought it was dangerous.” His warm brown eyes shone with enthusiasm.

He and his mother were waiting in a white, sparsely decorated room with a single glass door. One week ago, Nik had agreed to participate in a revolutionary scientific endeavor. He was going to be transported into the cyber dimension. He was going to explore worlds of code, behold the universe of software as a concrete landscape. He was going to be the first successful traveler into mankind’s greatest creation.

Nik had always had a passion for the digital realm. When he wasn’t busy with school, he was constantly absorbed in constructing increasingly complex AI. Everyone called him a prodigy, a genius, because he lived and breathed AI. They told him he had such a promising future ahead of him. To Nik, though, it was just a hobby.

Nik had often wondered what cyberspace might look like, if it were a physical place. After learning about the Cyber Initiative from an online friend, he’d immediately applied to be a test subject, recognizing it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance for his wildest dreams to come true...

A woman dressed all in white opened the glass door, and called out, “Mr. Naren? We’re ready to begin.”

Nik stood up and made his way over to the stranger.

“Be careful!” his mother called out after him. He didn’t know it at the time, but those were the last words she would ever say to him.

Nik grinned and said, “So, what am I supposed to do?”

“Follow me,” the woman answered, then turned around, leading young, foolish Nikolai closer to his dreams, and his destruction.