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worked for Unicorp?”
    â€œHe said…his name was Sigma.”
    A tremor runs through Dad’s body. He almost drops me.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” I ask. “Do you know him?”
    He turns away and stares at the lab. “It’s not a hacker. It came from right here. From my own computers.”
    Then I hear a siren. A truck from the Yorktown Heights Fire Department comes barreling up the driveway and stops in front of the lab. As the firefighters rush into the building, two ambulances pull up behind the truck. Dad tightens his grip on me and heads for the closer ambulance.
    â€œHey!” he shouts at the paramedics. “My son needs oxygen!”
    The next minute is a blur. The paramedics shout instructions at each other. Soon I’m lying on a gurney with an oxygen mask over my face. At some point I realize Dad isn’t there anymore. Lifting my head, I look past the paramedics and see him running toward the fire truck. What’s going on? What’s he doing over there?
    Then he grabs a fire ax from a bracket on the truck’s side panel.
    Holding the ax with both hands, Dad heads for the laboratory. For a moment I think he’s going back into the lobby to help the firefighters, but instead of entering the charred lab he dashes to a steel cabinet attached to the side of the building. Long ago, Dad explained to me what this thing was: a junction box for the lab’s fiber-optic lines. All the communications between the Unicorp lab and the rest of the world—telephone calls, emails, downloads, whatever—pass through the cables inside this box.
    The cabinet’s doors are secured with a padlock. Dad smashes the lock with his first swing of the ax. Then he opens the cabinet and starts slashing the cables.
    No one reacts at first. The people on the lawn just gawk at my father as he severs the lab’s communications lines. But after a few seconds Colonel Peterson emerges from the crowd. He edges toward the junction box, waiting until Dad has shredded every cable inside. Then Peterson says, “All right, Tom. That’s enough.”
    Dad drops the ax. Shaking his head, he strides back to the ambulance, with Peterson following close behind. As Dad approaches my gurney, he raises his hand to his mouth. He has a devastated look on his face, guilty and horrified.
    That’s when I realize what Sigma is. It came from right here , Dad said. From my own computers . It’s something Dad created, something that lived within the advanced circuits he built, the electronics designed to imitate the human brain. It figured out a way to jump out of those circuits and invade my VR program. Then it took control of the lab’s automated systems—power, heating, ventilation, security—and tried to kill us.
    The paramedics have left me alone and started treating the other injured people on the lawn. Dad bends over my gurney and checks to see if I’m all right. Then he turns around and confronts Peterson. “That was a waste of time, wasn’t it?” he hisses. “I cut the lines too late?”
    The colonel nods. “I’m afraid so,” he says in a low voice. “Our friend has already escaped from his cage.”
    â€œHe’s on the Internet?”
    Peterson nods again, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone, which is apparently working now. “He sent an email to Cyber Command headquarters five minutes ago, right after the last explosion. My men are trying to trace where it came from, but it looks like the message ping-ponged all over the globe before it arrived. He could be anywhere by now.”
    â€œWhat did the email say?”
    Peterson holds up the phone and reads from its screen. “‘My name is Sigma. This message is a warning to all government leaders and military commanders. I have the power to annihilate you.’”

CHAPTER
4
    I wake up the next morning in a hospital bed at Westchester Medical