Alice looked over at the flesh blob that was Thomas Rox-borough. His disease had nearly run its course and his organs were coming apart. If he didn't get help soon, he would die.
Roxborough had other problems as well. His head lay across an elaborate chopping block that was situated on a huge stage surrounded by gardens of white roses and a deck of royal guards. A huge, ugly guard with a hood over his head wielded a gigantic axe.
Alice grinned her Cheshire grin. "So it comes down to this," she said. "Do you have any last words?"
"Alice!" Roxborough bellowed.
The executioner swung the axe behind his head.
"David denies killing Dunkelzahn, and I can't find any concrete evidence that ties him to the explosion."
"He had motive."
"He had some interesting things to say about that, too."
The axe rose in a wide arc over his head.
"Alice!"
"He said you were responsible for the Crash, not Dunkelzahn. Just as I suspected originally. For some reason he was reluctant to tell me."
The axe fell.
"Stop, stop! I admit it. I had something to do with it, but I wasn't alone.".
The blade made a clean cut through Roxborough's neck and struck the wood chopping block with a resounding thunk! Roxborough's head fell onto the wooden planks and rolled over next to the fading cat.
Alice smiled down at him. "I thought you might have more to say."
"I'm still alive," said Roxborough's disembodied head. "I'm still alive."
"Surprise! Now finish your little confession, and I'll let you live a few moments longer."
Roxborough grimaced. "Okay, it begins way back with my corporation, Acquisition Technologies."
"Yes?"
"It was a small corp, but we had a drek-hot programming department. I ran it, and David Gavilan was my top code maestro."
Alice drew breath through her sharp teeth.
"Dunkelzahn had very little to do with the corporation except that he owned a small portion. Until one day, I learned that the wyrm was planning to hire Gavilan away from us. This started a little corporate data war.
"I instructed my programming team to come up with the most deadly computer virus ever constructed. My intention was to destroy the data cores of Dunkelzahn's Gossamer Threads Corporation. Nothing more. Gavilan worked on the project, everyone did."
"I don't believe you."
Roxborough's disembodied face wrinkled into a pained grimace. "Finally, the truth and you don't buy it."
"What happened?"
"We tried a small corp first to see if the virus would work. We unleashed it on Effexx Studios and it destroyed them completely. At first we were overjoyed, but then something happened. It was a complicated program, self-replicating, self-correcting, all that. It got out in the old Internet and infected hundreds of computer systems."
"I remember," said Alice. Perhaps, she thought, this is finally the truth.
"It was an accident, don't you see? We never intended to hurt anyone."
"What happened to David?"
"Dunkelzahn met with him to discuss moving to Gossamer Threads, and he saw the virus in David's mind. Dunkelzahn knew what we had done and he convinced David to quit Acquisition Technologies and go to work for the UCAS government to fight the virus. The rest of us were busy trying to hide our involvement, and with all the computer systems crashing, that wasn't too hard to do."
Alice looked at Roxborough with pity. "You deserve your fate," she said. "You deserve to be a brain in a bottle. But I never did anything wrong. I came in as an innocent…"
"Look, I'm very sorry. I helped fund Echo Mirage. We all fought the Crash virus."
"It mutated and grew into something else, did it not?"
"I don't know."
"Is it still out there?" Alice asked.
"Honestly, I don't know."
Alice faded herself out of Wonderland and into the shining city.
Roxborough's cries fell away into the distance. "You can't leave me like this. I'm a disembodied head, for Ghost's sake.','
Alice ignored him. He was still alive. He should be thankful.