The download finished with a chime that sounded more like a death knell.

"Welcome, Seeker," a voice boomed. It was a text-to-speech engine, cold and distorted.

"The torrent was a trap," TENOKE said, his face a blur of censored pixels. "You aren't hunting the memes. The memes are hunting the users. They need fresh consciousness to stay relevant."

He moved through the district of Low-Fi Hip Hop Beats, where the rain never stopped and the music looped eternally. Suddenly, the ground shook. Out of the shadows emerged a Rare Pepe, thirty feet tall and shimmering with toxic green light. It wasn't funny. It was a monstrosity of raw, uncompressed data. Kaelen didn't run. He raised his Capture-Lens.

TENOKE handed him a corrupted flash drive. "We don't. We just seed the revolution."

The giant frog let out a roar that sounded like a dial-up modem screaming. Kaelen looked at the lens, then at TENOKE, then at the beast. He realized the torrent hadn't downloaded a game to his hard drive—it had uploaded his mind to the network. "How do we get out?" Kaelen shouted over the static.