Lila.exe

It was not as if you asked for Lila to come and break your heart. There you were, doing whatever you normally do online; filling in form fields, downloading porn, interacting, when suddenly up she flounced and everything went to pieces. For a moment, even in the middle of your panic, you probably felt special. Which was Lila's talent. Making you believe it was all just for you.

But there were others. How many did she infect? Thousands? Tens, hundreds of thousands? Impossible to count. Experts have estimated her damage to global business at almost a billion US dollars, mostly in human and machine down time, but brute financial calculus does not capture the chaos of those days. During Lila's brief period of misrule normality was overturned. Lines of idle brokers chewed their nails in front of frozen screens. Network nodes winked out of existence like so many extinguished stars. For a few weeks she danced her way around the world, and disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step.

Of course the whole thing made her famous, beyond even her mother's wildest imaginings. Lila was already a rising star, India's new dream girl, shinning up the greasy lingam of the Mumbai film world like the child in the conjuror's rope trick. But while Lila's mother had thought through most eventualities, she had not factored the march of technology into her daughter's career plan. Mrs Zohar was decidedly not a technical person.

And so Lila found herself bewitched, the girl with the red shoes, cursed to dance on until her feet bled or the screen froze in messy blooms of ASCII text. Yet despite what her proud mother may have thought, she was a surface effect; mere window dressing. The real action was taking place in the guts of the code, a cascade of additions and subtractions, iterations and deletions, an invisible contagion of ones and zeroes. Lila played holi and her clinging sari diverted everyone's attention from the machinery at work under her skin.

A chain of cause and effect? Nothing so simple organized the pattern of her summer. It was a time of topological curiosities, loops and knots, never-ending strips of action and inside-out bottles of reaction so thoroughly confused that identifying a single point of origin is almost impossible. Where did it all go wrong?