Julia imagined the billions of nanoscale gears meshing as they spun up and sucked sugar from her blood. As her speed of thought accelerated, time slowed at an inverse rate until the car’s electric shriek collapsed like a broken siren: rrrrrrrrrr-r-r-r—r—r——r———r . The car froze in midleap as her mind ran at a thousand times normal speed; every inch of the jump would take minutes now. At the same time, a bubble of suffocating heat enveloped her, the clock glowing inside her skull as it shunted waste energy to her blood stream. Her brain would fry in five seconds, but that was more than enough time to piggyback any available data networks.