One Is the Loneliest Number returns to an issue introduced in Net Force: the Internet's potential for terrorism. The nature of the terrorist group in One Is the Loneliest Number is not explained as thoroughly as the group in Net Force. Its role in the novel is to show what evil people would do with an important discovery if they could get their hands on it before legal authorities found out about it. In One Is the Loneliest Number, the discovery is a way to infect virtual simulations of people in such a way that their real-life bodies manifest the symptoms of the infection. For the terrorists, this is a magic bullet: they could send e-mail to anyone and have them manifest all the symptoms of any disease, including deadly ones. The murders would be untraceable, and most of the time the victims would be thought...