Flat images on a cracked screen. Not even a trid. More like those shit things on the walls of old-timey trid shows, fuzzy colors and static. Sound through hissing speakers piped in from far away.
There is a run being planned. Something. I'm supposed to know something about it. Something about my niece.
That's not my niece. My niece is a child. But she called me Bartholomew. Whatever game she's playing, it's deep.
I think I'm playing her. Behind the static, we're in the Tower of Babel. It's been invaded by youth, full of bad haircuts and names like Lift Ticket and Blue Eyes. Guess all the good names were taken. It looks like the same bunch of assholes and incompetents. Idiots who think the real work gets done in bars. In public.
Something cuts through the static. A name. Cat. I'm running with Cat.
Fingers shake. I pull a chip. "Riding the Horse." Whatever that means.
Slot the chip. The images on the screen go dark.
Floating. Floating in an infinite void. Pure data flickers through my eyelids, straight into my brain. Electricity crackles through my fingertips, through my toes. The electrical burn smell of drek-hot data, moving through my nerves, my body on fire, my body nothing but my mind.
I move, flying through data streams. The ICE doesn't see me as I fly, like an ant doesn't see the god that steps on him. I'm alive, free, fast and dancing on a green lawn, greener than green, the Platonic green that makes all other greens look brown. The blue sky stares down at me, electric blue and bright and the color of happiness, the color of innocence. The smell of cookies. The sun smiles down at me, laughing at my antics as I prance about the field, lost in the pure, boundless joy of wearing a skirt. The world is the number four and running and carefree, and all my friends marked off in bright colors. There are no enemies here, no bad name to have, only love and laughter and the bright, bright colors of the everything I dance past, the laughing flowers and the vacuum cleaner says hello as he cleans up my mess, smiling as I slide down the datastream and into the mind of a fat decker, gone to sleep plugged in.
He wakes up.
Drab pictures on a static screen. Distant sounds of a van driving.
Oh. The run is starting.
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