Preface

Welcome, Beta Readers! I'd like to thank you for your kind attention, and set a few things straight before you begin.

• Welcome, reader! What lies before you is the skeleton on which I am now building. It's a complete story, but it's not a complete work; the pacing is inconsistent, and needs more work
• This is literally a first draft. That means that things will likely change, and that drastically, before I get from where I am now to where I want to be.
• I want your feedback. I'm still working on implementing a comment system, but for now, email will work. You can hit me at jessedyer@jessedyer.org, and I'll be grateful for anything you might care to add.
• Thank you!

On with the show..

Part 1: Labyrinth

1

There's something deeply disturbing about watching kids play hide and seek in plain sight of each other. ^af98c6

I was standing on the stoop, watching the fat kid, Tommy, crouching with that silly grin on his face, like he was trying to keep from bursting into piggish laughter, while his playmate stalked him, his eyes sweeping left and right, aiming directly at that grinning face, and not seeing it.

I focused my mind's eye for a moment, and pulled up flatland. I had a row of macros near the bottom of my workspace, fat kid still wobbling with silent giggles behind it, and I focused on the one called "Gradient". As the program started, the workspace, which only I could see, vanished and was replaced with a physical and visual analog that I'd designed to act as the program's control interface. Between the thumb and finger of my left hand, I felt tension, like a rubber band had been wrapped between the two, and I closed my hand, releasing the tension created by the band.

As I did that, a banner ad, like an animated billboard, faded from transparency, hiding Tommy from my sight the same way it had masked him from his prowling hunter.

I could have deleted the macro, right then. I considered it. I'd never seen the world without the interface, the corporate system I'd been tasked to defend, altering everything that I saw and heard.

I wish that I had. I wish that I'd hidden Tommy from myself and forgotten what I'd seen.

But I didn't, and we're all here now.

Fast forward a bit. It was Tuesday, which meant dinner with [[Akari]]. There was a place, Ramania Noodles about three blocks away from my place, one from his. It wasn't my favorite, but it was close for him, and he liked it, so I learned to like it. It was closer for him, but I was already there. Had been for long enough to order from the server bots. To watch them pretty close. I couldn't stop watching the way that they moved. They scuttled, trying to stay out from under foot. ^9c3186

I couldn't stop watching them, even when I caught sight of his big, lanky frame walking through the door. That perpetual smile of his was infectious.

Normally, anyway.

"Dad!" he said, pulling up a chair. He had this odd way of stepping over the chair before he sat in it. Yeah, he was tall, but I think I exposed him to way too much of Star Trek from back before his time. Way before mine, too. "You ok?"

"Yeah", I said, not quite meeting his eyes, "fine. Glad to see you. I ordered your usual."

"Thanks!" He leaned back in his chair a bit, and took in the room.

The place was packed. You wouldn't think you could do that much with Ramen, but the menu panel took up nearly the entire length of the back wall, and the videograms shifted every thirty seconds or so to show pictures of different selections, described in pulsing Mojis. Shrimp took up an entire thirty second block, and I'd made my way through about half of the permutations on that one. [[Akari]] didn't bother; once he found what he liked, he would latch on to it and never let go.

The clientele was a dog's breakfast of folk. Every color of the salaryman rainbow was represented, of course, but a fair number of punks were in attendance from the fringe neighborhoods, and a lot of tourist types. You could always spot them, even when they weren't dressed funny; they tended to move their heads around in these odd ways because they wanted to turn the video and audio streams they were recording through their implants into the next hot Tok vid and thought that inducing nausea was the best way to get that attention.

As the service bot approached, one of the salarymen eased back his chair and smacked into the service bot. "Stupid thing," he said, smacking at it. It scuttled quickly out of his way. It placed our plates on the table, and then rolled back towards the prep area.

"How's the job?" [[Akari]] asked, as he started to tuck in.

"I'm good," I said. "Some of the free lance work turned up some pretty interesting things. I actually wanted to talk to you about it."

"Yeah?" he asked. "What's going on?"

As he asked, a fly started buzzing around the table. As it flew, a small banner unrolled from behind it, carrying the name of an album that had released that week. Its low buzzing was gradually becoming a sound clip from the main track. Absent-mindedly, [[Akari]] shook his hand it, waving it away. ^1dbd44

Since Tommy, I'd left the band fairly tight, which meant that I could only barely see and hear it. For [[Akari]], it was indistinguishable from an actual fly. Other than, you know, the whole music and banner thing. I had raised my son from infancy alone, after his mother.. well, after his mother. And I had an inner pang; had I ever taught him that these things weren't how real insects worked? Did he know?

"I thought about sharing some of it with you, actually."

"Really?" He set down his sticks, looked at me closely. "You never talk about your work."

"Really."

"Why now? What are you working on?"

I looked back towards the back of the store. What everyone had been seeing as a service bot was a young girl, about fifteen. She looked as if she had some form of retardation; the Down's cast of her face was evident to me, as was the red welt across her cheek from the salaryman's slap. It's entirely likely that the system had overridden the feeling of her cheek with that of a metal hull, and he had no idea what he had done. By the look on her face, didn't understand what she'd done wrong.

"It's hard to explain," I said. "Probably easier to show you."

[[Akari]] didn't try to pull me into more detail. He knew my moods better than I did. Instead, he kept up a light conversation about his own work with a marketing company, and how he was trying to maintain his position.

I'd named him [[Akari]]yasu, and I'd meant the name as "peaceful light"; I had no idea how apt that had been. He'd been patient with the odd hours and distance working NetSecurity had imposed on us, and instead of becoming the distant, sullen person he so easily could have, he was ever happy, ever friendly, ever open. Our first moments, I had held him in a sunbeam passing through a hospital window, and the quiet warmth and brightness I'd felt had defined him. I could still feel his weight, like a feather, the warmth of the beam on my hands, see it slightly reddening his tiny face.

As he chatted away and ate, I couldn't help but wonder; had that sunbeam really been there? Or was that the Hospital overlay, optimizing emotional retention, nudging me toward compliance? Toward debt?

I couldn't keep doing this to myself. He was real. He had to be.

I hesitated. He was leaning down to his plate for a moment, so I'm sure that he didn't see the panic cross my face. I loosened the band completely for a moment, as he looked back up. I had to know.

He was still there. He was still my sun beam, his face was unchanged. For a moment, his eyebrows came together, darkening his face, but he accepted my smile and kept talking.

I picked up the check, and [[Akari]] walked me home.

You can fit an absolutely insane number of people into any three city blocks, and Arklon's former tribal conclaves had been forcibly shuffled back when I was small, which meant that our walk to my apartment was set against a backdrop soundscape of hundreds of different languages. As I got closer to any one of them, the Minos overlay stepped in and changed those sounds from the original language of the speaker into English while still keeping similar rhythm and cadence. It would even, if you looked directly into the face of the speaker, alter the facial movement so that I could read their lips. I had forgotten to turn that back on a few days ago, and spoken with a neighbor who, I'm pretty sure, spoke Cantonese. Watching her face completely mismatch her speech as she asked me if I knew whether or not the auto factory was hiring again was absolutely surrealistic, and I think I'd offended her with my stare while I said that no, the last batch of job lotteries had been awarded. She'd thrown the career scratchers into the trash as she walked away, watching me over her shoulder as she left. ^a61afb

I was trying to avoid any kind of similar incident on our walk, so I'd tightened the band nearly to maximum.

The Minos Kieretsu, a loose federation of corporations that kept their primary meeting tower here in Arklon, didn't keep a complete stranglehold on competition as some did in corporate cities. I'd never thought this was an altruistic thing, but it seemed to speak to me of a certain hubris on their part. As I'd tightened the band, I began to notice a little more subtlety to it. ^c9b303

For example, we had a Brady's on my street; the place was a restaurant chain that specialized in crickets. Before I tightened the band, the place looked pretty similar to how I remembered it, but as the band tightened, I noticed changes. Nothing overt, really, but little things. The windows were dirty. The people in line that I could see through the glass doors looked more shabbily dressed. The lines of the building seemed more imposing.

Would I look different to [[Akari]] if I ran in? Would the food taste the same to me if I were to loosen the band while I ate?

"Dad, did you hear me?" [[Akari]] asked, the clouds making a return to his face.

"You were talking about that guitar you're trying to strangle to death and how the neighbors are starting to complain."

He laughed, but the clouds didn't part entirely. He scanned my face, but couldn't quite read what I was thinking. Gave him a smile, and he kept talking.

That smile felt wrong on my face, though; it felt like dirty windows.

I had lost Anne before [[Akari]] was born. She'd been kept going on life support for three weeks before [[Akari]] was able to be.. Well, before we could let her go.

[[Akari]] had never known her, but I'd tried to help him know as much of her as I could. As we entered the apartment, we faced the single largest artifact of her being; the Go board.

As Go boards go, it was a monster, 25 by 25. I never played it at that scale; the boundaries on the standard 19 by 19 were slightly darkened to make using the smaller center easier. On the board, the game [[Akari]] and I had been running through for the last several weeks lay. It's difficult to glance at a Go game in progress and get a truly accurate read of the board state; fortunes can change very quickly, however [[Akari]] was holding his own. I was seeing him develop some interesting strategies he'd not tried before, and I wasn't completely sure I could win this time. ^86f27c

He sat immediately; it was his move, and he became completely engrossed. He picked up the bowl of pieces and ran his finger around the rim as if it were a prayer bowl, and in my mind I could hear the sound of it resonating, despite its complete silence in the room.

I sat across from him, and brought up flatland.

In the days when computers were separate things, people used rows of buttons, and strange little pucks they called mice (and I still don't know why) to interact with two dimensional interfaces in which information was bounded into panes of text and images that could be moved, sized, and flipped through like cards in a deck. While fiddling with boards full of keys and artificial rodents had fallen out of fashion, those of us who worked with the more arcane aspects of data management still used that card deck approach to interact with computing systems. It wasn't common, and there were dozens of different methods to abstract structures and commands. In college, my instructors preferred and taught entering into virtuality and manipulating data flows as if they were machines in a giant warehouse, connected together through snaking wires. I could never master that; I have aphantasia, which means that I don't have a mental camera.

For example, when I say "think of an elephant", most people immediately "see" an elephant in their mind. For me, however, that's not possible. The only things I can see are either through my eyes, or via the interface, so trying to think through changes in a visually oriented system is an enormous blank. Had it not been for a kindly professor that still worked with flatland computing as a hobby, I'd likely be doing something else for a living.

Flatland wasn't presented to me through some kind of hardware, though. Thanks to the interface implant, surgically implanted when I turned four, I could bring that interface up anywhere, anytime. The implant is an incredibly powerful microcomputer planted originally as a colony of nano machines within the cerebellum. From there, it grew, following my nerves into disparate colonies within my eyes and ears. I can't really remember what it was like before the interface became a part of me. Maybe that's the reason it's implanted at an early age.

Once I'm looking at flatland, I can open panes at will that allow me to enter text into them by thinking about it, and submit that text to the system, and read the reply. It's very much like what text messaging used to be like, except it's not other people I'm talking to, necessarily. It's the interface itself. It took some practice to develop a way of separating my internal monologue from the data to be entered into the pane.

I brought up a pane and started thinking.

I need to review the command syntax around Gradient.

The implant obliged and brought up a new pane beside the first, filled with the code I'd written to build the band.

Review protocols for transferring Gradient.

The pane replied: Gradient transfer is inadvisable. Security protocols for Minos Overlay Clients below your level will be unable to use Gradient without Warranty Void, which could lead to impaired performance, loss of sensory input, or cerebral hemorrhage.

I had expected that.

Factor macro "Deputize" into transfer.

Deputize was built for Flatland function. Interaction between Deputize and Gradient must be modeled in order to answer your question.

Do it.

About four years ago, I'd built the Deputize macro as a way to grant someone the temporary ability to interact with the interface with the same permissions that I'd earned when I was promoted to Net-Sec grade 4. Getting that level of security places me in a pretty small community; in Arklon, there are thirty of us. It had taken decades of hard work, impeccable trust scores, five attempts to prove me disloyal (although I still think one of those was a real competing Kieretsu trying to buy me off), and agreeing repeatedly that I'd never, among other things, build something like Deputize.

I'd done it as an experiment. At first, it was a penetration test, pushing the boundaries of the Minos Overlay Operating System looking for exploits. I dutifully found and reported several, but one, I held on to. I needed it to try and figure out what an attacker could do with it, so if the work I'd done been audited, I probably could have explained it away. My record was flawless, after all. It should be; aside from [[Akari]], I barely had a life at all outside of work.

Once I'd built it, I'd set it aside and waited. Occasionally, I'd remember it, and I waited for the hammer to drop. After a year or so, I realized that the auditing systems weren't going to catch it, and so I started pushing the boundaries even further. I kept digging deeper, and I kept finding exploits. For every five or ten I'd found, I'd hold one back, and report the rest. They were all explainable. They were all just a way for me to hone my craft. If I were to lose them, they wouldn't have been a loss to me.

All of that changed with Gradient. As I watched [[Akari]] place a stone, the weight of what I had done crushed me, almost as if [[Akari]]'s stone were the last rock in a cairn, burying me alive. For the first time, I could see the world without the interface, and it terrified me.

"Dad, are you all right?"

"Yeah, son, I'm all right. Can you hand my bowl over?" ^3fee70

"Sure." He handed me the bowl of white stones, still watching me.

"Really, [[Akari]], I'm fine." I was looking at him, but I was also looking at the pane in which my overlay was displaying its progress in the task I'd set it running. It had built virtual versions of a stock interface, and had injected the Deputize macro into it, and was running that virtual incarnation through a battery of tests I'd devised years ago called Gauntlet. Doing this was heavily taxing the interface, and since the hardware was a synthesis of both the nano machine colonies, and my own gray matter, it was tiring. I normally didn't do this kind of thing while [[Akari]] was around; it made me a poor conversationalist, and it had created a lot of distance between us when he was young. I throttled it back, and smiled at him.

"How's Stacy?" I asked him, eyes on the board.

"Perfect," he said, without hesitation. I smiled again. "She is perfect."

"Aside from her taste in men, you mean?"

"Ha ha. Aside from that, yes. And her work life balance is as bad as yours. She's a lot like you, actually."

Stacy was a tiny blonde with bright eyes, a wicked smile, and a razor sharp wit. I raised an eyebrow and looked at him.

"She is, though."

"Why, because she works hard? You work hard."

"No, because she's.. " He looked at the painting on the wall. It was a print of one of Van Gogh's paintings; I couldn't remember which, it was something Anne had liked. "Driven," he said, nodding to himself. "She's totally driven."

"Ah." I said, placing my stone, setting an eye for myself. "And you aren't?"

He laughed. "No, Dad. I work because virtuality is played out."

"Is it? If it's so dumb, why are so many people so happy with Basic Income and sitting around on the Feed all day?"

"I don't know." he said. "Maybe it's got something to do with all the reading you made me do."

Model complete.

"Your move." I said, and entered into the pane Result?

Deputize can be transmitted and executed on a standard MOOS implementation with a .28% possibility of performance degradation during transfer and initial execution. This period should last for no more than three seconds.

Model Gradiant on that same implementation after Deputize is performed.

The progress meter appeared again.

I dismissed Flatland, the model still running, and watched [[Akari]] as he sat down. "Did I push you into books too hard?"

He looked up, puzzled. He cocked his head slightly, replaying the conversation. "Oh. OH. No, sorry, that's not what I meant."

"I did urge you to spend time with printed words over videograms and virtuality."

"Yeah," he said, grinning, "you did. I don't think I ever thanked you for that, did I?"

"Should you?"

"Stacy reads, Dad. I think that pushed me into her league."

I grinned back. "Are you telling me that the only reason you have any gratitude for me over my raising you literate is because it got you hooked up?"

His face changed, suddenly serious. "No. I'm telling you that I'm grateful to you for teaching me to be different from most people." He thought for a moment. "I'm glad I have a kind of grasp on the world that most people don't. I mean, there's something about allowing yourself to fill in the blanks that virtuality, or videograms, or any of that stuff numbs you to. You gave me a way to learn about myself in a way that being a passenger in your own skull just couldn't have given me."

"She doesn't have such bad taste in men."

He laughed. "Don't get all mushy on me, Dad. I'm not stupid enough to not know that you did it at least in some part to shut me up."

I laughed, perhaps a little ruefully, and he turned his attention back to the board.

Model complete. Gradient functions identically, no performance impacts detected.

I leaned back, exhausted. [[Akari]] had just thanked me for showing him a different version of the world, a different set of illusions that he'd used to define himself. Was I really going to repay his gratitude by stripping him of all of those illusions?

[[Akari]] won the game set out before us, playing his last stone with a joy that reminded me so much of Anne; she had laughed like a child when she trounced me, and had showered me with kisses.

As he left, I wondered how the larger game between us would come out.

2

That next day, I had thrown myself into work. There's a certain state you can reach in flatland coding, especially when you get down to so low level that you're no longer speaking English, but any of a dozen or so special languages that comprise the bedrock of the overlay systems, where time and the physical world disappear. I remember reading old books from the paleolithic programmers that spoke of "dreaming in code". I had never understood that; dreaming for me was the one place where my mental camera kicked on, and I could "see". I had learned to control those dreams, in part to enjoy those moments of perfect clarity before I woke up, and those visual memories of the dream would fade away like a flower wilting. ^b71baa

But dreaming in flatland code.. ah, those, I could keep. Some of my best ideas came to me, hammering away at a problem, in deep sleep, and I sometimes fought to wakefulness so that I could immediately store off the code that I'd dreamed up. The overlay was incredibly powerful, but it had limits, and dreams were a thing that it simply could not touch, could not read. That had been one of the first things that I'd tried. I had wanted to record those dreams of flying, of being .. more.. more than I am. The inability of the interface to touch that side of my mind, to help me make up for my cognitive limits, had been a disappointment, but it had also sparked a desire to understand the system, so that I could understand why it had failed me. So that I could force it into a better shape.

Code had given me back those wings, and when I reached that deep state of mind, I could soar.

I couldn't quite reach that state, though.

Normally, when I was working, others saw me differently. The color leached from me, and I became something of a shadowed version of myself. You could see that I was me, but my actual features, expressions, were hidden. The dark form was a social nicety; it communicated to others that I was out of reach, and avoided them waving their hands in front of my face, trying to get my attention. When I get going, my focus is completely unbreakable.

The thought that kept me from my normal rhythm was a split question, and my mind kept rocking back and forth between the two beats like a clock escapement.

Tick. If someone else using Gradient were to see me in that state, what would I really look like? Would I be slack jawed and drooling? Would my face contort with effort? Would my tongue stick out? ^0e5f5b

Tock. What had [[Akari]]yasu seen, growing up? A dark form, immobile in a chair, never knowing when I might come to life. I had been a sharp disciplinarian, and so there must have been an added tinge of fear to the shadow statue suddenly animating, wrathful.

Tick. Did I want other people to see me like this? Did I want to lift a veil that I'd come to depend on, that protected me, like Noah's sons covering his nakedness? What else would I be showing the world?

Tock. What must it have done to my ray of sunshine, to see a man who loved him transform into that dark sentinel, to be left alone without even the comfort of my face to keep him company?

I knocked off a bit earlier than usual, and decided to take a walk.

As I hit the stoop, I saw Tommy. The kid had absolutely no originality; through the half strength tension setting, I could see him hiding in the same place behind the banner ad, but this time, he was just standing there, transfixed by the banner's videograms as they endlessly shilled some sugary something or other at him.

"Hey, Tommy." I said. He snapped out of it, looking around, getting increasingly panicked as he failed to see where I was. "Find a better hiding place, kid. Fatso's smarter than you."

He walked through the ad, and saw me. He shook his head, his cheeks reddening a bit, and took off.

That had been a mistake, I thought. I needed to be a bit more careful. I turned left and starting walking to the end of the block.

My street opened into a five way star fish intersection, a haphazard collision of paving, people, potholes, and pandemonium. It tended to slow a bit around 2 AM or so, but every other moment, rain or shine, was a mass of humanity squeezing past each other to get somewhere else, or gawk at the goods laid out on anything from highly polished vending apparatus to a baby blanket. It didn't have any kind of designation on GPS systems, but the locals called it the Patch. ^af2ab8

Economists had been prognosticating the end of physical commerce since the first drone delivery services. And they hadn't been completely wrong; if you can have practically anything by thinking about it, then there wasn't really much of a benefit in opening up a brick and mortar warehouse for brand new stuff. Large scale mercantilism had died out ages ago, their real estate turned to apartments, rest homes, and maker spaces.

But there was still a thriving second economy for used stuff. There's an enormous markup in thinking about printer resin and then having it in your hand a few minutes later. If the dread locks dude with the folding table down the street has figured out how to re-inject home-brew resin into the used cartridges and bypass the security chip so that the printer accepts it, you can get that refill dirt cheap.

In theory, Minos was deeply opposed to such practices. Every once in a while, the cops would hassle some hapless street vendor who might be getting a little too successful, but for the most part, the kieretsu turned a blind eye to the second hand market. It's a good thing, too; trying to completely destroy it had been tried before, and it had ended up in weeks of civil unrest before an unspoken detente had been reached. I remembered those days back when I was small, and I'd been kept indoors for months, watching the Malatovs fly.

As I reached the end of the block, I was swept into the Brownian motion of passers by buffeting me into the crowd. It felt like diving into a warm pool; I loved the hustle and bustle, the shouts and sighs, the smells and slights as people jostled me. Some gave a nod of apology, some were so entranced by things only they could sense that they probably didn't know where they were. You learned to accept such things if you were to move through these crowds, and I had long ago. But it was different now. ^6130c0

With the scales fallen from my eyes, the crowd had a different vibe to it. The clothing was not quite as colorful, the scents of perfumes and cooking were downplayed through a stink of the unwashed, and I tightened the band a bit as the smell started to nauseate me. The color leapt back, and the smell damped down. I didn't completely disable Gradient, but I wasn't about to lower it in the milling crowd.

I started pushing my way through to Zelinsky's usual spot a bit down the north most street. He wasn't quite the same kind of crowd lover that I was, and so he tended to try and hang back a bit from the crush. Besides, he claimed that sticky fingers and klutzy people took a toll on his goods. ^80b05f

Zelinsky sold books.

He didn't usually draw a crowd. Even if there were suddenly a market resurgence in printed words, he'd have likely scared off the masses with the perpetual scowl he inflicted on groups from under a massive pair of eyebrows that seemed to live a life of their own, and that life could be summed up in a single word. Disapproval.

He was engaged today, however, with an older man over a much abused paperback. It's pages were yellowed and brittle, it's front cover had been left behind long ago, like a rocket booster that had lifted it once and was then callously discarded. Its spine had been cracked in so many places that its title was illegible, and leaves were catty-cornered enough to make one suspect that the glue driving it into this last stage of its life was about to run out of fuel, scattering the book into a pile of leaves.

And for all that, I knew that Zelinsky was likely demanding blood for it.

"Fifteen hundred," I heard him say as I edged closer, "is an insult to my father and his father before him. I'd spit on such an offer if I could muster the saliva, but your affront leaves me a dried husk."

You're already a withered shell of a man, I thought, but I didn't say it. There weren't many people dealing books any more, and so I had to take care with the man; experience had taught me he could hold a grudge.

As he dickered, I lowered the pressure on the band, and listened. He wasn't a native English speaker. I'm not certain what language is was that he did speak, but it was a rolling, lyrical sound interspersed with hard consonants and the occasional lilt.

It was unexpectedly beautiful. I let the sound of it wash over me, and he seemed to change right in front of me. It wasn't the overlay; I'd not recalled the band or changed the settings. The sound of his native tongue, even though I couldn't understand a word of it, had added a depth to the man that I'd never have suspected.

In part, it was his body language. On a level I'd been unaware of, the overlay had, in the act of translating his speech, made a cipher of his movements and stances that had flattened him out in my experience of him. I was enjoying him.

His customer, not so much. They rapped knuckles together, performing the exchange of funds that Zelinsky had extracted, and the mark picked up his book, and stepped away. I watched him go, a loose sheet of paper trailing him under the feet of the crowd, and both it and he were consumed in the mix.

I re-tightened the band and turned back to Zelinsky, who was sizing me up.

"Dade," he said, "wherever have you been keeping yourself these many days?"

"Out of your clutches, Z. At least until I could bank enough credits to make you love me again."

The old man laughed, the eyebrows making their own amusement known incongruously. "Are you still hunting for Heinlein?"

"Might do. Have you found him?"

He reached into a box under the table, pulled a slim volume, and laid it down on the counter.

"I believe this might be one you seek," he said, his voice teasing slightly. It was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and he knew it was a book I'd been hungry for.

I made a point to remove any expression from my face. My hands had happened to be in my pockets, and through force of will, I left them there, even though I had a strong urge to grab the book and immediately start to read it. Had I done so, Z would have marked up his price by orders of magnitude.

"Scuffed cover." I said, dismissively.

"Scuffed leather." he replied, stressing the last word. "I know your tastes, barbaric as I find them myself."

"Is it in English?" I asked him. While the overlay would translate the spoken word, it stubbornly refused to be of any help with ink on word pulp. I'd never understood why, but my instincts told me that Minos took a dim view of literacy.

"Would I offer it to you otherwise?"

"You've done it before."

"Forgive an old man a lapse. Latin and English look the same to me. Please, give it a look."

It was safe to touch it now that he'd invited me, so I picked it up carefully and leafed through it. The printing was excellent.

"I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill." I read, and knew that I wouldn't leave the table empty handed. I set the book down carefully yet dismissively, and we began to haggle.

Five shameful minutes later, after discussing the weather, our parentage, the print date, and our past negotiations, we bumped knuckles, and I deposited the tome into a shoulder bag.

"How's the boy?" Zelinsky asked me.

"Still smitten," I said, "over the moon."

"You'll have to lend your moon to him," said Z, pointing to my bag, "so that you can guide him home. That way, you can send him my way."

"So that you can continue his education, I take it? It's quite a tuition you ask for."

"And yet you return," he said, lowering himself into a folding chair that creaked and groaned in protest. "Be seeing you." His eyebrows bid me their own farewell.

Those eyebrows were a tell, and I'd learned to read them, and passed that knowledge on to Akira. As I stepped back into the crowd, I wondered, looking at Z through my new understanding of him, if maybe those eyebrows were an overlay of his own creation, and if perhaps I was the one being taken in by them, after all.

I felt the weight of Heinlein's story of rebellion against my side as the crowd pushed against me, and decided that if I were the mark, I looked to it smilingly.

Down one alley, down one starfish leg, there's an alley. It has no name, and there are no doors, no cars, no fire escapes. It's simply a cut into the fabric of the city, and in that cut, a certain group has taken root, like an infection. The zoners. ^e5e25d

I stood at the mouth of the alley, looking down it. Against the walls of the alley, dozens of young men and women sat, cross legged, leaning against the brick work, smiling slightly. These were the virtuality addicts that had taken a step into an artificial alley that was even harder to find than this real one; they'd discovered drug emulation.

The implant works on the brain in profound ways, and it can alter the body's chemistry. The normal MOOS runtimes didn't do this, and believe me, I looked, but the stubbed code that could do such things was still there, left out as tantalizingly as ripe fruit on the tree, and men like me had capitalized on it, offering the ability to convince the mind that you were on powerful narcotics, stimulants, hallucinogens. The sellers made bank on the initial code change to unstub the code, and there was a thriving modding community that offered as many different experiences as you could ask for. You could live a long life and never take the same drug twice, or you could never come down off of that one, perfect high. ^6709c9

Many didn't.

I stepped into the alley, looking at the clean, smiling faces, and dropped the band completely.

I should have expected the dark; the alley had no lighting and the buildings looming over us prevented the sunlight from reaching down into this pit of the damned.

The bodies lay haphazardly, dirty and skeletal. Their eyes, the ones that were open, were cloudy and unseeing. They twitched and writhed; many of them moaned softly.

My eyes ran from face to face, terrified of recognizing any of them. The thought that anyone I had ever cared about being amongst these wretched zombies felt like a man with a gun to the back of my head, and I ran down the alley, terrified of that blinding flash of recognition ending me.

The smell of the place was indescribable, and I fought not to vomit; there was barely an inch of ground that didn't hold a twitching leg, a half-dressed torso, or a face filled with pain.

At the end of the alley, I could see seven people were dead, their lifeless remains had been left where they lay for quite a while.

One of them looked so much like Anne.

I screamed, turned, and ran towards the light at the end of the alley. ^e2dc83

I was met by a patrol droid. It zeroed in on my, and its voice called to me. I realized that without the band, I couldn't understand it. Was our law enforcement no longer defaulting to English? After a moment, I remembered the band, and tightened it.

"Dade Phillips, why are you disturbing the peace?" it asked. I drew a breath, and it saved me from blurting out what I had seen.

"I.. I was calling for my son. I thought he might be here."

The droid remained frozen for a few moments, and I thought it was likely communicating back to a central control station, judging the interaction. The Arklon Policing system was able to virtualize a judge, jury, prosectution, and defense in the space of a few minutes, and for all I knew, I was on trial right now.

"Please leave this area, Dade Phillips." the droid said, and as I stepped aside, it began trundling down the alley. I turned and walked away quickly, silently cursing myself.

Ever since I'd stumbled on the initial exploits that I believed might make Gradiant possible, I had wondered about the zoners. We all knew they were there, and most of us swallowed the stories that the city watched out for them without question, if we thought of them at all. I hadn't, though. In a city regularly increasing tax rates and poor mouthing public works, it made no sense to me that such a group of people would be cared for, that the city could find a way to make it work.

I had wanted to be wrong. I still wish that I had been wrong.

I lost sense of myself for a little while. When I came back to myself, I was in [[Akari]]'s favorite restaurant, chewing. ^b1706a

Had I come here hoping to find my son? Had I ordered the usual? I was facing the door, a mouthful of shrimp and ramen, and reaching to my cheek, I'd been crying. I looked around, and none of the other patrons seemed to notice me. Even in my flight, I was invisible and in plain sight.

The food was completely tasteless. The restaurant was dark and dingy. The crowd was a muttering mass. I was alone. I was so alone.

Surrounded by millions of human beings, I was completely alone.

I flexed my hand, and realized that at some point in getting here, I'd disabled the overlay. I turned it back up.

Immediately, the taste of spices and seasonings hit my palate. I looked down at the bowl, and dropped the overlay again. The food changed from colored by bright greens and sharp reds to a bland mash of colorless, flavorless drabness.

The restaurant was running hacked software. Like the zoners, they were manipulating the patrons beyond sight, sound, and smell, and were directly impacting the taste buds as well. I looked at the other patrons, and they worked through the same colorless mash that I had before me. I enabled the overlay and turned to look at the chipper, happy, sexy menuboard. It mocked me; wall to wall decisions, every one a lie.

At that moment, I swore to myself that, one way or another, I was going to show everyone the truth, and to hell with the consequences. If the zoner lords, the cops, even this crummy dive could subvert the system to get what they wanted, then so could I.

What a fool I was.

3

"Dad. Dad... Dad!" ^60de2c

[[Akari]] was shaking me out of flatland. I blinked and said groggily, "Huh?"

"Hey, cloud brain. Where were you?"

"Working." I said. "Going over some old classics." I stood, my knees and back cracking like machine gun fire. "The problem with logging security vulnerabilities.." I began.

".. is that bugs don't pay the bills." [[Akari]] finished for me.

"They don't," I nodded, "but I guess I'll spare you that sermon. Pardon a sec."

I stepped into the small WC of the apartment. There's a penalty to drinking a lot of water before sitting down for a long time and then standing up, and as I paid it, I took in the small cubicle. On the edge of the sink, there was a space, a small inset cove, for sundries. Nothing large. A razor, perhaps, a small battle of hand lotion, a bottle of perfume.

That had been Anne's space, and she'd practiced a Tetris master's ability to cram the space with oddments that I was constantly knocking clumsily over. Later, it became [[Akari]]'s space, and I could remember the metamorphosis it had undergone. Rubber ducks. Army men. Smarmy deodorant. His first razor.

And now it was empty.

Tick. I could fill that space again. I'm not that old, I'm earning well beyond Basic, and I'm no zoner.

Tock. There's nothing left to me. The best part of me got packed up with [[Akari]] when he moved out. No, that's not true, I buried it with Anne, and [[Akari]] got the left overs.

Tick. I need to stop this. I've got a lot to offer. I read, I think, I create. I love. I can love.

Tock. Then what is it that I'm trying to see? What is it that I want [[Akari]] to see?

"Did you fall in, Dad?"

I grinned. "Still dry, oh patient one." I washed up and left. The empty space stayed behind.

"You said you had something for me." he said, setting aside the copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. "Knowing Z, I'd be surprised if you had anything left to give anybody after this." ^7cd0ff

"I do," I said, sitting across from him. He motioned to pick up the bowl of stones, but I shook my head. "I'm not sure that you're going to want it, though."

"Uh oh," he said, "serious mode. OK. What don't I want?"

I thought for a moment. "We've talked before about polite fictions, right?"

"Yeah," he said, "like lying to keep the peace, that kind of thing. 'Sure those pants are flattering.'"

"Something like that, yes. Do you remember talking about 'mindless observation?'"

"No, can't say that I do."

"All right. There are times when we look right at things with our eyes, but the brain's not really registering it, and so even though you see something, you don't really see it."

"Oh", he said, "like how people make really bad witnesses, and that's why we rely on playback more than testimony?"

"Yeah." I sat there.

"Is this going somewhere, or are you finally losing it, Dad?"

"Yes, it's going somewhere, I just have a doubt now that it's somewhere that I need to take you."

"Oh, well, it's over now. Spill."

He had a point. The boy would worm his way into anything I ever said that interested him. He had the patience of a snake when it came to finding things out, and once he wanted to know something, he'd pursue it relentlessly.

"What if the playback was the thing that was wrong?"

"How could.." he trailed off, thinking. I nearly started talking again, but he tended to want to work things out for himself. It was a trait that he'd learned at his mother's Go board.

After a few moments, he looked up. "Something would have to be altering the playback."

"That's a possibility, yes. But what if it happened earlier?"

His eyes narrowed. "Something would have to be altering the signal. Before it was recorded."

"Something already does, [[Akari]]. You see it every day."

"You means ads and stuff. Sure, I get that."

"If the overlay alters things obviously, why couldn't it alter things with a bit more subtlety?"

He thought. "Then you'd never really know, would you?"

"Would you want to know if you could?"

He stared at me. His face fell.

"The way you've been acting, lately. I thought you were slipping back into the extreme work phase. You found a way to turn off the overlay, didn't you?"

"Not quite. The overlay can't be switched off. It's a part of us, and if it switched off, we'd switch off with it. But I found a way to change the overlay process, to get the unfiltered signal from our senses around the overlay, to control how much of that alteration we sense.

"That sounds.." he trailed off, looked away. "That sounds stupidly dangerous, Dad. Like risking switching yourself off."

"It wasn't..." I started, but then I trailed off, too. It was dangerous. Even with Gauntlet and the simulations, those models had been missing things that Minos didn't publish openly, and so I had made some.. intelligent guesswork. Looking back on it now, if I had been wrong..

"Perhaps it was, [[Akari]]."

"You had no right to take a chance like that." he said, quiet, but the rage was clear despite his low tones. "Do you have any idea what you could have done to yourself?"

"I.. I don't suppose it occurred to me."

"What you could have done to me?" he said.

"[[Akari]], I'm OK."

He stared at me.

"I'm sorry." I said. "You're right. It was stupid. Now that I've done it, I've thought a thousand times about just how stupid a thing it was to have done. But it is done, now. I can see."

"Is what you're doing... you know.. is it.. allowed?"

I grimaced. "Not even slightly."

"Then, why, Dad? Why would you do this?"

I thought for a while. I was staring at the Go board.

"It's a different way of seeing, this game of ours." I said. "Like the books. Like the talks we had where I tried to tell you what your mother was like. Like flatland, or dinner at the ramen shop, like all of this," waving my hands around the room, "all of these things are just ways to try and break down the walls between our own thoughts and feelings, and what's really there. I just.. I just wanted to see what's there."

"What did you see?" he asked, his voice tiny.

"That's where I'm not sure that I can take you." I said.

He leaned over and touched my hand, and I looked up at him. "I'm not sure I can let you go alone." he said.

We were sitting on the fire escape, passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth. ^8ea7ef

"What is he doing?" [[Akari]] asked.

"Hide and seek. Creepy, isn't it?"

"Very. Does he do that a lot?"

"Yes. I think his parents make him do it for the exercise."

"How is it exercise if he's standing still like that?"

"I don't think the exercise is for him."

There came a knock at the door. [[Akari]] jumped up and made for the door, which told me precisely who it would be.

Stacy climbed through the window to sit with us.

I had approved of Stacy on my first sight of her, and I still did. She was like a compression algorithm; she was so small, and yet her compact frame had not diminished her essentials. She was a vibrant highlight, a small mark that left the frame around her wanting.

"Strange," she said, "not to see you two huddled over the board in there. Special occasion?" She instantly read the glance between us and went on, "That's a yes. What are you two up to?"

I hadn't prepared for this. "We took a break for bit."

"More like he's finally got you on the ropes," said she, "and you're stalling. He told me he was pressing the advantage."

"Can't get anything past you." said I, trying not to deflate in relief. She took [[Akari]]'s hand and smiled.

"Danni asked if you might come play at Denizen's next week?" she said.

[[Akari]] had been studying her face closely since he'd joined her on the fire escape. "See something green?" she asked.

"Sorry, " he said, "lost in the game. Who's singing?"

"That depends on how nice you are." she said. "I might, if you play your cards well. Maybe your dad might come for once?", she asked, turning to me.

"My name is Dade." I said. "It's OK if you call me that. And yes, I'd like that quite a lot, if the Denizen's crowd won't be too freaked out to find a fossil in the crowd."

She laughed. "There are far older than you putting in time over there," she said, "and they don't have a problem with a new face. It's pretty laid back."

[[Akari]] and Stacy started talking about what song he might play, and she might sing. Their light banter was one part negotiation, one part gentle teasing, and eight parts play. They reminded me of a pair of pups nipping each other's tails.. and of Anne and I.

I had met Anne in high school. I had been awkward, reserved, and quiet, and she had been a bit like Stacy; outgoing and insightful, but she had a certain joy to her that she'd passed on to [[Akari]] that I'd first found intimidating, and then entertaining, and finally, completely captivating. No, that's not so, I lie. She had me at the first time that she'd made eye contact with me, reaching for the book on a shelf at a vendor stall. I'd been ready with an apologetic expression as my hand had touched hers, and her eyes were full had none of that; they had been all fire and joy, and if I'm to be completely honest, I all but fell down at her feet on sight.

Everything after that had been negotiation. Much like these two young pups had been doing, and I shifted my focus back to them.

[[Akari]] had stopped staring at her. I could understand his initial worry, that perhaps she wasn't what she had appeared to him to be, but their brief exchange seemed to have settled his nerves. I envied him that. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be able to talk to Anne again, to settle my own similar fears, or not. Would I find her to be less than I had believed her to be? Or, worse, would she think the same of me now?

"So, tomorrow night? You'll be there? .. Dade?" Stacy asked, tasting the name as she spoke it. It appeared to sit well, now that it was out.

"I wouldn't miss it. When?"

"I think it's around nine. I'm so glad that you're coming. And speaking of going places, I need to be heading home myself. Perhaps," she said, turning back to [[Akari]], "some gallant knight might see a young lady home?"

"I'll tag along and help you find one," he said, kissing her hand. I saw them to the door, closing it behind them. The light seemed to follow them out, darkening the old apartment as the door shut behind the couple, holding hands.

I sat back in my chair, and became shadow once again.

4

I didn't see [[Akari]] for a few days, and I filled the time with Heinlein, and work. I revisited a few other old friends, chief among them Frank Herbert, and I remained convinced that everything apart from Dune was just a bit too strange for me.

I finally showed up at his apartment one afternoon. He answered the door without his usual gusto. He seemed to not recognize me at first.

"Hey, Dad," he finally said.

"Son, you ok?"

"Yeah," he said. He stood there.

"OK. May I come in?"

"Oh, sorry, yes, please."

I walked inside.

[[Akari]] had been a very neat child. He'd practiced heavily the idea that everything had a place, and while I wouldn't go as far as to say that the place was a mess, it wasn't up to his usual nearly militaristic standards.

He walked over to the wall, nodded at it. "Look at this." he said. It was a poster of guitar chords.

"Can you believe this?"

"What?"

"Loosen the band."

I did. The poster was nearly blank; there was only a QR Code in the center.

"I paid extra for this," he said, "because it had the scales, too."

I nodded.

"It gets worse, Dad. Let's take a walk."

Things were a lot dirtier, I saw immediately. The streets were litter filled, the pavement cracked and weathered.

As we walked the Patch, I found myself hanging back from the crowds, avoiding coming into contact with them. They were, as I found with the band at complete slack as [[Akari]] had asked (more like demanded, in point of fact), much angrier than I normally took them for, or more morose.

[[Akari]] was, sotto voce, pointing out the thin clothing, the tattered shoes. "I've always thought it odd how shoes seem to go from great to gross overnight. I think I may have bought them gross."

He took me to an art museum that were practically empty, and asked, a little too loudly, where the originals were? "Son, you need to keep your voice down." He'd nodded, and we'd moved on.

For all of it's drabness, the unfiltered world was calming. Without the banners and ad flies, there was a sense of calm. One normally felt overwhelmed by the sensory overload of videograms writhing, demanding attention, but when I'd commented on that, he'd pointed out that the flies were still there. They just weren't dragging tiny banners behind them.

"[[Akari]]," I said, "you're focusing too much on this. It's not good for you, and you seem out of sorts. Maybe I should pull the macros from you. Give you some time to process all of this."

"Have you been to see the zoners, Dad?" he asked.

I winced. "You saw that?"

He looked into my eyes. "Yes." he said.

"I'm sorry, son. And I understand, believe me. But I'm serious, I need you to give this thing some time. Let's get rid of these macros."

"Dad, no." he said. "I'm not a child, and I get it." He grimaced. "I've been distant from Stacy, too. You're right, I need to stop this. You don't have to switch off the macros. I'll stop."

I hesitated. As [[Akari]]'s father, as the man who'd given him this curse, I felt a duty to try and undo the damage. But I felt a sense of guilt, as well. I felt the weight of that dark shadow in the corner that I'd been; I'd not exerted these paternal feelings with [[Akari]] before; did I have a right to start now? And despite me, [[Akari]] had turned out well. He had his mother's strong sense of self.

"All right," I said. "Thank you."

5

I know that I must have slept, in that time between their arrival, and my leaving to see them at Denizen's. I must have done, although I don't recall any breaks in the work I'd been doing. I know that I had used drone ordering, which was a rarity for me. I could afford it easily enough, but using that had always felt like cheating. If I needed something, even a meal, I was either finding a local restaurant, and there was always a plethora of choices since they seemed to come and go faster than the seasons changed, or else I was walking the Patch. It wasn't always convenient, but it kept me grounded, kept me tethered. That was something Anne had always insisted on, and it was a promise I'd kept. ^14941c

But now I had other promises to keep, and the work that I was doing now was demanding in ways that I'd not known I was capable of meeting. I had a new goal, now. I was driven, directed in a way that the work on Gradient hadn't known, and I was rapidly reaching a point of no return.

I had a glimmer of a plan. It was nine tenths intuition, and one part suspicion, and I'd been looking for a way to confirm that suspicion. To research, I had to do something I generally avoided. I had to spend time in virtuality.

The interface had two modes of operation. You could do sim calls, and that's usually how I used it. In that mode, I could open a flatland pane an use that as a window into the system, controlling an avatar that looked like me, but had similar shadowed features as my real world working self, letting others know
I likely had split attention. I usually didn't, but that's why most people who used this mode did.

I scoffed at this. "Real world." I was no longer sure that I knew what that meant.

In the other mode, you had total immersion. As I'd entered this state, I found myself standing in a park. Around me, paths branched through manicured lawns, snaking off into manicured hedges that contained archways covered in trellis and ivy. Within each archway was a portal, a cut in space that led to somme other part of virtuality. ^68c68c

This pastoral foyer wasn't my choice. I'd always used the default techno urban interface and I barely noticed it. This place was simply a place that got you somewhere else. It was the only space that truly belonged to you, and I had never wanted to establish any sense of residence. I would come in and leave, reducing the time I spent here.

This had been Anne's doing.

She had loved The Lord of the Rings, and what she had lingered over in the reading had been the parts I'd found myself racing past; the desciptions of nature. Forests, glades, glenns, streams, brooks; all of that talk had bounced right past me, and since she and I read to each other in the real world, my hurry had bothered her.

"Why," she had asked me once, "are you rushing through my happy place?" She had one eyebrow lowered just slightly, and that carried the same signal as a cat twitching the end of it's tail; she might be playing, or she might be hunting, but no matter which it was, she had target locked prey and was on he stalk.

I didn't understand it, but that eyebrow told me to pay very close attention, so I thought back. "You mean all the plant stuff."

"It's a little more than that."

"Is it?"

She drew a breath, which was the hindquarters twitch of the cat about to pounce, but she stopped again. "You can't see any of this, can you?"

"You know that I can't."

She looked sad for a moment, then brightened. "Keep reading." So I did, and I'd slowed hrough the forests of Llorienn. Afew days later, she had brought me here.

"So that you'll take your time," she had said. She'd meant it about the reading, but it had taken on a new edge to mean the foyer. I couldn't rush through this space.

This was where we had said goodbye.

The tumor had been aggressive. The back to back changes, from learning we would add [[Akari]]'s light to the world, to learning that we would lose hers, had been nearly more than I could take. In the end, the medications she'd been on couldn't spare her the pain, and the interface couldn't defend her waking mind from it. So she'd opted for the splice.

It was possible to sever all of the ties to one's real space senses, and move irrevocably to virtuality. You were still subject to the flesh; she could not survive her approaching death here, but she could at least not have to suffer.

Her last few weeks had been spent in a semi dream state, a dream within a dream, and so instead of spending time amongst others in the rest of virtuality, we'd spent most of the time here, in these gardens. She'd done cartwheels frolicked on the soft turf, while her physical slef lay connected to machines, my own body thhere holding her hand.

"You'll be an amazing father," she'd said, "and you'll bring him here and tell him about me. I'll leave some messages for him, and you'll wait a little while before you pass them on so that he'll understand."

I'd gotten two out three. I had brought him here, and I had given him her messages, once I knew that he would understand why she seemed so spacey, so distant.

A gnarled oak's roots created a lifted turf, and she had been laying with her head on my lap, and I'd been reading to her. She hadn't said anything for hours, but she still smiled at me, still enjoyed listening. I couldn't know how much, if any, of what I was reading was getting through. I wanted to stop, to set the book aside and just look into her eyes, but I couldn't. Finally, she had reached up, pulled he book from me, smiled sweetly, and slurred "Love you."

And then I was alone by the tree.

Two weeks later, [[Akari]] was there.

Virtuality could play back some of those moments with her, if I had le it. I didn't. That last moment with her, I had deleted from the system, then gone back over the redudant filesystems and caching locations, burning those moments out like a brushfire.

As much as I envy those with a mental camera, tere were at times benefits. I would never see that moment, ever again. Neither would anyone else. And that's what made it mine.

I spent a minute beside that tree. ^f15c0c

"Hi, sweetie," I said. "I did something I think you might hate. You remember that project I've been working on?

Silence.

"Well, I've brought [[Akari]] into it. I'm not sure that was the wisest choice I've ever made."

No, I was, she should have said.

"I had to know," I said. "Maybe I had finally cracked, and none of this thing was real. The lines are so blurry, I had to find bedrock. I had to have a control."

Silence

"He has your self assurance," I said to the tree. "I knew that if I'd been wrong about all of this, that he could set me straight, like you used o do. Oh honey, I'm so sorry. You meant me to raise him, but think he raised me."

I don't know how she'd have responded to that, and so she didn't. I had a feeling that no matter what she'd have said, that eyebrow would be lifted. Perhaps that's all the response she'd have needed.

I felt foolish, standing nowhere and talking to no one, and yet I still couldn't bring myself to say no more. "Gotta go," I said. "I have a test to run."

I stepped through the portal to Professional Street. ^8e37b2

I found myself surrounded by sky scraper buildings, austere and imposing. They had robust glass foyers displaying company logos among opulent trappings; some the elegant simplicity of timeless glass and steel, some lush and rich, like a palace throne room echoing Gothic tones, or burgundy and gold, or any of a dozen allusions of wealth. Settings like this had been real once, I was told, before the class and race wars of the 21st century that had ended both with the Basic Income stipend and the display of personal wealth had become taboo.

I couldn't afford such things, but even if I were able, I'd never have wanted things like this. For most, virtuality could fill any such wants, but even here, I wanted no part of it. Lush fabrics gathered dust and
dander, chrome and glass became tarnished and filthy, and it took quite a lot of work to maintain. My personal wealth tended to savings and the occasional book, and I had no fear of being seen as a braggert even if they were seen; I had few friends, and most folks barely recognized a book as a thing of value, even if they knew what it was. Books tended to end up in recycler systems, and the thought of these precious relics being ground down to new paper (itself something of a rarity), or fed to biorganic power plants, made my skin crawl.

Most of the structures here belonged to member corporations of Minos. These buildings housed workspaces, meeting rooms, knowledge repositories, and the experiential size of these spaces did not necessarily match the size of their containing structures out here on the street. One, a consulting firm called "Simposia", for whom I often did contract work, contained merely a conference room and six offices, and yet the space it took out here on Professional street spanned a city block and loomed over the pavement. The stature of the building matched the firm's deeply rooted control over the markets they served. The facade was meant to be imposing, and it worked. They knew me and held me in some small esteem, and yet I still didn't go there without feeling out of place.

Contrariwise, the NOC was a small building taking up barely any space at all; it resembled a hybrid style of a Brutalist firehouse, and an old English church. Despite it's small exterior, the spaces inside were labyrinthine, and I knew them well. Most of the time that I spent in virtuality portal mode, I spent there, and this was where I started today. ^06c0a9

The NOC didn't need to intimidate. It didn't need to suggest power. It had all of the power it'd ever need.

As I approached, I caught sight of Winston, the NOC's Sentinel.

"Why Dade Phillips," it said, "all the way here. Has their been a breach?"

"You're going to pretend you wouldn't know?"

It laughed. It's appearance was that of a kindly man dressed as a door man from some old movie about Manhatten in the 1940's; a great coat with burgandy and gold lapels that ended just above patent leather shoes shined to a mirror finish, and a peaked cap over a tall forehead and kindly eyes, and impeccable white gloves

That appearance was a lie. Winston's polite exterior failed to show one of the most powerful intrusion countermeasure systems ever devised. The NOC, Net Ops Center, was both the sanctum and headquarters of the NetSec guild, and one of the very few places in all of virtuality that allowed direct manipulation of the code base that controlled the shared spaces that for many represented the entirety of virtuality. My own flatland and entrance were private spaces stored inside my skull, but allowed me to
let others in. The moment I left my portal, and before I entered someone else's, I was experiencing a system who' s physical hardware, like the ancient Internet it mimicked, was spread all over the real world. But all of that hardware spread like roots of a tree in this world, it's central bolus before me, and this smiling gentleman here was it's champion and defender.

Most intrusion systems had the ability and authority to inflict pain as a form of defense; the more intense systems could cause brain damage. Winston, with his understanding eyes and polite laugh, could kill me with the casual speed and finality as I would turn out a light.

I felt the weight of the Deputize and Gradient macros resting inside my skull like a sword of Damocles, and if Winston were to sense that same weight..

But his laugh eased my fears, as he opened the door, and waved me inside.

The doorway opened into a large, cavernous space, and the authors of the NOC had simulated the shift from a bright space to a dark one with amazing fidelity, causing a moment's disorientation as the eyes adjusted. I had no eyes; all of this happened between my skull, and the transceivers that linked me to the servers, and yet the feeling was the same. ^26e489

Once adjusted, I saw a cavernous space, and the doorway had opened into a vestibule suspended over that space. The floor of the vestibule was a rich, complex rug, like a tapestry, depicting Yggdrasil, the tree of reality from Norse myth. It's branches reached to many realms of the Norse mythos. On the trunk of the tree, a great squirrel had been rendered, Ratatosk, and the image of it was looking at you with a gentle smile. That smile was similar to Winston's own kindly face; I'd never noticed that before.
In one corner stood a coat tree; ironic given there was no need for a coat here, and to the right and left, a filigreed catwalk led off into the dark of this upper level to the cavern space.

Further to the left and right, wrought iron spiral stairs led down to the NOC's floor.

There were problem millions of ways the NOC authors could have rendered the interfaces that allowed the monitoring and control structures that defined this universe; banks of keys and screens, or merchant stalls with rushing messengers bearing scrolls.

The NOC authors had rendered the space in brass pipes, gleaming steam engines, and gauges. People were walking the spaces around and beween them, looking at the gauges, turning the occasional valve wheel or pulling one lever from a bank of several.

There was a bit of cognitive dissonance. One expected, up here on the catwalk, to be bombarded by shrill whistles, clashing gears, metallic bangs and clanks. Instead, one only heard a gentle shoosh shuooosh shoosh of a great machine, its tolerances perfect, it's power running nearly at idle. It was a quiet, restful sound, and it took me back to the long shifts during my internship here.

Were there to be a problem, the peace would have been immediately interrupted. The space would fill with light, a whistle would sound in the pipework representing the trouble spot, and the clock would stop. In virtuality, the mental clock matched the real ones we left with our bodies, but that rate was alterable. During a breach, when some security barrier was broken, the open cavern, and most of the rest of the building, entered response timing. For every second in the real world , the staff on deck reacting experienced about a minute and a half of subjective time.

The strain of the increase was borne entirely by the team on duty. While it was theoretically possible to spell out a response crew others, it would normally have been too late to make a difference, by the ti,e such a shift change could have been effected.

It had only happened once during my residency; a targeted worm had been carried into the Fallan group's perimeter and had hatched during a board running while some hapless salaryman was experiencing his one shining moment, standing before people many levels higher than in the corporate strata, and he'd lost his chance for glory had erupted from his skull like Athena fro the brow of Zeus, and had started hammering away at the personal firewalls of the august attendees. ^647f50

Our team had fumbled the initial attack; the worm had, by the time the alerts had thrown us into slow time worked to embed itself into the surrounding environment. The team had run from gauge to gauge looking for the attack vector, and each had shown green, green, green. In a moment in which our brains were running at fever pitch, our bodies surging adrenaline, we were running, frightened and engaging in panic fire.

In that moment, I had stopped, sat, and I had called up flatland. While the team ran past, some of them cursing what they took to be sloth, or surrender, I started reading the base code and memory contents of the board room and their inhabitants. That shift in paradigm had unmasked rhe worm like a lantern in a darkened room, and I'd removed the infection with a single command.

The lights had dimmed, time had returned to normal, and all of us slumped as we felt the effects of overclocking. A few passed completely out, their digital representations vanishing as they lost consciousness.

One of my previously angry cohort who'd fallen near me had lifted his head and wearily asked, "What did you do?" I gaped at him; I had no way to tell him. It was like trying to explain music to the deaf; the gulf between us was insurmountable. I'd shaken my head, and thought that the end of it.

It hadn't been, though. Others, not least of which, had raised the same question. Some, mostly the senior analysts that had been in that slow time with me, had asked with suspicion, and it had taken a full review of my flatland logs to remove that dim view. Others, chief among them the board of Fallon Group, took a greater interest in what I could do more than how, and they'd been the first member corporation of the Minos group to sign me to freelance group. The first engagements had been courtesy, but I'd worked hard for them, and they'd repaid that through referral.

That morning on this floor had created the career that had carried me through to raise [[Akari]], and given me the freedom and distance from the rigid control others in my line of work that had eventually created Gradiant.

I smiled at the figures below me, and moved down the catwalk to the NOC Archive.

I entered the Archive, and immediately felt a sense of warmth. ^950e4d

[!WARNING] Inconsistency
Does this violate the rules about the interface from [[gradient#^6709c9|the zoner's alley?]]

The NOC authors had carried that steampunk aesthetic even here. From floor to the ceiling, several floors above us, dark wooden bookshelves stretched. They carried wheeled ladders to allow access to higher shelves, and a walkway, reached through similar spiral staircases, gave access to the higher level shelving. Above us, a glass ceiling, most of its cells transparent, but colored panes depicting a great rose in dark and light reds and a green stem, black thorns, let in an overcast, chilly daytime sky.

The marble tiles of the floor held tables with green tiffany lamps, callbacks to the great rose, and there were also wingbacked leather chairs with lamps and end tables. It was a warm, inviting space that felt comfortable, and also conveyed a call to silence.

Those books, I knew, were not books. The paradigm of volumes had never completely left us, and so when a book was picked up, it conveyed an interface to the reader not too dissimilar to my own flatland, although it tended to be more of an audio visual interface; the reader would be able to speak and hear the system as it allowed perusal of whatever data that it contained.

Of course, you could force the system to change it's display to more resemble a real book, and that had been one of the first things I'd done during my tutelage here.

Standing at a lectern by the door was Winston. He was wearing a green shade over his eyes, his coat gone in favor of a pinstripe shirt, its sleeves held back with gaiters. He was peering down at a book and looked up at me.

"Oh, hello sir. Can I help you find anything?"

Winston was here, yes, and he was also still standing at the door. As the system Sentinel, he was anywhere that he wanted to be. He tended to keep himself at Archive and doorway, but he could be in any of the other places in the system. Rumor held that he could even be seen down on the cavern floor sometimes, although I had never seen it. Students would sometimes ask "If Winston can do everything that we could do, then what do they need us for?" In my senior year of residency, it'd become my job to provide the same answer I'd been given, which was "By charter, no AI may cross system boundaries. Because virtuality is shared space, AIs are tightly coupled to their places, like genus locii" in old stories. Because the cavern abstracts all of virtuality, Winston is forbidden from entering it."

That pat answer had always bothered me. Saying that something was forbidden didn't mean that it was impossible, and I often wondered how to test that alleged boundary.

"Yes, Winston. Two lines of inquiry. One, Biochemistry and interface; I'm curious about the security systems governing the prohibition on altering neurochemistry."

"Highlighted," he said, and I turned, seeing a volume on a shelf nearby glowing faintly.

"Second, aniviral scans and patch logs for Ramania Noodes, 1714 Lorainne Street."

Winston looked at me a little closer, scrutinizing my security clearances. They must have remained current, because he nodded to another shelf, from which another spine glowed.

"Making a health case, Mr Phillips?" he asked.

"Remains to be seen. Thanks, Winston."

I drew both volumes, took them to a table, nodding to a couple of students studying nearby, and started reading.

A few hours later, I found what I'd been looking for. I tossed the volumes over my shoulder, which caused them to vanish back into their places on the shelves. I'd made the mistake of doing this once out in the real world, and I'd destroyed an old hardback copy of Bradbury's short stories. Since then, the act of reshelving felt wrong, and not for the first time, I wondered if the authors for the NOC had a perverse sense of humor.

I logged out, taking with me only the certainty which had once been a suspicion, and a name. I noted the time, stretched, and made my way to Denizens.

6

"You must be Danni." I said to the woman with

Take a bite of ice cream after a day of bitters. Color it in pastels. Fill it with the boundless energy of a newborn colt.

Danni had this energy. She was tall, and yet still she managed a femininity that didn't oversize the curves on her frame, which seemed constantly in motion.

"Guilty" she said. "And you are?"

I held out my hand. "Dade Phillips."

She took it immediately, which won her over with me instantly. Hand shaking was an anachronism, and few would recognize it. He hand thrummed in mine with a restrained energy, as if the contact were all that kept her from running through the crowded bar.

"[[Akari]]yasu's dad," she affirmed, and I caught something in her voice, just for a moment, but she went on before I could tease it out. "Have you been here before?"

She caught me at the bar, ordering Faxim It was an odd brew; it had been originally built as a substitute for beer, but had changed over time; it fizzed but had no taste, it was an emerald green instead of amber, and it tasted like absolutely nothing like beer. It tasted nothing like anything except for itself, and that was something of an acquired taste, as I had done, long ago. Anne hated it, and insisted that she could taste it when she kissed me, so it and I had parted ways. This had been my first glass in.. how long? [[Akari]] was twenty two now, so a bit longer than that. That first sip had been like greeting an old friend.

"No," I said, "but I expect you might be seeing me again. It's nice to meet you."

"And you" said Danni, who had completed sizing me up. "Glad to have you. 'Kari's spoken about you before, says you're one of those dabblers in the arcane."

"You make it sound like some kind of witchcraft."

"Isn't it?"

For all of her boisterous, bubbly front, I caught a sense of depths in this one. "How do you mean?

"Well, look at it." she said. "You folk are rare. Secretive. Tight lipped."

I sipped my Faxim. "So far so good," I said.

"You make incantations, magic words, to wield power most of us don't have."

"All right, I concede," I said lightly. "I'm a wizard."

She went on stepping slightly closer. "You bend the fabric of reality to your will."

Had I been tipping back my glass at that moment, I'd have been choking on the sharp intake of breath. Those eyes were looking right through me, into me, and I got the sense that somehow she knew more about me than I could explain.

I was transfixed. I wanted to babble, or sputter, or perhaps even admit something to her that I'd yet to admit to myself. However, I was saved as I heard [[Akari]]'s voice call "Dad, you made it!."

Danni's eyes lingered a moment, and she turned, seeing [[Akari]] and Stacy closing on us in the crowded bar. "Hey, Stace!" she said, and hugged the girl she dwarfed. "Hi, 'Kari." she said.

I heard it again, and put it together instantly. The tell had been the insistence on greeting Stacy first, done so casually that it stood out. Danni had feelings for [[Akari]]. Nothing about that hug had been insincere; she cared for Stacy, and she'd known the young girl for a long time. She valued that friendship, and [[Akari]] had told me Stacy had introduced him to her after they'd become a couple.

Who was this girl?

I realized that I had completely missed the conversation between the three of them, friendly as I sensed it had been. Before I could speak, the lights dimmed. "That's our queue!" Stacy said, and took [[Akari]]'s hand, dragging him towards the stage. [[Akari]] shrugged, smiling, as the tiny woman dragged him away.

I turned, but Danni had already left, gladhanding others in the crowd. Just once, she met my eye, and she mouthed one word. Later.

That night, sitting at a small table, I listened to my son and his lady love sing Mad World by Tears for Fears. It was an old, classic song, and Stacy's soft, yet powerful voice hinted at a whistful yearning that belied her short years. Akira's accompaniment rode the bass strings to counterpoint her, and he joined on the refrain, the harmony elegant, haunting.

I was spell bound, and at one point, the old familiar faces of my grief and loneliness swam into focus as I wished for the millionth time that Anne could be here with me to experience this. But, in a flash of understanding, I realized that I was there to experience this for her.

In that moment, watching and hearing my son with tears in my eyes, I found a deep inner peace. For that beautiful moment, I believed that everything could be well. I could feel the nervous energy standing next to him as his bride walked down the aisle to become his forever. I felt the warm, innocent bundle of my first grandchild in my arms as I used the same bouncing steps to calm him that had calmed his father before him.

I had no need of overclocking. I lived out those moments.

As they finished out the set and stood, the crowd cheering nearly as loud as I did, I felt a swell of hope.

But as I took in [[Akari]]'s face, his eyes showing not the joy I expected, but a confused anger, I wondered if that peace could last.

All the while [[Akari]] looked into the crowd, I saw his left hand by his side, fanning out, and collapsing. Fanning, collapsing.

He was using the macro, changing the Gradient. And it was changing him.

7

My contract back log had been completely discharged. The work I had been doing for the week after Denizen's had been all for me, and I'd barely made the time to do much more than check-ins with [[Akari]].

Oddly, [[Akari]] let me get away with that.

I hadn't found Danni after the performance, and while I'd meant to follow up with her, the work had proven distracting. I had been cleaning up old security fixes, and I was engaging them with a renewed creativity. My work before had been solid, but now it was inspired.

When next I'd come up for air, I took in the room for a brief moment before heading out the door to run my next errand. Something on the Go board caught my eye. [[Akari]] had been here; he had made his next move.

He must have come while I was working, and waited for me. I really needed to call him, and I promised myself that I'd take care of that as soon as I completed my task. If nothing else, I needed to ask [[Akari]] what was distracting him; his move had been sloppy, almost intentionally giving ground. It was unlike him.

I went to Bellinger's. It was the kind of place I might have ended up myself, had I not met Anne.

It wasn't apartments, but you lived there, and many did. It wasn't a shopping center, but you certainly could shop, and the places there made more from non residents than residents. It wasn't a nursing home, but you could convalesce there, and many did.

Most of the old shopping malls had died, but a few had been left mostly intact, and one of Minos' subsidiary organizations had taken a gamble on refitting a few. Most of the bays within them had been replaced with coffee shops, arcades (and yes, we are talking about the great olden machines using flat screens and mechanical levers to engage them, still sporting holes for metal discs used as currency to pay for time on them), and also with small museums, live music venues, and restaurants.

They were places where you could interact with other people, and that made them a completely different thing than their original purpose.

They also contained bays of sleep pods.

An inhabitant of Bellinger's could wake, eat breakfast, work, play, bathe, and sleep without ever leaving. And thanks to the overlay, you could either be completely connected with the people around you, or totally isolated, all at your whim. You never had to engage in any of the mundane acts like cleaning house, or washing dishes, or even doing laundry (for a subscription, Bellinger's could supply you with fresh clothes each day).

It was expensive. It allowed higher echelon people in time demanding work like Net Sec an incredibly enticing lifestyle.

And so it was no surprise at all that John Freedman wcoas there. I found him at a table, a coffee steaming near his hand, his features in shadow. I'd caught him working.

I sat, and I waited. As I sat, I found myself thinking about [[Akari]]. Perhaps I was wrong. Was that hand gesture him working the strain of the music out of his hands? It hadn't seemed a particularly taxing piece, but it could have been that. And the facial expression could have been a stage light blinding him. It could have been anything, really.

It didn't take very long for John to phase back into his normal self. He immediately picked up the coffee, smelled it somewhat pompously, as if wanting to be seen doing it, and as he brought the cup to his lips, he noticed me sitting across from him. His lips puckered slightly.

"Dade, yes?" he asked, sipping. "It's been a long time."

"It has, yes." I admitted. "The last time I saw you was shortly after the ruling on the Kernsk breach." The lips puckered a bit more.

The Kernsk kieretsu was a competitor of Minos, if not an outright enemy. They tended to focus in differing ventures, but there'd been a contention in acquiring a company that worked in solar power. Both organizations knew that, provided they could keep other interests out of the sale, they could potentially make their investment back ten fold, thanks to the aid they could cheaply provide the dying company due to sheer scale. Keeping others out had been child's play, but when the smoke cleared, the two kieretsus had found themselves facing each other across the battlefield.

Any corporate engagement is a race to the bottom. A corporation resembles a machine more than man; they are programmed to profit above all other concerns, with growth (or reproduction) a close second. Ethics statements might grace the letterhead, but espionage, coercion, and deceit are the weapons used by the moving parts, and Kernsk had gotten dirty very quickly.

They had used a chump. The idea was a pretty good one; they had painted one of their vice presidents as a gambler taking risks to fuel quite the list of vices, and the ruse had been compelling. It may not actually have taken much trumpery to arrange; the man likely had been quite a lot of what he'd seemed. It had been easy to get an agent near him, offering money (and more direct access to said vices) in the name of a newly formed friendship.

However, the moment the agent had gotten access into the chump's portal, the trap had slammed shut. Kernsk had loaded the VP up with countermeasures that, while not quite to Sentinel level (that took more hardware or wetware), came close, and it had leached information from the agent that Kernsk had hoped to use to gain leverage on the deal.

Only they'd not been cautious enough, and the agent had died.

Net-Sec was, at its core, an extremely pragmatic organization. For as long as humans existed, there would be warfare, hostility, lying, and any attempt to completely annihilate these practices would be a fool's errand. However, Net-Sec did have very strong feelings about killing. The ethics that governed these distinctions were complex, and sometimes they seemed even nondeterministic, but there were consequences in breaking them.

Both parties, and the Net-Sec members that advised them, had been called to the question. And those parties had been myself, and man with the face like a lemon had landed in his coffee sitting before me.

We'd presented our arguments, and he'd lost. He was a terrible loser.

"What is it that you need, Wade?"

I ignored the intentional mispronunciation. "I was hoping you could talk to me about Ramen."

He looked genuinely confused. "I beg your pardon?"

"You know.. noodles? Nearly tasteless on their own, but they can carry practically anything. Like a pod person's hair, so to speak."

John's frown deepened. People that lived in the pods had access to bathing, but of course that came at a cost, and some notoriously cut costs by skipping the service. There was a very old running joke about places like Bellinger's being an easy place to catch lice, and obviously, John had heard it.

"I have no idea what you could be talking about."

"All right. Let me say this differently. I've been reading your patch submissions, John. You do good work."

Net-Sec members were required to submit a minimum number of security code patches based on what we learned in our work. The code itself ran on any given server, and in some cases for higher level members, on the interface hardware itself. I had a fair number of fixes and patches in place, some of them extremely complicated due to the low level work that I was able to do in flatspace. John didn't work at that level, but he did display a surprising understanding, and even elegance in his approaches. I wasn't buttering him up; he was good.

"Your work is.. well, distinctive, let's say." I continued. "You have a certain flair, I'll admit. You also have a certain kind of.. style, let's say."

"Thank you.. " he said, lost in this change of tack. "Did you come here to flatter me?"

"Oh, no, John, of course not. I could have done that with just a message. No no, I had a different reason in mind." I leaned closer, elbows on the table, hands laced under my chin. "I wanted to watch your face when I told you that that exact style looks a whole lot like the code running at Ramania Noodles that's been ripping me off for the last few years."

A lift of the eyebrows, a pull back from the table, and then a very forced grab at composure. I could even make out the jaw movement as he bit the inside of the cheek to lessen his response.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh, I think you do." I said. "And I can prove it. You weren't as careful as you thought you were. I can see on the server logs where the code changes came from."

That was a bald lie. John had been careful, but I took a chance that he wasn't sure about that. His style sometimes displayed a willingness to shoot from the hip, and he seemed self aware enough to know this, and that he might have had a slip.

He stared at me, and I stared right back. The moment spun out.

He broke, as I'd known that he would. He exhaled sharply. "What do you want from me, Dade?" he asked. The name was as close to a white flag as he was capable of offering.

"I want the exploit." I said. "You covered your tracks in the code extremely well; I could see what you were doing, but not how. You're going to give that to me, and you're going to do it right now, at this table. Or I'll make certain you never sit here again."

"How do I know you won't expose me anyway?" he'd asked.

"John, you broke down the walls between interface.." I lowered my voice, "and body chemistry. By taking that from you instead of turning you over outright, I bring myself down to your level. The only defense I have against you doing the same is that you'd have the same problem."

"What do you want it for," he asked, "you planning on going into the zoner trade?"

The hands on my face tightened to fists, the knuckles white. "You don't know what you're talking about," I said, "or at least, pray that you don't. Because if I ever find out that you are, then being turned over to Net-Sec would be a reprieve from the kind of hell I would bring you. Now give."

We bumped fists, pushing the code I'd wanted into my system, and I stood, gave him my back, and left.

I hadn't expected John to fold so easily, and I felt ten feet tall as I left the mall.

For so long, I'd been a menhir; a talking stone, and I was discovering this other part of who I was, of who I could be. In my wildest dreams, I'd never thought that I could confront someone like that. I felt powerful, and for a fleeting moment, I wondered if Anne would recognize me. And wonder of wonders, I realized that it wouldn't really bother me if she couldn't. I was still alive, and living meant change.

To use the data that I'd just wrested from John, I needed to head back to the NOC Archive, but before I could get there, I got a call from Stacy. That was unusual, and so I had answered it immediately, voice only.

"Stacy?" I asked.

"Dade, I'm sending you a pin. I need you here right now." She spoke, but not to me, "honey, please, you've got to.." and the connection dropped.

The location pin blazed in my vision like a distant pillar of fire, and I ran.

I reached a tight knot of people and had to push my way through to reach the sound of my son screaming.

"NONE OF YOU UNDERSTAND!" he shouted, "NONE OF YOU CAN SEE! I CAN SHOW YOU! IT'S WRONG, IT'S ALL WRONG!"

He was walking in a tight semi circle, his wild eyes on the crowd. Some looked like they wanted to help, and whenever they did, he stretched his arms out at them, holding out his knuckles for a fist bump, and the approaching stranger would immediately withdraw. Others were laughing.. They were laughing at my son..

"Zoner." I heard someone say. "Bad trip Zoner for sure."

I pushed through and walked to him. "[[Akari]], it's me. It's Dad."

He stopped pacing, looked at me, and for the briefest of moments, he seemed to relax. And then, to my horror, his eyes changed. The light went out, the recognition.

"NO!" he screamed into my face, "NO, YOU AREN'T HIM. HE CAN SEE. HE KNOWS."

A patrol droid approached. It began scanning him.

Stacy was just behind him. "Honey, please, stop." she called, her eyes full of tears, her face anguished.

"YOU!" he shouted, neither seeing nor hearing her, and approaching a stranger. "YOU CAN SEE! I CAN SHOW YOU!" He held out his arm, and when the stranger back off, [[Akari]]'s other hand shot out, grabbed the strangers arm, and pulled, trying to bring the stranger's fist in contact with his own.

"[[Akari]], stop!" I screamed, grabbing for him.

But the trial was already over. It's virtual court room had already convened, heard evidence, and convicted my son. It's virtual judge had rendered it's verdict. The droid's directional antenna had already been aimed as it had scanned, and I neither heard nor saw the pulse it had emitted.

But I did see it's effect as [[Akari]] simply died.

The droid went on to disperse the crowd, but I never saw that, as I kneeled there in the street and screamed over the body of the son I had most assuredly just killed.

8

Fugue state.

The sound of rain, like ancient radio static.

Hands pulling me, pushing me, none of them his.

Stacy's voice, screaming, accusing.

I am lost in a labyrinth of my own creation. I walk these corridors without hope, without light, with only a steady tread of a heavy, lumbering beast behind me, stalking me.

There is no rest in this place, no continuity. The corridors turn, the dark stays dark, and the thud, thud, thud behind me keeps the beat, implacable.

There are faces, here in the dark. Stacy, angry and weeping. Anne, unreadable in her grief. My father, a dark god of anger and retribution. Zelinsky even makes an appearance, mouthing platitudes. Is this at a grave side, or in a cul-de-sac in the maze?

One face is missing. One face I long for, perhaps the one that would act as the exit to this terrible place, but his face is gone, his light's gone out, and it was my fault, my fault, my fault.

For a time I cannot measure, I am weeping in the dark as the thud, thud, thud gets louder, and louder..

I come to in Ramania. I am weeping, a bowl in front of me. A young girl, about fifteen, her face showing the Downs syndrome symptoms that prevent her from ever receiving the interface, is looking up at me. It is the server I'd first seen the day I'd first used gradient, and her eyes are full of tears, and they're for me, they're in sympathy, and she asks me, her voice soft and low, "Are you all right?"

I leave the table, I kneel down, and I hug her. I hold her and I weep, and I don't care at all what the people around us must see, and she hugs me back, her innocence incapable of the judgement, the damnation, I surely deserve.

I take her arms and hold her back, and I look into her face. "I see you." I say. I see you.

I wipe my eyes, standing, looking at the judging, blind, sheep-like faces around me.

"And these people are going to see you, too."

Part 2: Minotaur

9

I had so much to do. In my mind, I felt these outstanding tasks like missing teeth, and I couldn't keep from feeling them, rehearsing them. I walked for a while, through the patch, letting the ebb and flow carry me. I avoided Zelinsky's stand; seeing him would remind me too much of what I had lost, but that was about it for navigating.

I had stepped on a foot, and heard a "Watch it, zoner" hissed at me. I barely registered it.

There was a plan emerging in my mind, and I wondered if it was really a new idea, or if on some subconscious level, I'd been heading this way all along.

Tick. Nothing I do is ever going to bring [[Akari]] back. Every step I've taken so far has brought me here; how much worse can it get than this?

Tock. Every single thing I've ever seen, all that I've known, has been a lie save for two people, and I was lucky to have had that; most don't ever get any truth in their lives at all. I am going to give them the truth.

Tick. Who am I, to decide for everyone what they need? My past decisions for myself and my son didn't exactly pan out all that well, did they? What kind of damage might you be about to unleash?

Tock. I don't care. It doesn't matter. I will do this thing, I will.. I will..

It dawned on me that I'd poured the fragile remains of my life into the how of a thing, without truly knowing why. The righteous anger that I'd felt looked like the act of a petulant child, yet still, the fire inside burned. I felt so much anger, but it had no direction, no place to land. It seemed that I could only channel it into one of two places; either I could direct it upon myself; let it burn me out, leaving behind only the blackened shell of me that had been so much the father my son had known, or else I could direct it on everyone else.

Could that really be me? What would Anne have thought?

I felt the taste of Faxim, and suddenly the idea of drinking seemed like a very good one. I made my way to Denizens.

Danni wasn't there the first night, when I'd drunk so much that her bartender had thrown me into a drone cab. Nor the second, when I'd done a little better and staggered home.

It was three nights before I saw her. I was glad for having accumulated an independent level of wealth; my bar tab, had I not been settling each night, could have fed a family for a week on Basic Income.

I was nodding along to the music, and she was sitting there across from me.

I nearly didn't recognize her. I suppose it's possible that this was due to there being two of her. More likely, it was her face. That energetic gaze was somewhat muted.

"How are you, Dade?"

I tried to smile at her, but those circuits were stubbornly refusing to function. What she got was something of a sickly leer.

"I.." I said, "am just fine, thanks for asking, young lady. You?"

"I'm a bit sad, Dade. I'm mourning the loss of a friend."

The leer turned surly. "Oh, are you, then? Well, of course, my condolences, most assuredly, sorry sorry sorry."

She kept staring right into me.

"Do you know what I used to do, before I opened this place?"

"I'm guessing grief councilor." I said acidly.

"I was a Net-Sec apprentice."

"Oh?" I asked. "I wonder how you got from there to here."

"I'm glad you asked," she said. "I wanted to talk to you about that the night we met."

We sat for a moment. I leaned in. "So, are you going to talk now?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "You're not the man I thought you were."

"On that, we can agree." I said, draining my glass. "I'm not a man at all."

"That's what Stacy says. She said you did something to [[Akari]]. She doesn't know what it is, but she thinks you drove him crazy."

I wrapped the table. A service droid trundled up, and I said, very politely, "Another, please." I hadn't changed the gradient from default in.. well, in however long it had been since that day. There were actual service droids, but I couldn't really be sure what it was that I was dealing with.

"Did you?" she asked.

"That's a damned impertinent question," I said to her, turning back to that cold stare. "And what makes you think I could do something like that?"

"Because I saw you, coming out of that alley."

"What alley?"

"The alley of the Lotus eaters. The zoners." she said.

"Oh," I said. "Them." My drink arrived, and I thanked the service droid, which didn't seem to notice. Real or overlay, they didn't have any kind of anthropol.. arthropo.. they didn't look like people at all. How many drinks had I had?

"You came out of there like you were running from hell itself." she said.

"You're not far from wrong." I said.

"What's so scary about a bunch of people smiling at each other?"

"You wouldn't understand." I said, drinking more.

"You might be surprised," she said, getting up. "But I don't think you're in any state to hear that right now. You're cut off tonight, Dade. Go home. Sleep it off. When you're ready to talk, call me."

She held up her fist, to give me her contact card. I frowned at it. Bumped it. Probably a lot harder than I needed to.

A night isn't all that long, and the time between them went by fast; I just slept through them. I saw Danni, and made no move at all to talk to her. Why should I? [[Akari]] hadn't been hers, and I owed her nothing. So she washed out of Net-Sec. So she saw me in an alley. So what? I had enough weight to carry. I didn't need any more.

She'd called that alley 'the alley of the Lotus eaters.' That was interesting, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered going back there.

Not to save them.

To join them.

But I'd found a lotus of my own. If I drank enough, then I could sleep without dreaming. And that was good. There were terrible things waiting for me in those dreams.

It was the another, later night, karaoke night. She pulled me down from the stage, where I'd been singing Mad World, and something about those verses had been so funny, and I'd been laughing as I'd sung them. I kept asking her, "Why are you stopping me, I'm having a good time." She'd said nothing, just taken me down from the stage, walked me home, an arm around her tall shoulder. The night was a cool one, but I didn't feel cold, except my cheeks. I reached up and felt them, and they felt cold and wet.

I hadn't been laughing. I'd been crying. Those cheeks burned with shame, even though I was still barely there, even as Danni bumped my fist against my door, and brought me inside. I slept.

I woke, still fully dressed. Faxim didn't leave a hangover, but my head still hurt, and I still felt stretched out. There was no slow remembrance of the night before; I woke with the shame and guilt fully formed in my mind, and lay there for a while. I'd never go back to Denizen's, I decided, except to apologize to Danni. I remembered the look that she'd given [[Akari]] the day we'd met, and wondered how much harder her own grief might be, watching her crush's drunken, maudlin father weeping the words to his song.

How pathetic.

I got up, and dragged myself out of the bedroom. As I walked out, I smelled coffee and breakfast, and heard the sound of someone stirring in the small kitchen. For decades, there had only been either myself, or [[Akari]] in there, and for the briefest of moments, I had to fight down the leaping hope in my chest that it was my son, that [[Akari]] had come home, it had all been a mistake, it was all going to be ok.

But it wasn't. It was just going to be breakfast, and the chance to deliver that apology a lot sooner than I'd anticipated.

"It lives," Danni said, not turning her head as I walked into the kitchen. "I had started to give up hope."

"Thank you for bringing me home, Danni." I said. She was finishing a pan of eggs, her back to me. Still tall, but there was something different about her.

"It's a terrible thing, losing hope." she said, and her words were clipped, harsh. I could see tension in the set of her shoulders.

"Danni, I'm sorry, I.."

"Stop." she said. She still didn't turn, and her voice, while strained, was even. "You took your turn on my stage last night. It's my turn, and I'm going to ask for equal time as the payment for ferrying you home. Deal?"

"Yes." I said, softly.

She plated the eggs, two plates, I noticed, and brought them to the table. As she turned, I saw that her face was recently washed, the makeup she wore muted somehow.

I also noticed that her eyes were closed.

Still, she managed to set the plate neatly down in front of me, and a place across from me. She pulled the chair, and swung deftly into it.

"There are some things that I'm going to tell you," she said, "and they are things that I don't normally tell anyone. I'm going to tell them to you because I think you might need them, but more because I think I need to tell them, and you're going to listen."

"All right."

"Eat, while I'm talking. No sense letting those get cold," she said, still with eyes shut.

I did, and when I brought the first fork full to my mouth, she nodded, and began.

"In case you haven't noticed yet, I am blind. It's a neurological condition, and I was born that way. I knew that the interface would let me see, and I can still remember the first thing I ever saw. It was my father's face." She smiled, a little ruefully. "I can still see that face, right now as I sit here, and not because of playback. It's because he was the first thing I saw in a world full of things to see.

"I can also remember," she went on, "how confused I was the first time I fell through a wall. I was, I think seven or so. We were standing in line at a cafeteria, my parents and I, and there were these line dividers that kept us all queued up, all of them showing videograms. I'd already started tuning them out, but they're never really gone, you know? I was tired from standing for so long, so I tried resting against one, and I fell right through.

"The other kids in line laughed, but I could understand. I kept pawing at it, and my dad looked at me, and said 'Stop it, honey, it's not really there.' So I started questioning, how did they all know, and I didn't know? It looked as real as anything else did to me, but they just knew."

She paused for a while, ordering her thoughts. The eggs sat ill on my stomach, but I kept eating them. Keeping my mouth full seemed to act as a kind of green light for her, and I didn't want her to stop.

"You remember I saw you coming out of the alley? I was there to care for my father." she said.

I couldn't help the hiss of breath. She shook her head, slightly. "It's not what you think." she said.

"I don't know what I'm thinking." I said.

"You're thinking, 'oh, poor Danni, her dad's a zoner.' And yeah, he is, but being a zoner isn't what you think. I ought to know."

"You.. you mean you.."

"Yes, Mr Phillips, I am a recovering zoner. I was in that alley for a little while."

"How.. How did you.."

"How did I break the habit?" She laughed. "I think I had something a little like you have. Oh, I can't see what's really going on down there. Without the implant," she said, opening her eyes, "I can't see a thing. But I can also see what it wants me to see just fine. What I can't do," she said, "is stop questioning what I see, and comparing that with what I feel. When a child comes to understand the world without sight, those instincts never truly leave you."

"You people talk about zoners, but you never think about the zone." she said. "If you're going to name people after a place, you might try and understand where that is."

"I know it's a shared experience, like virtuality." I said.

"You know nothing." she spat. "That's like saying you know what it's like to be blind because you blink." She took a moment, composed herself. "Can you imagine what perfect peace, and joy, and love, must feel like?" she asked me.

I thought of sunlight through trees, Anne's smiling face looking up at me, warm sun, warm Anne, soft grass. I had a slight pang; that place didn't exist.

"A little." I said.

She seemed to read what I was thinking, and nodded slightly. "I want you to imagine that feeling, only it's happening all of the time, and it's shared amongst friends that you trust completely. It's powerful, consuming, and leaving that place, even briefly, is like walking into hell."

"But you did leave it." I said.

"I did. I couldn't let go of falling through the videograms. When I'd realized, back then, that some things that I could see were real, and some weren't, I had reverted back to those blind girl habits again, and used my hands to help me understand what was there, and what wasn't.

"So, even in that beautiful place, I had to understand, what was real and wasn't. And when I started checking on the people I saw sitting around me, all smiles and perfect posture, I realized that it was a lie. That the zone had been built to let us happily, smilingly, let ourselves rot to death.

But you didn't use your hands, did you, Mr Phillips? What did you use?"

I never hesitated. I felt an enormous pressure that had built up, pushing the words out of me. "I found a way to force the system to let me control the strength of the overlay." I said.

She leaned back, exhaled. "Wow. I thought it had to be something like that, but still.. Oh. Oh. Oh, no."

"What?"

She looked away. "Stacy said.."

"Stacy said that I did something to [[Akari]] that drove him insane."

"Ye.. yeah. She did."

"I did." I said. And then, all in a rush. "I spent a lifetime of work and earned trust to break down the systems I'd been trusted to protect, and I did it out of arrogance, or hubris, or some other stupid selfish reason, and when I got scared, I inflicted that on my son. I am a monster."

We sat for a little while.

"I need you to help me, Dade. I need to revenge my father. You need to revenge [[Akari]]. A monster could do that."

"You think I haven't considered that?" My voice was rising now. "You think I don't wish for a throat to choke, every day?"

"Then find him," she said, matching my heat. "You can figure out who's fault this is! That's all I need. If you can't do anything else, then tell me who's fault this is, and I'll do the rest."

"That's why you joined Net-Sec, isn't it? Trying to find your villain?" I laughed, bitterly. "Well I got some bad news for you, young lady. The overlay is consensual."

"I don't understand."

"Try it like this. Imagine you live in a village where there are tigers. Tigers are scary, and people are panicky, nervous creatures that tend to lash out and cause hurt when they are frightened. So they decide to paint the tigers green, just like the grasses and plants all around them. Now, there are no tigers any more. Nothing to be afraid of. All is right with the world. Sure, occasionally one of the villagers disappears, but that's just how things work."

"I don't follow."

"I think you might. The tigers aren't painting themselves."

She thought for a moment "So there are a few, like the village elders or the shaman, who go out and paint the tigers."

"I suppose that could happen," I said, "but it couldn't last for very long. A tiger brushes against a tree and wears a bit of paint off. No shaman could keep up with the entropy in the system."

"So what's happening?"

"The villagers are carrying paint around," I said. "Hiding the tigers from each other is consensual. It took an initial suggestion to get the process started, but the village has decided that the peace of life without fear is better than real security from the tigers."

"How does that work with the overlay?"

"The same way. There is no single system hiding the zoners from the crowds. We're all doing it, subconsciously, in a learned way, but we're still painting tigers in each other's minds."

"That... can't be how it works." she said.

"Sure it can. Think about it for a moment. On your time in the cavern, when was the central system governing the overlay breached?"

"That can't happen. The overlay is a distributed system, and .." she trailed off.

"A distributed system." I nodded. "With no central authority to expose to attack. With no single figure acting as a controlling authority that could be misdirected."

I let it sink in.

"We are all zoners, Danni. Degrees, nothing more. The zone isn't abuse—it's the system finishing what it was built to do."

She started eating, dismissing the conversation. I sat there, thinking, watching her.

When she finished breakfast, she got up, and said, "Don't come back to the bar, Dade. The liquor doesn't suit you."

She walked away. "I'm sorry," I said again, over my shoulder.

"My Dad was sorry, when he left." she said. "He was so happy when I joined him in the zone. Every time I clean him up, feed him, I kiss his forehead, and I curse him for his refusal to leave. And every time, I fight the urge to sit beside him.

"I don't know where you're going Dade. But I will say this. If you're really the monster that you seem to think that you are, and if we're all guilty, then play the part. Take your vengeance."

"That's what you want?" I asked. "Even if it costs you your sight?"

"Even if it costs me my life, Dade. Finish the job."

She slammed the door behind her.

10

I sat at the table for a while. I wanted time to get my thoughts in order, to truly understand what I was going to do next. I wasn't going to get it. I got a call, and I answered it.

The overlay gave me an image of Stacy, standing in the small kitchen. She looked even smaller than usual, diminished, and yet there was a current running through her, causing her to nearly thrum.

"Stacy," I said, "I'm glad you called. I wanted to.."

"You need to understand at this point that I am calling in an official capacity." she said, and her voice laid that thrum bare. The current running through her was rage.

I became immediately still, and said nothing.

"Dade Phillips, it is my intent to call an inquiry by Net-Sec into the recent death of my fiance, [[Akari]]yasu Phillips. This is a precursor to my intended action of filing suit against you. Do you understand what I've said thus far?"

I remained silent. Oh, did I not mention? Stacy was a lawyer.

I've read courtroom dramas from back before the interface, and it's always seemed like such an interesting system. Law now worked very differently. Building a virtual court, feeding it the parameters for your case, simulating for outcome, and then using iterative learning algorithms to seek the outcome you wanted had completely changed how the legal profession functioned. Even in the best of times, a good lawyer was a person best given a wide berth.

But now, a lawyer could simply refine their argument until reaching an iron clad argument. All that it took was time, and will.

Stacy had quite a bit of both.

"He wouldn't tell me," she said, her eyes reddening, her composure buckling, "no matter how much I begged him to tell me. He would only say that there was no way to tell me, only to show me. And I was willing to do it, but he refused, until right at the end, but he was scaring me, and.."

She bit her lips together, looked away. I could see her hands bunch into fists, and for one panicked moment, I was afraid that [[Akari]] had passed Gradient on to her, that she was manipulating a band of her own. She fought for composure, and finally, turned back to me.

"Once more, Dade. What did you do to him?"

I said nothing. There was nothing that I could say.

"If nothing else," she said, "I can make certain that your activities will fall under direct scrutiny of Net-Sec. I can make certain you never get the chance to do to anyone else what you've done to [[Akari]]. I can take everything from you, Dade Phillips."

She disconnected. It's a pity, I spoke aloud what I'd intended to tell her myself. "I have nothing left to lose, Stacy."

I didn't have a whole lot of time. I ran out of the apartment.

I'd pushed my way through the crowds in the Patch. I had to be ready for a full audit, and the macros my system carried would be spotted within a few seconds. There was no way to hid nor encrypt them; a full audit would require me to provide the investigation temporary permissions into any area they wanted, and they'd want it all.

I reached the alley of the lotus eaters, the zoners. Looking around and seeing no obvious surveillance I walked, looking at each smiling, serene face. One caught my attention. It was something in the jaw line, the shape of his smile.

I kneeled down beside him.

"You're Danni's dad," I told him. Nothing about him registered hearing me. "You're lucky," I went on, "she's survived what you did to her. My son.." I choked off a sob. ".. my son didn't. I don't have the luxury of escaping like you have. Maybe I could, though. Maybe I could just sit down right next to you, give it all up, just let go."

I took his hand. "I'm very sorry," I said, "but I just can't do that. I hope you understand."

Ten minutes later, seated once again at the kitchen table, the call came in. I was summoned to appear at the NOC for a full investigatory audit. Compliance was mandatory, and so I entered virtuality. I couldn't help but glance at Anne's tree as I walked to the Professional Street portal. "Here goes nothing," I said.

As I approached the building, Winston greeted me. For the briefest of moments, I had the sense that his greeting was comparatively cool compared to his usual. Maybe that was just fear talking. I couldn't afford fear, and so I fought down those worries and strode past him. I took the iron catwalk to an office.

"Ah, Mr. Phillips," said Amir, rising to greet me. "So good of you to come so promptly."

"Did I have a choice?" I didn't ask. I bit those words back, said instead, "No worries."

"Please, please, sit." He waved me to a plush chair across from a formidable desk bereft of anything save a leather blotter, and a green lamp offering a warm pool in an otherwise dark space. "Allow me to express our deepest sympathies on your recent loss."

"How am I supposed to answer that?" I didn't ask. "Like that means a thing to me? Like it' supposed to change anything?" Instead, "Thank you Mr Melose."

"I'm sure you're aware of the source of grievance which has forced us to perform this audit?" he asked.

"I believe that I am. My almost daughter in law, in her grief, has come to believe I am in some way responsible for the death of my son."

"Are you?" Amir asked.

In that exact moment, I could easily, unhesitatingly, have killed the elderly man with the paternal expression and salt and pepper hair and beard staring at me. There would be absolutely no effect were I to rise, wrap my hands round his throat, and squeeze with all the force I could muster, and so I didn't. But it was a near thing, and I think he saw that.

"Please forgive so blunt a question." he said. He didn't say that I didn't have to answer. Nor did he offer any reasons for asking.

"I was a negligent father," I said, "and my son's deterioration should have been obvious to me. In that sense, I believe I am culpable, yes."

"And no other?"

I hated this man I'd never really known him; I'd always known of him, and aside from the audit I'd undergone that day in lockdown in the cavern, we had hardly spoken. But now, I focuseed eerything on that burning hatred.

"No."

By entering the room, I'd stepped into a space that monitored me very closely. While it couldn't read my thoughts, it could sense my emotional state quite well, and there was no way that I could have evaded the lie detection mechanisms that I was certain Amir could see just now. I had pinned my hopes, all of them, on attempting instead to overload them. I was attempting to use my grief and anger as a weapon.

I had no way to know if it had succeeded. I was lucky, though. He made it easy. I was nearly disappointed; most interrogators rely on dropping defenses through amiability, not through old fashioned shock approaches. Maybe he was in a hurry.

"I've reviewed your work over the last several months." he said, changing tack abruptly. "It's really quite inspired. You seem to have been hardening the defensive capacity of Minos systems, and the work shows a thoroughness that raises a personal bar, which was already quite high."

I said nothing.

"Might I ask, what was your inspiration?"

"The work I've done has been refining updates I'd already been doing." I said.

"Oh, assuredly. But the improvements surely came as the result of a train of thought."

"If I had to cite a single reason for what's motivated my work," I said carefully, "I would say that the zoners, and the nature of the system that allows them to be as they are, is a major reason."

"Ah," he said. And he waited.

I matched him. It's a tactic. Most people are uncomfortable with silence, and the patient interrogator can often obtain incredible information by just watching.

Eventually, he asked, "What was [[Akari]]yasu Phillips trying to pass along to the people in that crowd?"

"Whatever it was, it's probably for the best that he didn't manage to pass it along."

He frowned. "Did you have direct knowledge of the data that your son tried to pass to that crowd?"

"No."

Amir's face changed completely. Before, he'd been vaguely polite. He turned to stone.

"Place your hands on the desk." he said. I did.

The contact with the desk connected me to the crawler; a software routine that swept through my own data stores in seconds, looking for any anomalous code, any ethics violations.

It found nothing.

Amir was looking to empty space, and I knew this to a pane reviewing what the crawler was displaying.

This was taking longer than usual.

"Nice portal," he asked. "Did your wife do that? Anne, was it?"

"You take her name out of your filthy mouth." I snapped. No, I' d really said it.

"Excuse me?" he said.

"My membership to Net-Sec gives you the authority to review my working code," I said, "not my private life."

"You forget yourself. You know any data storage mechanism can be used to store anything by the creative. Your long history with us tells us you are that."

I lifted my hands from the blotter. I had the sense that Amir had summoned Winston, and that kindly figure was reaching his hand to point at me, to shut me off.

"Dade Phillips," Amir intoned, "I do not find any clear evidence of malicious acts, nor of unethical use of privilege on your part, and will so update the case brought against you.

"However, I do find that your behavior calls to question your fitness for exercising those privileges, and I hereby revoke your privileges for no less than one year. "

"But.." I began.

"No, no argument. On a personal note, I believe you are a man who has lost control of yourself, and I'm certain that there is something going on with you. To be frank, I suspect you, despite my inability to prove it, of actions that would mean your termination. I don't believe that I have to press very hard, though." He smiled. "I expect you will do something that will bear me out before the year is over."

"You son of.."

"Get out, Dade. I don't recognize you."

I turned. There was only the door.

John Freedman walked into YesterStar, his slippers making a zip zop sound across the dark carpet. John loved it in here. The place was a call back to a time he'd never known, but idolized. It was a video arcade straight out of the 1980s or 90s, and it was a darkened cave full of chip tunes, black lights, an air hockey table, and games arranged in a maze-like pattern.

It had started out as something of an odd throwback, and when the original owners had started to look at closing the place, John had bought the place out. The money was no object; he had a practically never ending supply.

It was never very busy at the best of times, but that was OK; he'd set the place to render additional people, and he'd chosen instead of trying to simulate contemporary people (whom he generally despised), to instead simulate people from the golden age of two dimensional media.

There were "street punks", with spiked Mohawks teased to incredible heights. Gum chewing valley girls rattled bangle bracelets as they ran Pac Man through the maze, young men in letter jackets stood around watching greasers with wallet chains wracking up perfect combos. John understood very few of these cultural references, but he still loved them just the same.

He'd been working on a fighting game near the back of the place, and today, he felt very much like beating his personal best. He stepped up in front of the cabinet, wrapped it with his knuckles, and began to play.

He never saw me shadowed behind him.

I'd entered virtuality in pane mode, but I had no interest in the tranquil garden that greeted me. The pane was behind me. I'd wanted the camouflage, blending me in with the darkened shadows of the arcade cabinets and low light. I reached out and grabbed him.

"See what good works you've made," I whispered into his ear, and activated the Vampire macro.

John slumped, and I'd been braced, expecting his weight, and still it surprised me how heavy he was. I dragged him into the deeper shadow. Inside the pane, I saw John Freedman, standing there, stock still.

Vampire used exploits I'd learned from the biological barriers John's code had offered me, and that had allowed me to access his interface without the volition of the friendly fist bump. It had also allowed me to render him unconscious.

Vampire had also given me the ability to push all my code into the overlay of Danni's father. It had been the safest place I could think of; he'd never have noticed it. I'd expected to at least lose the power that Net-Sec had offered me, and so Vampire had waited to sense me and return the code to
For as long as I maintained physical contact, John Freedman's virtuality presence was mine. I switched from pane mode to presence, and I stepped into the Freedman mannequin. I wore him like a suit of clothing. I looked down at myself, moving strange hands.

I nodded, and stepped through a portal.

Professional Street looked much the same to me through John's eyes as it did my own, but there were differences. Businesses of a lascivious nature didn't appeal to me, and they were therefore apparently comparatively hidden, although no one got away from such things completely. John, apparently, made use of such businesses, and so the street look less reputable to him.

Foyers that had seemed filled with glass and steel carried women dancing provocatively. They looked at me with knowing smiles, their eyes filled with recognition. I found it disturbing, but also a relief. My life was about to depend on which of us the system could perceive. I'd built this code with no real way to test it.

As I approached the NOC, the real test began.

Winston nodded at my approach, his demeanor the same as I'd always known it. I walked closer, and noticed a slight furrow of his eyes. Every instinct, every nerve path screamed at me to FREEZE, to wait for that predatory gaze to move on, and I knew such an act would be fatal, and so I forced myself instead to add swagger to my walk, and still to drag my feet in the lazy way John had.

"Welcome, Mr. Freedman."

Would John return the greeting? No, I didn't think so. John would probably glance disdainfully at Winston and pass the construct by, and so that's what I did. I could feel Winston's eyes between my shoulder blades; I could hear his feet shift, the cloth of his coat rustle as he lifted his arm to point towards me.

But he had instead reached for the door, pulled it open, and swept me inside.

In any reality, the key to traversing a secured space is to look like you belong there, and behave as if you have every right to be there, and that was stance as I walked down the spiral staircase and into the cavern.

I nearly nodded to a few people as I made way into the deeper plumbing of the cavern, before remembering that John despised the younger people that were working their way through internship, and I forced a disdainful look on my face, forcing myself not to make eye contact. John had been trying to increase the requirements on what it took to become a full Net-Sec employee pulling the ladder up behind himself. I knew for a fact that he couldn't pass the requirements he wished to impose, and even if he had not, I still recalled his complete lack of composure that day lock down had happened.

I found the piping I sought. Two paths in virtuality came near each other here, and nowhere else. I summoned my tooling and drew from nothing a small pipe, connecting two runs through a simple if case. Then I opened flatland and eliminated the logging systems that recorded the change. As far as even a full audit from Amir, this connection had always been there. I dismissed flatland and began making my way out of the stacks. I had one last place to go.

I climbed the spiral staircase, and nearly walked into Winston.

Gone was that affable exterior. Winston's face was a cold gravemarker carved from granite, offset by eyes lit with an internal fire like the pits of hell.

"John never uses flatland, Dade." it said. "What did you do?"

I gaped, unsure of what I could do. I turned, but the stairwell had become a shimmer of blurred light, an impassable wall. Winston had initiated lockdown, and I couldn't escape.

Fast as lightning, Winston's hand shot out, held me by the throat.

"Try to leave," he said, "and I will destroy your mind. You will tell me what you changed, or you will die. Choose."

This was a scenario I'd never predicted. I stared into that visage of stone and fire, heart beating like a rabbit, and knew I had only one path left to me.

"Winston," I said, "it's certainly been interesting, but I quit."

And I disconnected.

I did something I never thought I'd do. I woke up.

I regretted it immediately.

The pain I felt in my skull was a thing of weight and substance. It was made of pressure and hate, and I couldn't move, or speak. I could breathe. That was all.

Beside me, lying on the floor, was John's corpse. I had known that Winston would kill him, but I had no way of knowing how much of his attack would pass through the conduit Vampire had built between us. As I forced myself to try to sit up, I realized that the answer was "quite a lot.".

I was unable to move my left arm. I couldn't speak, despite trying. I could feel that my face had contorted on my left side. I had suffered a stroke, and from all signs, a severe one.

Net-Sec wouldn't take long to find John. So, I did the one thing I'd never wanted to do.

I called Stacy.

I used Gauntlet and showed her a healthy version of myself, and mentally ordered my doppleganger to say that I had decided to confess my complicity in [[Akari]]'s passing. I needed her help though. Her face was a mask as she agreed to meet me at the cafe near YesterStar, and she disconnected. I dragged myself there to meet her.

11

"What is wrong with you?" she practically screamed into my face as she found me, sprawled drunkenly at the table.

I fired up flatland and starting sending her text.

I suppose you could say just desserts, Stacy.

"Is this some kind of sick joke?"

Do I look like I think this is funny? Sit down and stop making a spectacle of yourself.

"A what?"

Sorry, old word. Just sit, please?

She did, as she did so saying, "You need to start making sense, or I'm leaving."

All right. You were right, Stacy. [[Akari]] died because of me. And what you're looking at right now is the result of my trying to cover it all up.

"You.. You... What was it, Dade? What did you do to him?"

I showed him what the world really is, Stacy. I showed him the sight of his own eyes, the sounds from his own ears, and it drove him crazy.

"What are you talking about?"

The interface, Stacy. I gave him the ability to shut it off and see the world unfiltered, like I see it.

She gaped at me. "Who are you," she asked, "to say that that's what the world is?"

I didn't understand, and I told her so.

She was shaking her head. "Oh yes you do," she said. "You just turned the lights off and decided that the dark was better. You blinded him and claimed it was good for him. You lied."

No, you don't understand, Stacy. There's so much being hidden..

"Of course there is, you idiot." Her voice was acid. "Perspectives differ, and everyone thinks theirs is the only truth. But the interface is real. You took that from him. What can I take from you?"

Let's find out. Take me to Minos, Stacy.

"Why?"

So that I can turn in everything I've done. So that they can keep anyone else from ever doing what I did. Because you're right, Stacy. I took [[Akari]]'s reality from him. Now I'm going to give up mine.

She helped me from the table, and we made our way out. As we went, I saw droids entering YesterStar. There wasn't much time left.

Stacy was a small woman. I truly don't recall how she was able to get me into, and then out of the cab. I only remember that the tremors were getting worse. With the gradient off, I could barely see; the stroke had done quite a lot of damage, and motor control was perhaps the least of it. I found myself wondering if I were still truly myself. But then, I suppose the time for such concerns had passed.

I do remember the running stream of anger and frustration she gave vent to as she propped up my left side through the foyer of the physical Minos building. She sat me down at a bench.

"I'm going to call security," she said, "and then I'm done with you. May you get what you deserve."

I think I have, Stacy. Right back at you.

She was taken aback by that, but walked off. A few minutes later, two men, hired more for brawn than brain, took me into an elevator. They never spoke, and they didn't need to. The moment we entered the elevator, I logged into virtuality. And that placed me into Minos' systems directly.

I'm not sure what happened out there in the real world. Perhaps that's for the best.

The Minos Corporation was, once you passed through the virtual lobby, a maze. I wandered it for a while, it's corridors dark stone, and oppressive. "I'm here!" I called out.

A great, lumbering stride sounded from close by, and from around the corner came the Minotaur.

The Minos Sentinel was built from the ground up for intimidation. I'd seen it before in more cordial circumstances, and at the best of times, it was a thing of fear. But now...

The Minotaur stood at eight feet tall. It was a giant of a man, hairy and muscular, and it had the head of an enormous bull. The eyes, even though they were dark black pools, had a kind of probing intelligence to them which it's horns and hooves belied. It's hands were empty, clenching, ready to hurt me.

"You are either brave or foolish, coming here." it said. It blew a great snort, and hunkered down to look at me more closely. "I'm thinking foolish. Why have you come?"

"You know me," I said. "You know what became of my son. Do you know why?"

"We have heard from your son's lover," it said, "that you have found a way to disconnect from the interface. Is it true?"

From around my left wrist, I removed the band of the Gradient macro. I held it up. "Yes, " I said, "with this. This infernal idea has taken everything from me. My son, my livelihood, my body. Do you believe that I've nothing else to lose?"

"You are not answering me," said the Minotaur, "why are you here?"

"To destroy the Gradient. To end this misery. And to ensure that no one ever has to make the choices I've made."

The Minotaur reached out to take the Gradient from me. Before it could, I took the band in both hands, and pulled it apart.

"What have you done?" it asked.

"Just what I said that I'd do," I said. "I've destroyed the Gradient. And in doing it here, in this place, with you watching, I've ensured that no one will ever have to face what I've faced. They'll never have to choose what reality to believe in."

Alarms began to sound. The Minotaur twisted it's head, looking at things that I couldn't see. "Something is wrong." it said.

"No," I said, "everything is wrong. Everything the interface tried to make people believe, every lie the system has built up, every social contract to hide the dirt and the pain and the sins, they're all wrong. But that's all right," I said, smiling, "because I've done what you were built to do. I've made us safe."

Its eyes widened in shock. "You have done something to the firewalls." it said.

"That's right," I said, "I have. The interface is.. well, it was.. a distributed system. I couldn't destroy it. I couldn't remove it. It was really quite well built. But what I could do was to surround it, to encapsulate it." The image of the Go board flashed through my mind. "By destroying the macro here, I've signaled every node in that distributed system to completely lock down each individual from the interface, including future updates."

"We can repair this," said the Minotaur, "we can correct what you've done."

"Certainly." I said. "Provided you gain physical access to every single person individually, I'm sure that you can. In fact, I believe that people will even beg you for it. But not all." I said.

"You would repeat upon everyone the pain you inflicted on your son." it said, disbelieving.

"[[Akari]] couldn't handle the truth," I admitted. "Others probably won't. But some will, and if that's the cost to reintroduce the real world, then yes. Yes, I have done exactly that."

"You have a countermand," it said, and waved its hand. "You will not leave this place until you give it up."

And here we are at last, you and I. I wander this maze, the Minotaur finds me and tries to force me, through pain and fear, to give it the countermand code. I've no way to know how much time has passed out there in the real world; it engaged lock down immediately. And despite all of the pain, and all of the fear, I still find myself laughing, because there is no countermand. There never could be; I'd never have been able to load a back door into the system to make it less secure.

I'm sure that it's chaos out there. And I'm fine with that.

[!NOTE] Now that you're here
Let's talk through next actions:We need to get the firewall work Dade pulls off a bit more telegraphed. It shouldn't be an Encyclopedia Brown style ending. Foreshadow Dade's thoughts on what he wants to do.Stacy needs to earn the bitterness Dade gives her.[[Akari]] needs more work.

[!NOTE] idea
Throughout the story, show us offworld colonies. The life there is hard, but completely ad free non commercial. [[Akari]] wants to go. He hates the commercialism. What pushes him to the brink is on finding that there are no colonies; they are simply more Lotus Eaters. Minos doesn't want to waste Basic Income on people that won't buy, and so they use the Interface to silence them. The profit motive is that Basic income is a form of taxation that the corps get back through buying, and the system runs on a quasi mix of capitalism and communism.

This forces you to ramp advertising hard. You end up with a heavy class based systems, and the differentiation is production. We are not post scarcity, but we could be if we can eliminate the population to some extent.

The lie of the colonies could be very insidious. The volunteers are simply cast adrift in another city as zoners. As they starve to death, the interface learns to emulate them as a means to continue the lie, with the conceit of the colonists becoming less connected to Earthers as time goes on.

[[Akari]] will recognize someone, and will tell Dade as he dies to look more closely at the faces. Dade will recognize one of the colonists, and that will be the drive to tear the whole system down. Dade would use Vampire to allow him to see what it is that the colonist is seeing, confirming his fear.

[!NOTE] Requirement
The technology system is unclear. Expand on how these systems work.

I think you're also mixing what the interface is capable of doing. Sometimes you claim it doesn't handle neurochemistry, other times you do.