Zakariah Davis surveyed the V-net booth from across a darkened, deserted boulevard. The night was calm, but he felt a prickly unease like a static charge on the nape of his neck, a promise of adrenaline and strange neurotransmitters. A waft of air carried a faint odour of exhaust and mouldering refuse as a pregnant moon waxing gibbous laid a gossamer sheen on the suburban cityscape. The streetlights were long dead victims of power entropy, but the V-net terminal was still fully functional, an early public booth without the usual armaments, about a dozen years old school. A field technician had tested the electronics down to Sublevel Zero the previous day.

In a compulsive ritual of invocation, Zakariah caressed his scalp where the network cable entered his skull just above and behind his left ear, a permanently hairless semicircle on the side of his cranium. He combed his fingers through a wavy tangle of hair atop his head and set his teeth with determination, psyching himself up like an athlete before a big game. He’d been a field runner his entire adult life since receiving the Eternal virus at twenty-one, his only vacations spent underground when he was too hot to surface on the net, squirrelled away with his young wife and baby boy in dark basement apartments in downtown free-zones. He reached up to the V-net plug dangling from his left earlobe and tapped out a simple binary code with a pointed fingernail. The correct time flashed briefly in the upper right-hand corner of his field of vision. He had three more minutes until rendezvous.

Camouflaged in the dark green coveralls of a metro rep, Zakariah hurried across the street and keyed open the V-net booth with his new set of retinal prints. He surveyed the photoelectrics and deadbolts in search of tampering, then set up his doorstop and mirrors with care. Safe inside, he buckled himself into the launch seat and laid his wrist on the biometric monitor. His eyes strayed ritually over the ceiling in search of nerve gas ducts or any other modifications as he unclipped his plug and inserted it into the V-net console beside his head. A two-way flatscreen in front of him came to life with a menu of possible realities, but Zakariah was already diving to Main Street.

The City glowed with alien phosphorescence. The impossible architecture, unbounded by gravity, paid only passing homage to realtime mechanical conventions of depth and distance or light and shadow. Buildings that seemed about to topple never did. Pathways that seemed ready to disappear in the distance instead branched up into labyrinthine candelabras. Rooftop spires rose in spindly curlicues that sparked with energy like lightning rods. Pop-up billboards flashed the daily fads of fashion. Zakariah flew far above the twisted metropolis like a wary bird of prey as he rode the virtual datastream down. He tasted burning semiconductors—a keen electric choke in his throat that reminded him of home. Home again. Sound rose up in a blended hum of babbled incoherence and dissonant music from the digital underground, a chaos of raw communication.

Zakariah quickly located his target, a private conduit just inside the City perimeter, and glided to street level with slow precision. He was not interested in making a lot of ripples on Main Street. He preferred to remain unnoticed, a ghost without shadow, a cypher without substance. He landed to a full stop with clean grace and nary a vibration. He scanned the datastream without making eye contact with any pedestrian or sensory node. No trackers, no greysuits. He strode purposely to the conduit, stepped inside, and willed himself downlevel.

The fall to Sublevel Zero was much slower, experientially. He had time to peruse the steady string of advertisements scrolling on the walls, time to role play once again his scheduled meeting. His new avatar had made a flawlessly discreet entry to the net. His tech team had provided a stable linkup, his presence solid and virtually free of feedback interference. He held his hand up in front of his face and could see only vague outlines through it. Biomagnetic resonance detectors produced an exact duplicate in V-space, eliminating the need for webcams and bulky bandwidth, but Zakariah used illegal enhancements to disguise his avatar to suit the occasion. He was imaging an electric blue jumpsuit, a workman’s outfit that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd.

Sublevel Zero swarmed with bodies—pimps and tourists mostly, and hawkers pushing unlicensed nanotronic accessories. Zakariah brushed quickly past the colourful street chatter, being careful not to touch anyone or anything. Some of the escorts had dirty transparent holograms that betrayed cheap systems and promised nothing but trouble. A bad routine from one of them could fester in a system for weeks and ruin the best of implants. “Enhancement, turbo fantasy,” one of them whispered, her face pockmarked with feedback. She reached out a ghostlike hand, offering a free tester in passing, but Zakariah ducked away from her shadow.