I stomped into my room that Friday night, exhausted. My Friday classes started early and ran late. I spared a quick glance at my roommate (either Mark or Mike, I never could remember which) before flopping down on my bed and starting to dig my deck out of my bag. Mark (Mike?) glanced over to see what I was doing before turning back to his work. Mike (Mark?) majored in some no-brain-involved subject and really didn't understand my interest in the Matrix. His ability with computers was limited to word processing and sending email.

It took me a minute to find my deck - it should have been in the top of my bag, but it wasn't. Somehow it had settled down to the bottom. I dug it out and looked over - just in case it had gotten dented or something... however unlikely that might be. My deck's an old Zenith model - or was an old Zenith model, I should say. The solidly built steel and plastic case is about the only part of the original deck that's still there. I've made a few mods. Just a few. Suffice it to say, my deck's not a standard Z-22k anymore.

I flipped my hair back away from my jack (which reminded me that I really needed to get it cut (my hair, not my jack) - it was getting in my eyes again) and jacked into the Matrix. After the usual moment of nausea and disorientation, which I found myself wondering if it might be possible to modify my deck to avoid, my surroundings coalesced into the familiar rough-hewn stone walls, colorful hanging banners, and massive oaken door of my room node. I'd customized my node's appearance - it originally had four plain beige walls and a standard door. It wasn't supposed to be possible to play with the node settings, but it hadn't taken me long to subvert the pathetic defense program that the college had installed on the settings. The program now called me "boss" (literally... about every other word - I've never seen such a suck-up piece of software in my life) and prevented the incompetent who ran the UVM Computer Resources Department (incidentally, the guy who wrote it) from changing my settings back. It now thought he was me, and I was him, see.

I stepped out the door to my node to be greeted by a waist- high green dragon - my security program. I'd beefed up the program that defended the entrance to my node. My dragon, Willy, was significantly more dangerous than the knee-high dogs that guarded the doors up and down the corridor which represented UVM In-Dorm Matrix Access. Someone down the hall a ways had a giraffe standing watch. I'd been meaning to wander over there some time and see if I could get past the giraffe, but I never seemed to get around to it. I patted Willy on the head (it never hurts to encourage your software) and headed down the corridor to my favorite hang-out. It was a place called ThoughtWorks, just a couple of connections down the link.

There are people who say that physical distance doesn't matter when you're in the Matrix. People who say that have obviously never used a Z-22000 to jack in. When using a machine that slow, adding extra light-speed lag on top of already-slow transfer rates will kill you. Literally, if you're fooling around with black ice.

So I stayed reasonably close to home most of the time. ThoughtWorks was in the Church Street Marketplace, only a few blocks away from the UVM campus, and the light-speed lag was negligible even at computer speeds. I walked in as if I owned the place - which was reasonable, I spent half of my time there. The ThoughtWorks node was decorated in Matrix Modern... you know, dully glowing blue-black walls and a neon grid laid out across the floor. Well, I didn't hang out there for the decor.

I took a quick look around to see who was in. Most of them I recognized as regulars. There was one, though... on the other side of the room, a tall figure, sort of humanoidish. There seemed to be quite a bit of cat as well as machinery. The combination looked like Puss-in-Boots goes cyber.

I edged my way across the room towards the stranger, nodding a greeting to one of my acquaintances, SKULLS (always all-caps, don't ask me why) as I passed. SKULLS was one of the few regulars I knew well but didn't count as a friend. She was a ganger from Seattle, and a little bloodthirsty for my tastes. It's also a little disquieting to talk to a floating cluster of six or eight skulls. SKULLS, fortunately, didn't seem to have any desire to talk to me tonight, either, so I moved past her and over to the stranger.

Up close, the stranger looked even odder. Not only could I see more of the peculiar details of the cat-cyborg combo, but there was something else besides - a sort of indefinable aura of... something. It bothered me to be unable to pin down exactly what it was. While I was approaching Puss-in-Boots, he was looking me over as well. I took a moment to consider the view of me he got. I was humanoid, either human or elven, or possibly ork - it was impossible to tell, for I was encased from head to toe in steel. The flat-black plates were edged in glowing orange, and a white glow emanated from inside the visor of my sallet. Imagine Tron meets 16th century Maximillian plate - that's me, at least when I'm on the net.

"Greetings and salutations," I said to the cat. "They call me Broadsword."

"I can see why," the cat agreed, eying the broadsword at my hip. "They call me Jack." There was something odd about the stranger's voice, too... a suggestion of a deeper reverberation, an almost audible echo.

"Jack," I repeated, slightly surprised. Most people's handles and personas had something to do with one another.

"Yes, Jack," Jack said. "As in '-of-all-trades'."

"Ah," I said, as if that explained it. Though it didn't, come to think of it.

"Are you a regular here?" Jack asked.

I nodded. "You're not," I observed, brilliantly.

Jack didn't bother replying to the obvious. We looked at each other a second longer, then Jack asked, "So, where are you?"

This is something I don't understand. The Matrix is a world-wide thing, with transfer rates so high that (my complaints about the Z-22k notwithstanding) it doesn't really matter where you are. Burlington or Bangkok, makes no difference. Yet deckers - and not just people like me who spend half their lives jacked in, but the real deckheads who only jack out to eat and sleep - will ask you where you are. As if it matters.

Even as these thoughts flicked through my head, I replied, "UVM, Burlington, Vermont," and waited for the inevitable "Where's that?"

It didn't come. Jack smiled (not a comforting sight, not with those needle-sharp cat-teeth) and nodded. "You're right here in town, then. You familiar with Burlington?"

I nodded back. "You're in Burlington too?"

"Yeah," Jack replied. "I'm actually physically in ThoughtWorks here on Church Street. I'm new to town, and figured that the easiest way to familiarize myself with the place would be to go to the nearest decker hang-out and wait for a local to show up. Feel like showing a stranger around?"

"Sure, why not," I answered. "I've got nothing better to do tonight."

"Well, then, I'll meet you out in front of ThoughtWorks?"

I agreed, and turned to leave. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of the cat-figure dissolving out of the corner of my eye. Jack managed to be unusual even in jacking out. Instead of just fading and vanishing, the motes that formed the cybercat seemed to swirl away into nothing. I shook my head and headed back to my home node. It wasn't strictly necessary to return to one's starting point before jacking out, but it seemed to reduce the nausea.

Willy growled at me as I reached for the door, then snuffled flames in joy and tried to twine around my legs like a cat as he recognized me. I stepped into my little room and, out of habit, I checked to make sure everything was as I had left it before I jacked out.

The usual wave of nausea hit me, and had me once again seriously considering ways to modify a deck to avoid it. Maybe a gradual transition from Matrix to reality...? But if you had to jack out in an emergency, if, say, black ice was about to nail you, you wouldn't want to go about it gradually. You had to be out, and out instantly. Well, it would bear thinking about.

When my stomach settled, I got up, scooping my deck up off my bed as I did so. My roommate had gone somewhere - off to get drunk, most likely - so I had the room to myself. Of course, I was leaving, so it didn't matter much. Even as I dug my coat out of my closet and tucked my deck into the inside pocket, I asked myself exactly why I was leaving. It was true, of course, what I had told Jack - that I had nothing better to do. That wasn't my whole reason, though. I decided that I also wanted to meet Jack in person to see if I could figure out why there was that peculiar aura of difference around his net-persona. It was not, I knew, something that could simply be programmed into your settings. It had to originate somewhere else.

Still thinking about that, I absently tucked my little .38 into the inside pocket next to my deck. The gun was strictly against school rules, but I kept it around anyway, because Burlington, while not as dangerous as, say, SKULLS' hometown, was not the kind of place where you wanted to wander around at night unarmed. As I stepped out the door, I noticed that my roommate had left his keycard on his desk. He really ought to learn to carry it with him, I thought, as I locked the door behind me.

It was chilly enough outside that my breath formed plumes of vapor in the crisp night air. I had a good warm trenchcoat, though, and Church Street really wasn't a particularly long walk from my dorm. Within twenty minutes, I had the bricks of the Marketplace beneath my feet. I skirted the group of idle teenagers that seemed to perpetually congregate around the boulders in front of the entrance to the Church Street Underground Complex. One of them tried to bum a smoke off me. I gave him a look, and he subsided. The entrance to ThoughtWorks was right next door to the Complex.

I don't know what I had been expecting to have waiting for me by the door of ThoughtWorks. I'd kind of been half-expecting that it would be a cybercat loitering with its back to the wall, scanning the crowd up and down the street, though I knew that Jack's image was an image and nothing more. Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn't what I saw.

She was tall and slender, with wide blue eyes. Her high, fine cheekbones and delicately pointed ears confirmed her elven heritage. She wore her blonde hair long except where it had been shaven from her temples to accommodate her jack. The remaining hair on the sides of her head hung in two long braids. She wore faded blue jeans and a short t-shirt with a denim jacket over it. The bulky shape of a deck filled one of her jacket pockets, and some other technological gizmo I didn't recognize was tucked into the other. She had something that looked vaguely like a fencing foil tucked through her belt. Resting by her feet was a purse - well, more like a sack, really.

"Jack?" I asked, uncertainly.

Jack saw the expression on my face and grinned. "It's short for Jacqueline," she informed me. "You must be Broadsword."

"Yeah..." I replied, then added, "Off the Matrix, I'm Tom. Tom Cameron." I couldn't manage anything wittier - I was still trying to recover from the unexpected fact that Jack was abso- lutely gorgeous.

Jack scooped her bag up off the sidewalk and slung it over her shoulder. "So," she asked, "what do you do around here when you're not picking up chicks on the Matrix?"

"Dunno. That's about all I do," I replied, then explained hastily, "Jack into the Matrix, I mean, not pick up chicks. That and go to class."

"Sounds thrilling," Jack commented dryly. We'd begun to wander aimlessly up the street, skirting the group of teenagers in front of the Complex.

"It's not much of a life, but it beats what these guys do," I replied, hooking a thumb in the direction of the cluster of loiterers.

"What do they do?" Jack asked.

"What you see is what you get. They sort of stand around, get in the way. Other than that, not much. I don't know why they have to hang around here."

"What is 'here', anyway?" Jack asked, veering suddenly towards the Complex entrance.

"Church Street Underground Complex," I replied, following her. "It's where they keep most of downtown Burlington these days. Eight levels, straight down. I don't know how they keep the lake from flooding the lower levels. Dwarves love the place, though."

"I can imagine," Jack responded, as we passed through the huge front doors (recently remodeled to accommodate trolls). We paused in front of the first shop on the right. "What's this place?" Jack asked, looking over some of the interesting stuff in their front display cases.

"They call it a tobacco shop," I answered. "They don't sell tobacco, though. Just about anything else, but no tobacco."

"That's odd..." she said. I wasn't quite certain whether she was commenting on what I had said, or on the ceramic winged cat she was examining. "They sell lighters, though," she noted, indicating one embossed with the UCAS flag.

"Yeah, but nothing to light with them. I think they got tired of the lowlife out front wandering in to get their cigarettes."

We wandered through the place, briefly looking over the various doodads the tobacco shop sold, then wandered back out into the main corridor. Jack glanced around, then got a vaguely troubled expression on her face.

"Something wrong?" I asked.

She hesitated, then shook her head. "Where's this go?" she asked, heading for the escalator that led down to the second level.

"Down," I replied, as I followed her. Not content to simply ride the escalator, she trotted down its steps. I matched her without much thought. I usually did the same thing, anyway. Escalators are awfully slow.

When we reached the bottom, Jack looked around at the various restaurants and bars that occupied this section of the second level. "Nice atmosphere," she commented, eying an ork who wandered past us, chewing on a slice of greasy pizza. "I'll have to come here for dinner sometime."

"It's expensive," I warned. "If you want grease, there are cheaper places to get it."

Jack laughed, a cheerful, musical sound. "It's a good thing I found someone who knows the city to warn me away from the expensive grease," she said. After a moment, she added more seriously, "Though I really should watch what I spend. I haven't got much, and I don't think I'll be getting more anytime soon."

As she spoke, she moved the ten paces to the escalator down to the third level and stepped on, leaning back to half-sit on the rail. I stepped on a couple of steps behind her. As we rode the escalator down, I noticed that she her gaze kept flicking back in the direction we had come from. I looked back, but saw nothing remarkable.

When we reached the bottom of the escalator, Jack strode down the corridor, moving purposefully and not asking questions about the stores we passed. Granted, they weren't anything interesting - mostly clothing stores - but her actions weren't those of someone just strolling through a mall. It began to worry me increasingly as we walked from one bank of escalators to the next in silence. When Jack climbed onto the up escalator, I shot her a quizzical look and started to say something.

"I've got a reason, maybe," she said, even as I opened my mouth. "Maybe not. I'll know in a minute."

I closed my mouth (for the moment, anyway) and climbed onto the escalator. When we reached the top, Jack turned and headed back towards the food court at the east end of the Complex, back to where we had started. After we had walked a dozen paces or so, she glanced back and frowned slightly.

"Call me paranoid, but I think we're being followed," she said, quietly.

"Paranoia is a survival trait," I replied, glancing back as unobtrusively as I could manage. She was right. There was a suit pacing us some distance back, a suit that I remembered. He had been at the cyber-bank terminal across from the tobacco shop, and on the escalator later. He was a typical suit - a regular-sized guy with hair-colored hair and average clothing... completely forgettable. I wouldn't have noticed him if it hadn't been for Jack's statement. "Maybe it's just coincidence," I suggested, not really believing it.

"I don't think so," Jack replied. "Why would anyone use the route that we did to get from where we were to where we are? Unless they were following someone..."

"So why is someone following you?" I asked, pointedly.

"Maybe they're following you," she retorted.

"No." I had already considered and discarded the possibility. I didn't have any enemies, at least not the sort who might put a tail on me. My enemies generally didn't know that they were my enemies - life's easier if you can remain on good terms with someone (at least to their face) even while opposing them. The victory's generally easier, and the consequences less if you do lose.

Jack hesitated, hearing the certainty in my voice. After a long second, she said, "Okay. I'll tell you everything if you can get me somewhere safe."

"Deal," I replied. "Follow me." I stepped into the lead, taking long strides to move faster. Jack matched me pace for pace, which surprised me slightly. Most people find my paces just a little too long to match comfortably. Of course, Jack was tall - just a hair shorter than me - and had the typical long elven limbs.

I led the way back to the bank of escalators in the food court. It would have been faster to go the other way, but I didn't really want to walk right past our tail. We rode (well, climbed, really) the escalator back up to the first level and headed back in the direction we had just come. I noticed that we had increased the distance between us and our shadow. He couldn't walk quite as fast as we could without breaking his veneer of ordinariness. Near the second bank of escalators, I suddenly veered into a software shop.

The troll behind the counter (I bet they saved on security...) looked up as we entered and said, "May I be of..."

I cut him off. "Griffin." For a moment he looked startled that I knew his Matrix name, but he understood when I continued, "I'm Broadsword. Think you can let us out the back way?"

Griffin hesitated, then nodded. He owed me a couple of favors in return for help I'd given him on the net. A favor's a favor, even if it was the first time we'd met in person. "Why?" he asked, as he opened the storeroom and guided us through.

"Can't tell you," I said, thinking to myself that I didn't really know. "And we haven't been here," I added, as we stepped out through the delivery door.

Griffin nodded again and locked the door behind us. The door led out into the parking garage that attached to the Complex. This particular section of the garage was used as a sort of loading dock, and was currently abandoned. I quickly led the way in the direction I thought was towards the exit. We passed the main access from the mall to the garage, and I heard Jack, behind me, mutter, "Drek. I just saw him again."

"Where?" I asked, without stopping.

"Access tunnel," she replied.

"Did he see you?"

"I think so."

"Did he see me?"

She hesitated. "I don't think so," she said at last. "You were out of sight when he came around the corner."

"Good," I said, circling around behind a vehicle. "You keep going that way." I pointed towards a side passageway. Jack hesitated for a moment, then hurried down the side tunnel. I ducked down behind the car and remained as still and quiet as I could. After a few seconds, I heard echoing footsteps approaching. I looked under the car, and saw a pair of feet clad in unremarkable brown shoes coming from the direction we had come from. They paused at the intersection for a moment, then headed up the way Jack had gone.

I gave him a moment, then left my hiding place behind the vehicle. I moved quickly and quietly up the tunnel behind the suit. The tunnel was a dead end, something I hadn't counted on, and Jack was at the very end, her back to the cement wall. She had a look on her face like a cornered cat, and looked about ready to take the suit on with tooth and nail. He was advancing towards her slowly, ready to lunge with the stun-stick that had appeared in his hand if she attempted to go around him. I fished my little gun out of my pocket.

"Come along quietly and you won't get hurt," I heard the suit say. Jack snarled. "Where's your little friend gone?" the suit asked.

"I'm right behind you," I said, loudly, as I leveled my pistol at his head. "And if you so much as twitch, I'm going to splatter your brains all over this garage." I pulled the hammer of my pistol back with an audible click. The suit froze. "Drop the stun-stick," I ordered.

He moved so fast I could barely see it. I squeezed the trigger - just too late. His crescent kick connected with my hand, knocking my pistol flying and causing my shot to go wide and kick up concrete dust from the wall. I managed to get my arm up in time to block the second kick - a reverse crescent kick with his heel to the side of my head. I didn't manage to stop it, but my block absorbed most of the force, so it just knocked me down instead of knocking me out.

At that moment, Jack hit him from behind, clawing at his face with her bare hands. It distracted him, but not much else. He turned and pushed her to the ground, bringing the stun-stick down on her. She twisted away at the last second, so the blow glanced off her arm. As it struck, she convulsed and slumped over. I cast about, looking for my gun. I didn't see it, but I found a good-sized piece of metal scrap - rebar or something, as long as my arm and maybe four or five centimeters wide and a centimeter thick. About the same size as my broadsword, in other words. I grinned and took a two-handed grip on it, rising to my feet just as the suit turned to face me.

He looked at the steel bar I held in my hands and laughed. "Gonna fight me with that?" he asked.

I grinned again. "Yup," I told him.

He laughed again and, smiling contemptuously, came at me with the stun-stick. I parried, just barely, sparks flying as the stun-stick shorted across my bar. The stun-stick flashed up again, and I parried again and lashed out. The suit stepped back out of the way, then stepped back in, his weapon lashing out repeatedly. I could hardly see his shots coming, but I parried them all, fighting from sheer instinct. He must've had wired reflexes. Not quite fast enough to get through my guard, though. We circled for a second, appraising each other. His smile was gone. Mine was still there, the maniac grin I always get when I'm in a swordfight. (Okay, so it wasn't quite a swordfight, but still...)

"Where'd you learn to fight, boy?" the suit asked, as he circled for position.

"Society for Creative Anachronisms," I replied, even as I brought my bar whipping around in a vicious arc towards his head. He ducked under it and lashed out with his weapon. It just brushed the knuckles of my left hand, sending a tingling sensation up my arm. The sensation reminded me of the time I got the 120 across my fingers. Annoying, slightly painful, but hardly incapacitating. He threw another blow, this one aimed at my left leg. I reacted the same way I always do when someone does that (I never fragging learn) - instead of parrying the blow, I lunged. My attack would have been quite lethal with a real sword. With my blunt-tipped steel bar, I just gave the suit a nasty bruise over his heart and knocked him back a step. At the same time, his stun-stick hit my upper leg. The jolt caused all the muscles of my leg to convulse, and I collapsed to my knees. I managed to bring my weapon up to a guard position, but I knew that if he struck again, I wouldn't even know until it hit me. The universe was being kind of incoherent. The suit stepped forward, raising his weapon.

At that moment, a thin red beam burned its way between us. The suit jumped back, startled. I shook my head, which seemed to clear it some, and looked around. Jack was on her feet again, looking a little shaky, but okay. She had the fencing-foil thing out, leveled at the suit. "Move and I'll fry you," she threatened.

"Okay, okay," he said, turning slowly, arms raised. Suddenly, he moved, striking out at her with the stun-stick. It never even got close. The ruby beam lanced out again, catching the suit full in the chest. There was a sort of almost-flash, and a wave of heat. He collapsed to the ground, acrid smoke drifting up from the charred body.

I looked from Jack to the corpse and back. Finally, I managed to say, "What the flaming drek is that? A laser?"

Jack smiled weakly. "It's a magic wand," she said, tucking it back into her belt.

"Oh," I replied. It was all I could think of at the time. After another second, I managed, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah... I think so," Jack answered. "Kinda wobbly, but I'll live."

I pushed myself to my feet, using the metal bar as a prop. I was feeling better, but my left leg still felt kind of odd, almost as if it had been asleep.

Jack watched me struggle to verticality, then said, "Are you okay?"

"I think so," I replied, taking a couple of tentative steps. I had to pay attention to what my foot was doing, because, though the feeling was coming back, I wasn't getting any feedback from my foot yet. My balance was off, too, because the muscles weren't quite responding the way they felt like they were. I wasn't sure whether I was overcontrolling or undercontrolling, but whichever, it was throwing me off. "I don't want to walk just yet," I added.

"I know what you mean," Jack agreed, rubbing her arm.

I figured I might as well be doing something while I was waiting for my leg to recover, so I leaned over and checked out the corpse. It was lying on its back, and the jacket had fallen open, revealing a holder for the stun-stick under the right arm and a holstered pistol under the left. I reached down carefully, avoiding contact as much as possible with the charred flesh, and withdrew the pistol. I examined it briefly, then stuffed it into my pocket next to my deck. That reminded me of something else, so I looked up at Jack and asked, "Did you see where my gun went?"

She nodded and wobbled over to one of the cars, keeping one hand on its bumper to keep from tipping over while she reached under it and pulled out my little gun.

While she was doing that, I'd leaned over the corpse again and gone fishing in the inside breast pocket of the scorched jacket. I thought that I'd felt something solid in there when I'd pulled out the late suit's gun. The pocket contained a half-dozen credsticks and a few nuyen worth of paper scrip. I pocketed the whole mess, then retrieved my little Walther from Jack and tucked that back into its place. As I did so, I heard the high wail of a siren in the distance. "I think that's our cue to leave," I remarked.

"I think so," Jack replied, and we both made our unsteady way towards the exit. After we had walked a little ways, Jack asked, "Won't anyone who sees us think it's odd the way we're weaving?"

"Nah," I replied. "It's Friday night. They'll just think we're drunk." It didn't matter much anyway, because we were both walking normally by the time we got back out on the street, though my leg still felt a little strange. I led the way back up the hill towards my dorm, taking a short route through one of the less savory neighborhoods rather than my usual longer, safer route. Mostly it was because I still didn't feel much like walking, but also, after Jack and I had taken out a guy who must have been some sort of company muscle, common gangers seemed a little tame.

Regardless, we didn't meet any, and made it back to my dorm without further mishap. I carded my way through the back door to avoid having to answer awkward questions about Jack's presence in the main lobby - it was an all-male dorm, and, while Jack might pass for a UVM student, she certainly wouldn't pass for male (Not in person, anyway. The Matrix was a different story.). Miraculously, we made it to the elevator and up to my room without meeting anyone (my floor wasn't one of the party floors, which probably explained why the hall was deserted). I carded my door open and chivalrously held it for Jack before following her in.

My roommate still wasn't back, and I noticed that his keycard was still lying in the same place on his desk. He probably hadn't realized yet that he didn't have it.

Jack turned in a circle, looking the room over. "Nice place," she said. "It's real... real..." she paused, searching for a word.

"Small?" I suggested.

"Yeah, that's it. Small," she replied, grinning.

I grinned back for a moment, then sat down on the end of my bed. "Now," I said, "I think you need to tell me what that mess downtown was all about."

Jack sighed, then pulled my chair out from under my desk and sat down on it, backwards, laying her arms across the back and slumping down to rest her chin on her arms. After sitting in silence for a moment, she sat up straight, sighed again, and reached into her jacket pocket. "I guess it's this they really want," she said, pulling her deck out of her pocket and handing it to me.

I took it and looked it over. "A Fuchi-4," I said. "Nice, but nothing to get killed over. Unless there's something interesting in storage..."

"Not precisely," Jack said. "And it's not really a Fuchi-4."

"Oh?" I raised an eyebrow, thinking of my own deck, which wasn't really a Z-22k. "What did you do to it?"

"Modified it some. Response increase, extra memory, the usual." She stopped, looked down at the floor, then looked back at me. She took a deep breath, then continued, "Then I enchanted it."

"Uh huh," I commented. "How?"

"Well, I suppose you've figured out that I'm a mage."

That wasn't quite what I'd meant by 'how', but I let her talk, figuring she'd tell me what I wanted to know sooner or later.

"Well, I'm not really a full mage," she qualified her statement, "just a sorceress. I can't do conjuring, and I've never gotten the hang of astral travel. But I figured, hey, who needs to go astral when the Matrix is so much faster? Which got me to thinking - offline, if someone messes with me, I can roast them." She held up her wand. Up close, it looked like an old radio antenna. "In the Matrix, though, if some ice comes after me, I can't fry it. Not with magic, anyway. I'm stuck using the same utilities everyone else uses. Casting spells on the icons just doesn't work." She grinned sheepishly. "Trust me, I tried it.

"Anyway, I gave it some thought - programs are stored as data in memory. They actually exist physically as electric charges or light pulses or pits in a optical disk somewhere. And if they exist physically, it's possible to change them with magic. I mean, I can produce a light that can light up a room, or a pool of darkness in broad daylight, so it can't be too hard to duplicate a pulse on a fiber-optic cable.

"So I devised the necessary spells. It wasn't too hard - they're mostly adaptations of standard spells. Then the problem was that I still couldn't cast them on icons, because there was nothing to relate the image I was seeing with the physical location of the data. So I modified my deck. Adjusting it to feed me the proper info wasn't easy, and devising the spell necessary to enable the deck to do what it needed to was even harder. But I did it. It works." She stopped talking and sat in silence, watching me.

I took a minute or two to digest what she had said, then said, "So you're saying that with this deck," I held up the Fuchi, "you can cast spells on Matrix icons? Torch them like you did that suit?"

"Well, not quite," she answered. "All I can do is toggle a few of their bits. Not real selectively either. It's not very effective if I hit data or seldom-used code, but if I hit something like a main execution loop, the results can be pretty spectacular. Usually ice just gets real confused, but sometimes it gets killed." She grinned and added, "By the CPU, usually, for attempting to execute an illegal opcode. It's always nice when you can get your target's system to do your work for you."

"So how'd you get corporate muscle after you? Wait... let me guess. You used your new abilities to crack some system that just happened to belong to a megacorp. So the corp sent someone out to make certain you didn't do it again. So, whose system did you compromise?" I asked.

"Well, that's the odd part," she responded. "I can't think of any systems I even tried to break that belong to anyone with the resources to have me erased."

"Hmm... that is odd." Then something occurred to me. "Wait... wait..." I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the gun I had taken off the suit's corpse. I noticed as I did so that it was a little warm inside for my coat, so I emptied the rest of the stuff out of my pockets and dumped it all on the bed, then took my coat off and tossed it in the corner. I picked the gun up off the bed and examined it. It was an Ares Viper Slivergun - vicious against unarmored targets and almost silent in operation. "That suit wasn't trying to erase you. If he had been, he would've used this, not a stun-stick. Whoever he was working for wants you alive. They want me, too, or he would have shot me after he stunned you."

"So someone knows what I can do, and wants to capture me and make me tell them how," Jack exclaimed, understanding.

"And they want me because they think you might have told me something," I added. "So, who'd you crack that might be interested in this?" I tapped her deck.

She thought for a minute. "Several systems. None that would have the resources to send someone to get it, though."

"You sure?" I asked.

"Yes... I stayed mostly in the university systems."

"Which university?"

"SUNY."

"SUNY. What are you doing in Burlington, then?" I asked, curious.

She frowned. "Someone searched my room on campus while I was in class. When I discovered that, I grabbed a few essentials and took off. Burlington seemed like an unlikely place to go, so I didn't think they'd follow me here. I thought I might be able to get some help and find them before they found me again."

"Well, you found your help," I said. That earned me a smile from Jack. "But they did find you. So if we're going to do anything about them, we'd better find out who 'them' is."

"So how do we do that?" Jack asked.

I thought for a minute, then picked up one of the credsticks. "We trace these," I stated.

"And how are we going to do that?" Jack inquired. "Those things are supposed to be just about tamperproof."

"Oh, yeah, it's just about impossible to write to them without authorization. Reading is another matter entirely. I think I know where we can get the hardware we need to do it, too."

"Oh?" Jack raised an eyebrow. "Where?"

"Just give me a few minutes," I replied, hunting around for my electronics kit. When I finally located it under my bed, I told Jack, "Wait here. Don't let anyone in."

She shrugged and said, "Okay."

I stepped out into the hall, locking the door behind me, and went into the bathroom across the hall. There was someone at one of the urinals, so I stepped into a stall, figuring I'd use the facilities while waiting for him to leave. After a minute or so, I heard the door open, and footsteps move out into the hall. I stepped out of the stall and checked to make sure the bathroom was empty. Seeing that it was, I unfastened the cover plate on the nuyen-deposit-box on one of the pay-showers. Working quickly, I stripped out its electronics and carefully removed the credstick-insert device. I pocketed the hardware and turned to leave, then had a thought. I turned back to the open electronics box and swiftly spliced two of the leads together. The shower came on, and I grinned. That would provide a decent false motive to explain the cannibalized circuit box, and also discourage anyone else on the floor from reporting it. Who was going to tell Security about the missing nuyen deposit when they were getting free showers out of the deal?

When I walked back into my room, Jack was sitting on my bed examining my deck. She looked up as I entered. I pulled the credstick-insert device out of my pocket and displayed it in the palm of my hand. Jack looked at it for a second, then looked up at my grinning face and said, "I won't ask."

I shrugged. "You probably don't want to know, anyway." I dug a cheap data display system out of the junk on my desk and began wiring the credstick reader into one of its ports. Jack put my deck back on my bed and came over to watch over my shoulder. When I was done, I hooked a keyboard into the data display and tapped in a short program in its assembly language. It was a simple program - I designed it to read and display the data from all of a credstick's storage fields. I executed it and the display screen cleared. Nothing else happened.

"Was something supposed to happen?" Jack asked.

"No, not yet," I replied. "Let's try putting a credstick in it."

Jack scooped the pile of credsticks up off my bed and handed me one. I stuck it into the slot, and data scrolled across the screen. I read through it, then said, "Looks like this one is certified rather than registered to one person."

Jack agreed, so I pulled the credstick out and stuck in a another one. That one also seemed to be certified, as did the next one. My improvised reader wouldn't read the fourth one - fire damage, perhaps. The fifth one, however, spat out a bunch of data on its owner. So did the sixth. The problem was that the owner data on the two didn't match. When Jack commented on that, I replied, "I somehow doubt either of them are registered to the guy's real SIN."

"I doubt it too," Jack responded. "So how do we find out who he really was?"

"You feeling up to a Matrix run?" I asked.

Jack nodded. "What are we after?"

"We've got the ID numbers for those two credsticks right here." I tapped the display screen. "All we need to do is visit the financial computers and trace those ID numbers back to their origin."

"Oh, that's all," Jack said, sarcastically. "Well, I guess I'm up to it."

I got up and locked the door, answering Jack's questioning look with, "I don't want anyone wandering in while we're both out of our heads." Then I sat back down on the bed next to Jack. We both plugged our decks into the room's access node. Jack whispered a few words and traced a symbol on the top of her deck with her finger. "You ready?" I asked.

"This is insane - but yes."

"Good," I replied, and jacked in. The nausea struck me again, as always. While I waited it out, Jack's cybercat icon appeared in front of me. It was distinctly different than it had been before - it was slenderer, proportioned differently... I snorted.

"What is it?" Jack asked.

"Your icon have a sex-change operation?" There was definitely a feminine shape under the fur and cyberware.

"Oh," she said, sheepishly. "I'm sorry... I altered it before to mislead you. I needed that look of surprise you got when you saw me in person to be certain that you weren't a company man sent to get me." Her voice was higher, too. More like her natural voice than the neutral tone she had used in our previous Matrix encounter. It still had that same reverberating quality, though. I thought I understood that now, as well as the aura of undefined power she projected. It was probably a side effect of her enchanted interface.

"So, where are we going?" Jack asked.

"The first part of the data stored on those credsticks looked like a node address. My guess is that it's the address of the issuing institution." I suddenly realized that I hadn't stored the credstick data anywhere where I could access it. "Um... do you remember the number?" I inquired, embarrassed.

"NA/UCAS-NE-0409234215," Jack replied, "for both of them." Then she added, with a vicious grin, "I had the sense to store the data in my internal memory."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," I said. "Let's get out of here."

I led the way out the door of my node. Willy seemed happy to see me, but turned, ready to attack, as Jack passed through the door.

"It's okay, Willy. She's a friend," I said, hastily. The little dragon settled down, reassured.

As we moved out through the UVM Student Access System to the SAN, Jack said, "You named your ice Willy?"

I grinned. "Well, his real name is Kizarvexius, but I call him 'Willy' for short."

"What?" Jack exclaimed, lost.

"Never mind. It's a dumb joke."

We emerged from the UVM SAN into the open cyberscape of the Matrix. I hooked a dataline, and in a fraction of a second I was at our destination. It was represented as a huge metallic-green slab in the shape of Vermont. Copper lines covered its surface, connecting various components. The effect was similar to an old- style circuit board. I checked to make sure Jack was still with me, then said, "Looks like the National Bank of Vermont's logo."

"If you say so," Jack assented. "We just going to waltz straight in?"

"It's the only way," I proclaimed, diving down the dataline into the bank's SAN. The SAN seemed to be a copper corridor, and, covering the only line into the main system, there was a metal mesh. Access ice. I loaded and executed a deception program and moved towards the exit.

"Your ID number?" the ice inquired. My deception program provided a fake one. "Confirmed." The mesh vanished, signaling the ice's acceptance of the validity of my presence. I moved through into the SPU beyond.

Jack duplicated my actions and was also admitted by the ice. When we had both reached the SPU, Jack said to me, "That was easier than I expected."

"This is a bank," I reminded her. "It's a public access system. Real easy to get in. It's when you try playing with their records that it gets nasty."

"That's what we're about to do," Jack stated.

"Well, yeah," I admitted. "Just be glad we're not going after the actual financial records. I don't think we'd survive that."

"You are so reassuring," Jack muttered.

"So, which way do you think we should go?" I asked. There were three lines out of the SPU.

Jack hesitated briefly - most likely she was busy loading sensor programs - then said, "Well, the middle line is wide open."

"Probably the public access," I opinionated.

The cybercat nodded. "The right-hand line has moderate-strength access ice on it. The other has heavy-duty access ice linked to either a grey or black ice."

"Could you take it out?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Jack replied. "It's a nasty one."

"Well, we can't go left, and we don't want to go straight... so we go right?" I suggested.

"Looks like the only choice," Jack agreed. "Deceive the ice?"

"It's the simplest way." I executed my deception program again and moved towards the dataline. The ice allowed me to pass, so I guess the program worked. Jack followed, flashing her own fake passcodes at the ice. We slid down the dataline into the next node, another SPU. This one had dozens of connections, most of which appeared to be I/O ports. One was blocked by access ice, but the others seemed to be undefended. I looked at Jack. "Any guesses what this place is?"

"Dunno," she replied. "Maybe we ought to analyze a couple of these I/O ports."

"Can't hurt, I suppose," I responded. "You take one and I'll take one."

"Okay," Jack answered, vanishing into the copper tunnel of one of the datalines.

I turned to another dataline and transferred over to the I/O port it connected to. The node was undefended, but reasonably secure - it took two tries to get my analyzation program to work properly. As soon as I had the results, I slipped back into the SPU. Jack was already there, waiting for me.

"This one is hooked to a cyberterminal. Secure, but undefended," Jack informed me.

"Same here," I told her. "With this many cyberterminals, my guess is this is where the corporate wage slaves hook in."

"Why is there no activity, then?" Jack objected.

"It's after normal work hours," I reminded her. "They'll have gone home for the night and left the computers to run the show."

"Right. Hmm... the corporate records must be around here somewhere, then. The data pushers have to be able to access them."

As one, we turned to look at the sole protected dataline. "After you," I said.

"Why, thank you," Jack replied, moving towards the line. The ice accepted her passcodes and let her slip past. I executed my deception program and moved forward. The ice stopped me and demanded re-verification. I executed my deception program again with slightly different parameters. It failed again. The massive door that represented the ice began to pivot closed. I grabbed it, attempting to use an impeding program on it. It worked, stopping the ice from blocking off the dataline and preventing it from triggering a full alert. I was stuck, though. If I attempted to load an attack program to destroy the ice, my impeding program would lapse, and the ice could act before I had a chance to actually attack it.

"Jack!" I called. "Jack! I've got trouble!"

The cybercat reappeared and saw at once what my problem was. She closed quickly, claws lashing out to slash the ice into its component bits, while my program kept it from declaring an alert.

When there was nothing left of the ice but random tatters of data, Jack looked at me and said, "Good thing I was around to bail you out of that one."

"That ice was tougher to fool than I thought it would be," i said, by way of explanation.

"Yeah, and there's a reason for that, too," Jack acknowledged. "Come see what it was guarding." She turned and vanished back down the dataline. I followed. The copper tunnel of the dataline emerged into a huge node. The walls and ceiling were flat black. The floor was a metallic green, with an intricate pattern of lines traced on it in copper. It gave the impression of being inside of an old silicon integrated-circuit chip. There was only one thing that this node could be.

I turned to Jack, grinning. "The CPU," I said.

"That's what it looks like," she agreed. "Let's see what it can tell us." She moved towards the center of the node and prepared to take control of it. Evidently, her actions triggered something - access ice we had overlooked or something. The floor of the node bulged and a huge form exploded from it. I didn't get a good look at it - as soon as I saw the floor ripple, I ordered my deck to switch to combat mode.

In combat mode, the node was empty black space. Jack turned into a beige pyramid, and the attacking ice became a grey diamond. Data flickered through my vision, informing me that the ice had launched an attack program against Jack. I stepped into the fray, loading and executing an attack program of my own. An instant later, my deck informed me that the program had failed. I quickly modified my attack parameters and launched another attack. By sheer luck, this one struck home, ruining chunks of the ice's code. Another round of attacks flickered back and forth between Jack and the ice, and Jack appeared to come out the worse for the exchange.

I adjusted my attack program again to take advantage of the weakness my previous attack had created, but the ice adjusted its own code to cover the breach, and my attack failed. Jack, her persona program becoming increasingly tattered, dumped her attack program and loaded a shield, which absorbed the force of the ice's next attack. I hoped she wasn't counting on hiding behind her shield while I took the ice out - her shield wouldn't last that long.

I prepared my code for another attack, figuring I had to at least try to kill the thing. I was pretty certain that it was going to crash Jack and come for me any second. Suddenly, something flashed from Jack to the ice. My deck identified it only as "unknown phenomenon", which didn't tell me much. The results were pretty spectacular. The ice crashed instantly, going down in a burst of random data transmissions. I grinned, realizing that the "unknown phenomenon" must have been one of Jack's spells.

"Nice shot," I said, watching the last random chunks of the ice's data fade out of existence.

"Thanks," Jack replied. Then she paused and added, "Um... what happened to you? You've turned into a pyramid."

I laughed, both at her confusion and at the oddity of hearing Jack's voice issue from a small beige pyramid. I switched out of combat mode and explained, "It's one of the mods I made on my deck to compensate for its lack of speed. When I'm in combat, my deck quits sending and responding to queries about the appearance of Matrix constructs. People see me as a generic persona icon, and I see them the same way. I admit, I lose a lot of the scenic beauty of the Matrix, but I recover a little bandwidth to use for important things, like launching attack programs."

The cybercat shook her head. "Are you really that short on bandwidth?" she asked.

"Yup," I replied. "You have to realize, this deck is practically obsolete. It's only the modifications I've made that keep it from being completely obsolete."

"Well, get over here with your obsolete deck and see if you can use this node without being attacked by something."

I moved into the center of the node. "Report system status," I commanded.

A neutral monotone began to recite system data. "Processor usage: 22 percent. Storage free: 17 percent..." I ignored it until it told me what I wanted. "Alert status: Passive," the CPU stated.

Jack and I looked at each other in surprise. "Only a passive alert?" she said.

"Cancel alert," I ordered the CPU.

"Alert status: None," the CPU replied.

"Display system architecture," I ordered.

"Negative," it responded. "Insufficient security clearance."

"Jack, you try it," I suggested.

"Display system architecture," she commanded the CPU.

The CPU responded to her, causing a glowing diagram to appear in the air in front of her. She and I both leaned over it, examining the pattern of datalines and nodes.

"This blue and green zone must be the public access section of the system," Jack said.

I nodded. "And this part down here," I indicated an array of SPUs and datastores, all glowing bright red, "must be the actual financial records."

She whistled. "Red-12 nodes? I didn't think anyone had that kind of security."

"Black ice in every node, too, most likely," I replied. "Nice to know they keep the money safe."

"Yeah, but where do they keep their records?" she asked.

"In these orange datastores over here, I'd guess," I guessed.

"Well, there isn't anywhere else," she agreed.

"There's the red-12 datastores," I suggested, jokingly.

"Yeah... if you think it's a good night to die," she shot back.

"Where are these orange nodes, anyway?" I asked, tracing datalines back as I did so.

"Um... looks like they connect to an SPU off that one with all the I/O ports," Jack replied.

"I think you're right," I agreed. "How'd we miss them the first time around?"

"Dunno. How do we get there now?"

"Teleport. It's the easiest way." I glanced back at the map, memorizing the node number of the datastores' SPU. "Change to node 12-754-A," I told the CPU.

My surroundings shifted, and I was in an long, narrow SPU. The datalines leading off the sides were all blocked by access ice. Jack materialized beside me and looked around. She groaned when she saw the ice. "So, do we deceive them, or go back to the CPU and teleport directly into the datastores?" she asked.

"Deception can be iffy... and if we just teleport in, we'll still have to pass them on the way back out. I say we just kill them," I proposed.

"And how to you plan on keeping them from declaring an alert while we're killing them?" Jack inquired.

"Simple," I replied. "You inhibit them so they can't, and I'll do the actual killing."

"Sounds good." Jack turned to the first ice and activated her inhibition program. I loaded my attack program and launched an attack, not bothering to switch to combat mode. The response gain wouldn't have meant much against an inhibited access ice. I actually saw the Matrix image of my attack program for once. My broadsword bit deep into the shiny surface of the door, smashing through sections of code. I slammed home a second blow, and a third, and the door shattered.

"Might as well do them all at once," I told Jack.

She nodded and grasped the second ice. My broadsword made short work of that one as well. It wasn't until the last of the eight that we had difficulty. That ice escaped from Jack's inhibition program. Jack instantly switched programs, the cybercat's claws sliding out. Her attack and mine struck simultaneously, blasting the ice to bits before it had a chance to declare an alert.

"Close," she said.

"Close," I agreed. "You take these four datastores and I'll take those four, okay?"

"Okay," Jack answered, turning to the newly cleared dataline into the datastore.

I stopped her before she moved into the dataline. "What were the ID numbers on those credsticks again?"

She grinned her toothy cat grin and provided them, then ducked into the dataline. I quickly crossed the SPU and slid into the opposite datastore. With the access ice out of the way, there was no further security on the data - it was just lying there in the datastore. I booted up a browse program, using the credstick ID numbers as the matching field. My program turned up two matches, one on each number, and I downloaded them to my deck's local storage. Then I moved to the next datastore, where I came up empty. The third datastore contained a single relevant file, as did the last. I downloaded them as well, and met Jack back in the SPU.

"I found four files, one in each store," Jack told me.

"I got four as well," I replied. "Two in the first store, one each in the third and fourth."

"Did you scan any of the data?" Jack asked.

"No... I didn't think to," I replied, feeling foolish. If the files weren't what we were looking for...

Jack reassured me. "I did. Looks like the kind of data we need."

"Time to jack out, then?" I asked.

"I guess so. Nothing else we can do here," Jack replied. With those words, her image dissolved into motes, which seemed to swirl off into the distance without actually getting farther away. I glanced around the SPU one last time, then jacked out.

I was sitting on my bed, leaning back against the wall. The universe wobbled unappealingly, so I closed my eyes and waited for the nausea to pass. "There must be something that can be done about the nausea," I muttered.

"There is," Jack answered me. "Enchant your deck. That seems to be one of the side effects of my spell."

I gave her a look and said, "I'm not a mage."

"I guess you're out of luck, then."

I growled at her, then, as the nausea seemed to have faded, I sat up and said, "Well, let's see what we've got." I hooked both decks up the room telecom and loaded the set of files into the telecom's memory. They were tiny files, each containing only a single data entry, each a record of an action performed on the account. Remembering that we had recovered the data for two accounts, I sorted them into two groups by account ID and redisplayed them. The lists of actions still didn't really make sense.

"Sort them by timestamp," Jack suggested. I nodded, having already begun to issue the command to do so. When sorted chronologically, the first set of files read:

     Opened  Smith, Jason Albert  2935-871-20310
     SIN Confirmed
     Deposit 1000¥  CI Virtual Services

The second set read:

     Opened  Clark, John Quentin  2043-934-86346
     SIN Confirmed
     Deposit 1000¥  Hartford InfoSystems
     Deposit 97000¥  CI Virtual Services
     Payment 2¥  CT Bus Lines  Bus 17

"It looks to me," Jack said, after a moment's thought, "that CI Virtual Services paid this guy... probably a hundred thou even... and he used some of the money to create a couple more false SINs, like this `Smith'."

"And the `Clark' identity was created after a payoff by Hartford InfoSystems," I added.

"What are the times on those last two entries in the `Clark' account?" Jack asked.

I checked. "17:57 and 18:25, both tonight," I told her.

"So CI hired this guy at 17:57, and an hour later he jumped us in the garage," Jack mused.

"He certainly didn't waste any time," I observed. "I don't think he had to bother trying to locate you. He must have been hired specifically for the collection."

"So they already knew where I was?" Jack questioned. "Why didn't they capture me earlier?"

"They must have found out just before they hired this guy," I replied.

The light dawned. I could see it in Jack's face. "I jacked in down at ThoughtWorks at 17:50. They must have located me by tracing my connection and made arrangements with this guy to pick me up."

I nodded. "That unique deck of yours probably leaves a unique signature."

Jack leaned back against the wall. "So, now we know who's after me and how they found me. Now what do we do?"

I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see that it was one in the morning. I also realized, suddenly, that I was dead tired. I yawned. "Get some sleep. In the morning, I can get hold of some help. After that... well, I'm not sure, but there's got to be something we can do." I looked around, considering sleeping arrangements. "I'd offer you my roommate's bed, but I don't know when he'll come back. Not good for him to find you in it." I sighed. "You can have my bed. I'll sleep on the floor."

"Oh, no," Jack protested. "I won't make you do that." She hesitated, then said, "We can share your bed. I think I can trust you to keep your hands to yourself."

I shrugged. "Works for me," I agreed, scooping the pile of weaponry, credsticks, and other junk off my bed. I looked around for a second, then dumped the pile on my chair.

Jack stood up, pulled off her jacket and boots, and slid under the blanket, turning to face the wall. I kicked off my boots, and turned off the light. I felt my way back across the room to the bed and slid in beside Jack, facing out away from her.

I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.