Banks and big corporations figured that out pretty quickly. Hell, most mom-and-pop businesses had enough smarts not to install a System interface unless they wanted vandals messing with their inventory and bookkeeping. Porn was one of the few big businesses still tied in, and with so many holes (no pun intended) in their frontline security it was easy to hack. They wanted you in, after all. Eventually they made a customer out of you.

So The System had become a glorified chat room, used primarily for communication and some semi-secure data management, and was big on the world-wide primarily with the entertainment industry. Not to mention it took a hardcore fan to bother getting jacked in the first place.

Or a cop bucking for an easy promotion to detective. One which, by most cops’ standards, had never earned his gold shield.

“Let me take a walk through the system, at least. Get a feel for our perp.”

Our perp. On the same team, me and him. Curtis hesitated, studied me like something he wasn’t quite sure about.

Strike a pose: feet spread apart, confident, relaxed, thumbs hooked into the front pockets of my slacks (because I didn’t have a trenchcoat). If he’s there, we’ll find him. That’s what you do when your business is being a cop. A man crosses the line, any man, and you bring him in. No matter what.

“All right,” Curtis finally said. And nodded me down the hall.

Score one for the wirehead.

It was just a short trip to the property clerk’s office. Past the men’s room and a janitorial closet with a small puddle of water leaking out under the door. Isolation was always a good first line of security, but screen freeze me if it didn’t feel like these officers had been exiled to this far corner because they rated below mop buckets and dusting cloths.

There was a metal security door protecting their lair, with an access port that refused my badge number. Curtis swiped us through on his.

Tell me to take a square room ten feet on a side and fit in four desks and a DataScanVI the size of a small filing cabinet, and I’d have great game of mental Tetris playing in my head. Apparently, so had the officers in charge here. Two desks pushed back-to-back, the third shoved up against a wall with the DSVI crouched in the kickspace beneath it, and the fourth desk set on end in one corner as the piece-which- would-not-fit. Plus, the walls were painted in a bright, too-cheerful jewel-tone yellow.

All that was missing was the jaunty little background tune. Instead, the chief property clerk had a CD player spinning out some classical piano.

“Franklin Torres,” he introduced himself. Willowy would be the best word to describe him. Tall and extremely lean, with stooped shoulders and rail thin arms. A good breeze would probably bend the man in half. No wonder he’d been filed down in the property clerk’s office-sure wasn’t built for the streets. He did have a chrome jack behind his right ear-another of the chrome detectives squad, then-and he made sure I got a good look at it by turning his head overfar to introduce the others. Nothing to hide? Asking for some professional courtesy?

Samantha Blake and David O’Rourke were his two assistants. Samantha was a freshly made officer who starched her blues and I’m sure had an academy stencil still visible below her shirt collar. How she had pulled drudge duty I could only guess. Luck of the draw, maybe. Her file, as it had been given to me in the package, was clean. Top marks in programming and rated for an eventual job with the Electronics Division.

O’Rourke was sour-faced and carried an obvious chip on his shoulder. No doubting why he was here. His file had mentioned two trips to rehab in his first three years.

Both officers barely acknowledged Torrres when he introduced them. Me they glanced down at like a particularly loathsome bug trying to crawl into their food. I’d like to think it was the IAB detective looming behind me. Maybe it was the chrome.

“You have logs on the door for the last week.” I said. Meaning, to let them know, that I had the logs and knew there was nothing out of place.

Torres nodded. “I’ve made runs on them in System,” he said. “Sam has mast-fingered them for two days. We’ve got nothing new to add.”

Fingered them. On keyboard. Torres was definitely old school cybercrime. He’d been about to call it “masturbating.” By the light flush coloring Samantha Blake’s cheeks, she knew it too.

I shuffled around the two back-to-back desks and crouched down before the DataScanVI. There was an Electronics Division sticker on the case, logging it as “evidence in place.” So ED had already looked it over for tampering, to see if someone had installed a wireless bridge on the sly. No joy on the third-party hack.

Samantha, keyboarded and neither she nor O’Rourke had visible jacks, but I had to double check. “Wireless?” I asked them, and they shook their heads.

Not surprising. Not on a cop’s pay, and the department would never spring for the new tech when the old stuff still hadn’t paid for itself. Not in the eyes of the upper brass. I’d have them scanned again, but I doubted I’d turn up anything.

Mind if I plug in?” I asked Torres.

A courtesy only, as the equipment was owned by the department. But you didn’t go plugging another man’s jack into your chrome without asking. And don’t go there.

“Top drawer,” he offered.

Never pointed out his desk. Didn’t have to. Even outside The System, it was the details-those little things I mentioned-that made the difference. In this case, his chair. A nice form-fitting tilt model designed to hold you in a semi-reclined position. He didn’t have much privacy, not even so much as the closet-cubicle I was allowed for hosting my virtual office uptown, but he did go in for comfort and safety. No sense letting your body fall forward with an involuntary twitch, impaling your cell or a piece of your coffee mug into the middle of your forehead.

I eased myself into the hugging material, liking the velour touch. Then opened his top drawer and pulled out the datajack on its thin cable. Like most, it was covered in a thin latex sheath meant to keep things clean. Okay, it was a condom. Extra-small. The department wasn’t about to pay for a custom-designed sheath, but it could have been worse.

The upper brass could have made us pick up our own extra-smalls at a local drugstore.

Without a warning glance at Curtis, and avoiding Samantha’s gaze altogether, I stripped the condom away and set the jack into the socket behind my ear. Immediately, I began to relax. Muscles going slack, and a pleasant buzzing in my ears as the endorphins kicked in to lull me in to a… let’s call it a receptive state. In a dreamy haze, I settled my hands down onto the chair’s arm rests and reclined back into a comfortable pose.

Then rocked forward.

Standing up (in The System).

I was back in the office I’d just left, only without the clutter of desks and without the jewel-tone walls closing in around me. Instead, walls were painted a pleasant beige, illuminated by a soft glow that seemed to pool up from the floor, and hung with a few art masterpieces I might have recognized from museums. That is, from movies that had been shot inside museums.

So I wasn’t an art buff. But still quite soothing, all considered.

The room remained ten-by-ten, held only by the single chair I’d just stood from and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the mirror. Mirrors were such a common physical interface between The System and reality that it didn’t surprise me at all. My office in the uptown precinct had one as well, and I was well trained in not looking until I was ready to unplug. There’s something disconcerting in watching yourself lolling back, often with a sliver of drool trickling down your chin, giving those phantom twitching motions you see dogs do when they are asleep and “chasing rabbits.”