That was when he'd begun the long, painful process of getting clean. Withdrawal from BTL was hell, but a hell that could be endured. The heightened sensitivity to stimuli and lowered threshold of pain, the agony that came from bright lights or the pressure of cloth against skin- neither of these were anywhere near what Jocko had endured as he experienced Jocko's death in simsense, disemboweled and bullet-ridden, his face slashed wide open by the razorboy that Bloodyguts had assured him would be a pushover, even though he'd known that Jocko didn't have a chance.

The Azzies hadn't made the BTL recording of Jocko's death. Someone else had-someone who had disappeared into the shadows, rendering futile all of Bloodyguts' attempts at revenge. But the Azzies were a part of the whole thing, with the ultra-violent drek they exported into the UCAS under the guise of "sports" recordings. For people like Bloodyguts, legal Azzie simsense chips were the first step onto the slippery slope that led to snuffsense. And now Bloodyguts, who had made it his one-man mission while he was still in Seattle to slag every snuffsense dealer who still polluted the streets, was going to eliminate that step.

Best of all, he was doing it from within the jaguar's den. Not only had he penetrated the system of a red host like Aztechnology's Seattle arcology, but he was doing it from a jackpoint within Tenochtitlan itself-the city that was the heart of the Azzie simsense industry.

While on the run, slipping from the shadows of one city to the next, he'd wound up in Tenochtitlan. There, he'd hooked up with some rebels-a kick-hoop group led by Rafael Ramirez, an ork with a virulent loathing of the court ball game. Bloodyguts had earned their trust, and worked with them on a run. With Bloodyguts providing the decking they needed to trick the securicams into thinking that all was well, the group had planted a bomb in the telecom studios that were used to broadcast live from the court ball stadium, reducing the complex to a heap of rubble. The beauty of it was, it had all been done remotely; Bloodyguts had used a robotic drone to plant the C4 that leveled the studios. He'd done it from a distance, striking from afar like a powerful god.

That was when he'd realized that he could also still strike out at Seattle, even though he was on the run and far, far away from that city. Grateful for his assistance, the rebels came through for Bloodyguts. They told him about a data transfer that had recently been made to the Seattle arcology, and of a shipment of simsense chips, made from that recorded simsense data, that was about to hit the Seattle streets. The shipment that Bloodyguts was looking at now. The chips he was about to destroy.

Back in the meat world, Bloodyguts' lips twitched into a smile. Decking was the way to go, the best way to target the snuffsense industry. Like the image of Jocko on which he'd patterned his persona, Bloodyguts was a mere ghost in the machine, If his enemies threw a punch, it would pass right through him.

Of course, if they threw IC at him the outcome might be different…

Keeping a portion of his perception within the sec cam that was monitoring the truck loading bay, Bloodyguts accessed by feel one of the other faces on the small stepped pyramid that was the slave node. He first crashed the electronic locks on the loading bay doors, effectively freezing them in a closed and locked position and sealing the truck inside. Then he followed the maze of connections that led from the node to the automated weapons that protected the loading bay against intruders from the street. Inside a sensitive area like the loading bay, which was typically filled with valuable shipments, rifles and explosives were not an opinion. Those weapons were reserved for the outer, streetside defenses. In the bay itself, lasers were the standard line of defense. A scorch mark or two on a packing case was vastly preferred to a series of deep holes chewed by high-velocity slugs and explosives.

On the other hand, lasers were the perfect weapon to wield against optical chips that were protected only by a thin layer of shrink wrap and cardboard…

Bloodyguts activated the four MP laser guns and sent them coasting along the rails on which they were mounted. Maneuvering them into position directly behind the rear of the trailer, he quickly set up a loop of programming that would send the beams crisscrossing back and forth over the bundles of optical chips. The program would also gradually step up the gain on the lasers, allowing them to burn deeper and deeper into the cargo inside the truck. Within a minute or two at most-long before any security guards could react to the threat by unloading the truck- the optical chips would be slag.

With a satisfied smile, Bloodyguts activated the laser guns and watched as four ruby red beams of light began cutting destructive swaths through the optical chips. The shrink wrap bubbled and warped, and the cardboard packaging below it began to smolder. A few wisps of smoke began to drift upward, but Bloodyguts had already compensated for any interference that the molecules of soot would cause.

He watched for only a moment, then exited the slave node and activated a spoof utility. A loop of dripping entrails appeared in his hand. Whipping them over his head like a lariat, he wrapped them around the slave node, enclosing the face icons on its four sides in heaps of tangled entrails. The hoses of flesh constricted around the stepped pyramid as the utility began its work, editing the slave node so that any commands sent to the node would be rendered into unrecognizable strings of gibberish by the node's own subsystems as the commands were forced to pass through the long loops of entrails. Regardless of any overrides sent by the arcology's system operators, the laser guns would continue their deadly work.

Good. A job well done. Bloodyguts glanced at his log monitor. It was just a second or two before 9:47 a.m., Seattle time. He'd completed the run with plenty of time to spare. Now it was time to scram from the arcology's system and do a graceful log off before any of the Azzie deckers came to investigate the overwhelmingly improbable "glitch" in the loading bay's weaponry. Bloodyguts turned and made his way past the jaguar-shaped IC that had blocked his way earlier. He started along the beam of blue light, intending to follow the datastream out of the arcology…

And suddenly faltered to a halt as his legs collapsed under him. Looking down at the lower half of his persona from where he lay sprawled on the beam of blue light, he saw that his feet and lower legs had been infested with tiny black moths with wings of gleaming obsidian stone. They rose into the air and descended again, dipping and fluttering down to take sharp bites of his flesh. Their tiny mouths devoured his persona icon pixel by pixel; already his feet were fragmenting, turning translucent and revealing the glowing blue data stream on which he lay.

Drek! The slave node must have been booby-trapped with crippler IC. Even as he'd been rendering the Azzie chips to slag, it had been doing the same thing to his deck, silently attacking its MPCP chips. And now his persona was disintegrating.

Bloodyguts flicked his hand, causing a gigantic hypodermic needle to appear in it. Aiming the needle at his legs, he squeezed the plunger down. A thin stream of liquid, rainbowed like a streak of oil, coated his lower legs. Gradually, the restore utility filled in the holes the moths had created, washing them away in the process. The optical chips in his MPCP would still need to be replaced, but at least his persona had been prevented from crashing. He rose to his elbows and prepared to stand…

He heard a snarl and glanced behind him. The jaguar that had guarded the slave node was advancing on him, eyes narrowed and tail lashing in fury. Now that the crippier IC had attacked Bloodyguts, the jaguar must have recognized him as an intruder. Bloodyguts expected it to spring forward in an attack, but instead it vomited forth the heart Bloodyguts had offered it earlier. The pulsing red organ sailed from its mouth and landed square on Bloody-guts' chest, where it stuck fast, beating with a feeble arrhythmia.