Just wait until he had some real hardware in his hands…

For now, although the Vista was slow, it had one important advantage. Like the tortoise that gave antiquated decks their derogatory nickname, the Vista's primitive interfaces offered a "shell" that protected the deck's user from harm. While more modern computers offered direct neural interface with the Matrix, that connection was a two-way street. If the decker trespassed on an IC-protected node and hosed up, lethal biofeedback could flow back along the DNI conduit, frying his brain.

Ansen didn't have to worry about any of that. At worst, any intrusion countermeasures could only fry the chips in his deck. If that happened-and it hadn't yet-there were still eleven other Vistas back at the warehouse as backup. And optical chips had a way of "falling" into Ansen's pockets when the boss wasn't looking…

So the only question was where to go today. Ansen circled his right index finger clockwise (it had taken him a while to figure that command out; the manual that came with the Vista assumed that the user knew what "dialing" was) and a punchpad of glowing letters and numbers appeared in the air ahead of him. He keyed in NA/UCAS-SEA, then chose the four-digit LTG code that would connect him with the University of Washington. He'd heard they'd been developing some nova-hot sculpted systems and wanted to give them a browse. And leave his mark.

A system access node appeared before him: a fairly standard "office door" icon bearing the U-dub logo. Ansen reached for the knob…

And felt a moment of dizzying disorientation as the viewscreen image projected by his goggles zoomed forward, jerked back and forth in an epileptic frenzy, and then lurched drunkenly away from him. Instead of the door, Ansen now faced a dark tunnel draped with moss and fanged with dripping stalactites. Misty vapors wafted out of it like panting breath. Ansen was willing to bet that, had his deck contained an artificial sensory induction system, they would have chilled his skin. The speakers in his goggles broadcast a low, moaning sound that sent a shiver through him.

"Frosty," Ansen said out loud.

And then he frowned. What had happened? His data glove hadn't connected with the door icon; he should have still been outside the SAN leading to the university's system. Was his deck glitching out? Or had some virus scrambled an access code, sending him here?

And where was here?

The SAN in front of him looked like it might be stacked with some pretty hard-hooped IC, but Ansen was willing to give it a try. He touched his fingertips together in the complex pattern that would load and launch a deception utility. The universal icon associated with the Fuchi designed program appeared: a black, lozenge-shaped mask materialized a few centimeters away from Ansen's face, then settled in place over his eyes.

Ansen took a deep breath, then sent his persona gliding into the tunnel by focusing his eyes on its center point and jabbing a pointed index finger forward over his sensor board. The tunnel rushed forward to meet him, enveloped him in its stygian darkness…

And then that darkness was replaced by the utter blank of a dead viewscreen.

"What the frag…?"

Ansen tore the goggles from his eyes. The light had gone out in his sensor board, and the deck's tiny flatscreen display was also dead. But the power switch glowed cherry red, indicating that juice was still flowing into the deck. And the speakers in the goggles were emitting a faint static hiss.

Ansen peeled the data gloves from his hands. Something had dumped him out of the Matrix.

He hit a button on the side of the deck and watched as the flatscreen came to life. He scrolled quickly through the text that appeared on the screen: a log of his run. It was pretty brief. He'd logged onto the Matrix at 09:46:51 PST through his LTG, then emerged into the Seattle grid four seconds later. Keying in the LTG code for the university's computer system had taken him five long seconds-no wonder they called his deck a tortoise-and that's when the log went funny. At 09:47:00 exactly, the codes recorded in the log became scrambled. Instead of the usual letter-and-number combination that represented an RTG or LTG, the code became a meaningless string of symbols. Ansen had no idea which of the communications grids the weird tunnel icon had been in.

According to the log, he'd spent a full ten seconds just staring at the tunnel icon, and another three seconds getting his deception utility up and running. Then he'd tried to access the weird-looking SAN-and been dumped.

He didn't think it was IC that had crashed his deck, since the LTG codes had started going funny a full thirteen seconds earlier, back when he was trying to access the university's system. The fault was more likely to be a simple failure of one of the deck's routing sub-systems, perhaps caused by a faulty peripheral or I/O connector.

Cursing, Ansen crawled across his futon and began rummaging in a packing case for his spare VR goggles and sensor board.

09:46:38 PST

(10:46:38 MST) Cheyenne, Sioux Nation

Kimi laughed and ran after the other children as they chased the "rubber ball" that bounced from one end of the room to the other. Today the FTL Technologies game room was running a lacrosse program-baggataway, in Iroquois. The kids called it "bang-it-away." The sticks they carried were made of foam, the netting of a soft foam cup inlaid with a fine web of wires. These "caught" the holographic ball and held it until the glowing blue sphere was hurled away. Even the goals were holos, so the kids wouldn't hurt themselves by running into them.

Kimi liked playing bang-it-away. It was her favorite of the virtual games that the creche kids got to play-not because she liked running around after a silly ball, but because its holographic displays were the best. Whenever a goal was scored, holos of masked dancers sprang to life, filling the game room with their whoops and dancing in celebration around the kid who scored the goal. The holos were ultra high-rez, almost as good as what you saw in the Matrix. Just the sort of stuff you'd expect from programmers who designed some of the most wiz cyberdeck games on the market-and let their children alpha test them.

These kids were lucky, having parents who worked for FTL. They got to play, and test games, and go to 'puter school, and eat good food. Kimi had grown up in a tiny agri station out on the plains, with no other kids to play with, only soy and vitamin-enriched bannock to eat, and nothing to look at but hectares and hectares of rustling stonewheat.

Until she discovered the Matrix. That's where she'd connected with other young deckers. Lonely kids like herself. Kids who told her this brain-bending story about being able to run the Matrix without a deck after meeting a great spirit there.

They'd guided her through her own vision quest in the Matrix, taught her how to find the great spirit for herself. One year ago, she had at last succeeded, and been transformed. Now she could spirit walk through the Matrix, able to jack in directly without need of a cyberdeck. She had become a technoshaman.

She'd used her talent to deck into the FTL personnel files and create a mother who worked for the computer software corp. For the past two months Kimi had shown up every weekday at the corp's daycare creche while her purely fictional mother "went to work" in the tower above.

Most of the time she'd just played with the other kids in the creche or joined them in lessons and at lunch. But she'd also done what she'd been sent here to do: decked into the FTL mainframe from inside this building. The great spirit had explained that it was necessary for Kimi to do this because the system was "closed," not accessible via the Matrix. Even the great spirit itself couldn't get at it.