Wind stirred up smells of exhaust and whatever chemical cocktail they used to scour the oil from the landing pad. Glitch fell in step with Jones. N4n0bytes hovered at her elbow uncertainly, trying to guess if she was mad at him or not. Glitch scanned the shadows until she found the maintenance panel she needed. She tapped N4n0bytes on the arm with the back of her hand and pointed.

Glitch crossed the roof, feeling her steps sync up to the rhythm of the job. Unyielding ground sent little shocks of force through her rubber soles into her heels. The breeze stung her eyes and stole the heat from every inch of exposed skin. The acrid smell of the city was worse here in the corners where the rain hadn’t washed the synthetic cleaner into the gutters or the walkways below. All were details of meat-space she savored only when she was about to leave them behind. Even the tightness of her shoulders and stomach – what was that? Anxiety? Apprehension? – were interesting sensations.

Glitch put her back to the maintenance panel and slid down into a crouch. The metal casing was cool to the touch but the poured cement still remembered the heat of the day. From the back of her neck she unspooled her jack-in cable – a slender bridge between biospace and cyberspace thinner than her little finger.

To her left, N4n0bytes mirrored her. His cable wasn’t built in – he fished one out of his pocket and pulled back his hood to plug it into the metal plate on the side of his skull. Jones came to stand watch over their bodies while their minds were away, gun in hand. Wingz joined him, twirling a pistol like some kind of a gunslinger out of a videogame. N4n0bytes gave Glitch a confident nod.

“I’ll handle security,” he said, “you get the climate control system. If… so like, if you run into any trouble just like give me a call, ok? I’ll come bail you out.”

Glitch stared at him for a beat. She had dozens of runs to her name and he was giving her instruction. Offering to come to her rescue. Implying that she’d need it.

Unacceptable.

She knew her own skill, and that she could handle both systems on her own, without his help. But that competence didn’t matter until she jacked-in. Out here in biospace though, perceived competence was everything. It was a teammate’s trust. It was the chance they’d call her for the next job. It was the reputation Fixers staked on her whenever they recommended her. And those jobs were the off-the-books pay that let her keep surviving free from the chains of a wage-slave. He was posturing, trying to appear strong, playing into his image of himself as the hero of his story, and it was costing her.

Unacceptable.

She pushed back her hood so he could better see her scorn in the darkness.

“Nano, if I ever need you to come bail me out of anything, the situation is already so far fucked you will need an army of hackers to come find me,” she told him. “Get a grip on your savior complex. Just do your job.” She turned to Jones, stolidly watching the interplay. “I’ll be done inside three minutes,” she told him. “If I’m not back in five, pull the plug.”

Beside Jones, Wingz frowned.

“Doesn’t that hurt like a bitch?” he asked.

Dump shock felt roughly equivalent to waking from a deep sleep by slamming into the ceiling and free falling back down. Not the worst thing in the world, sure, but it took a while for your brain and the rest of your biology to sync up again, so you spent a while feeling the input of your hands through your feet, or smelling your tongue.

Glitch gave Wingz a flat look. “Less than a piece of ICE burning through my brain, one neuron at a time.”

ICE – Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics – were nasty little programs, capable in some cases of doing lasting damage to a hacker’s mind, while the dump shock just left you stupid for a little while… usually.

Wingz didn’t reply, but his lip-shrug was assent enough.

Glitch closed her eyes and pressed the cable into the access panel.

For the briefest moment, she felt her body go limp as her mind dropped away from it. Then all bio-space sensation cut out, and she was inside the Matrix of the building. The wind, the roof, the chemicals, all of it dropped away. Even fear – that’s what that feeling had been, fear – faded away without her biology’s sweating palms, stiff muscles, and pounding heart to reinforce it. A little black house-cat avatar with purple eyes in a constant state of pixelated glitch sprang into existence.

People didn’t often ask what it was like to be jacked in. Computers might run the world, but a shocking few cared how they worked. When Glitch tried to describe the feeling for the first time, she said it was like standing firmly on the ground without having any weight. It was the absence of biological noise cluttering her mind with wants and feelings. It was seeing what needed to be done and doing it without the nuisance of waiting for your body to carry out the command. A perfect marriage of intent and action. It was like editing a piece of code and seeing the resulting change as it happened instead of waiting for the program to compile and run. Her audience hadn’t much cared and she’d never repeated the sentiment. People had long since lost their appeal anyway.

N4n0bytes’ avatar popped in alongside her. It materialized as a grown, muscular man in sleek, shiny body armor with a full, well-groomed beard and sunglasses. In another context, she could have mistaken it for the brooding protagonist of a first-person shooter. Glitch checked its signature and smirked: he’d bought it from someone named “Pixelator”. She didn’t wait for him to finish resolving. The less time spent together the better, and N4n0bytes already made time spent around him feel like an eternity without dilation’s help. With it – best to move on.

In front of them stood a barred, iron gate set into a wall that stretched for miles in both directions. To a user on the outside, in biospace, it was just a login screen, though some systems might attempt to render the gate in 3D. Inside the cyberspace of the Matrix, the wall appeared to be made of old sandstone and every inch was covered in scrolling, neon hieroglyphics.

Her avatar pawed at the heavy lock on the portal, sending a little tremor through what her brain thought was her hand. Code – rendered into 3D images for ease of handling – was a tangible thing to her when she was jacked in. The simpler it was to process, the lighter it felt; the easier it was to bypass, the softer; and the more straightforward it was for her to manipulate, the warmer. The wall felt heavy, hard and cold, but the lock came away in her hands and became a pyramid-shaped Rubix cube covered in symbols instead of colors.

The cat’s tail twitched, sending pixels flying through the air while she toyed with the puzzle. Glitch bounced the cube up and down once or twice, getting a feel for it. It was light, almost weightless, and the hardness of a soda can. It felt warm though, like a hot box of Chinese take-out on a cold day. Glitch’s fingers flew as she spun and twisted the pieces this way and that. She got it close enough to completion and then cheated by swapping two runes with one another. The gate swung open and the cat avatar bounded in, leaving N4n0bytes behind playing with his own login. No root permissions meant they had to log in separately; one of them couldn’t just open the door for the other without a lot of extra work.

The architects who had constructed this Matrix either hadn’t known or didn’t care about the historic and geographic difference between Babylon and Egypt. The world behind the wall resembled an approximation of the Hanging Gardens with a giant pyramid rising up out of its center. At its peak, a hovering Eye of Horus glowing neon-yellow spun slowly, like a weight on the end of a string. Walls and stairs patrolled by wandering sphinxes with glowing LCD eyes partitioned off the different subsystems into unique gardens. She needn’t challenge them for now – the maintenance panel had let her into the exact garden she needed. Cisterns of impossibly blue water, branching grapevines with golden leaves, and chrome aqueducts that represented the building’s climate control spread out before her. If she peered closely enough at the surface of any of them, she could see tiny lines of code running across the surface. The garden’s protector – a piece of ICE displaying as a white leopard with neon-green spots – ignored her, convinced that she was part of the normal facilities staff. Overhead hung a blank, mirroring the one she had left behind in biospace.

There was no rush. Her cyberware kept track of real-time for her, and she’d only spent a minute and seventeen seconds of her three minute benchmark. Whatever wage-slaves had built this Matrix had poured what was left of their hearts and souls into it. The sandstone was textured and the leaves detailed on a level a biospace user would never be able to appreciate. Her cat avatar, ignoring the preferences of its kind, splashed through the canal-ways as she admired the water droplets spraying up and even rendering the light reflection of the neon around them. She walked until she found the stone tablet with glowing hieroglyphics that put the air conditioning system on standby for maintenance. Sluice gates slammed shut and the flow of water stopped. She copied an image of the physical blueprints to her deck as an afterthought. Glitch’s avatar sprang free of the water and shook itself like a dog, spraying pixels everywhere that hung awkwardly in the air for a moment before dropping to the ground. The system’s physics engine didn’t know what to do with her avatar’s conflicting signals, poor thing. She bounded back out the gate. A little timer set to twenty-five minutes inside her head started counting down. The cat vanished as it cleared the gate.