I took hold of the resonance around us, twisting and weaving it as my thoughts gave it form. Mindful of what Labyrinth had said, my first thoughts were of secrecy, and the consequences of being caught. The sprite took shape as a woodlouse, skittering along my arm before nesting itself amongst the folds of my persona’s robe.
My next sprites were much less subtle; jagged, angular code coming together as a familiar pair of wasps, their stripes, eyes and wings glowing an electric yellow as they circled me in a protective pattern.
Beside me, Labyrinth’s crow had appeared on her shoulder and was looking at my sprites with its head cocked. Labyrinth herself knelt down, pressing her palm against the ‘floor’ of the host and drawing in resonance. Rather than forming the sprite directly, however, she stood up and watched as it seemingly took shape of its own accord, forming into a majestic eagle – its wingtips shimmering in and out of existence.
Labyrinth smiled at the bird, leaning down to ruffle the feathers of its neck. To my surprise, the sprite preened at the attention, cawing softly before leaping upwards and hovering next to her, slowly beating its wings in a parody of flight. It locked eyes with me and let out a harsh screech that took me by surprise.
“Those sprites are unusually docile,” Labyrinth said, looking at my trio of insects.
“Docile?” I asked. “What are you talking about? They’re constructs.”
Labyrinth shook her head.
“They are creatures of the resonance, just like you or I. We entice them out of the resonance and form a contract, or bind them.”
I looked at her like she’d grown a second head.
“They don’t come through the resonance,” I countered, bemused. “I make them out of it.”
“If that is what you believe,” Labyrinth said, noncommittedly. “But we are here for a reason.”
“Hold on, you’re just going to drop it?” I asked, a little frustrated.
“This is a cerebral space,” Labyrinth explained. “It is possible for two things to be true for two different people.”
“Sure,” I sighed, exasperated. “So, you want me to come with you or go it alone?”
“I am used to working alone,” Labyrinth said. “You need to be used to it as well. Without control of the matrix, your team will be vulnerable in meatspace. But they can’t follow you here.”
“Right,” I nodded. “Running silent,” I warned Labyrinth, determined not to let her completely take the lead in case she thought I wasn’t worth teaching. Especially after our little… philosophical dispute.
She simply nodded, before vanishing from sight. The veil she’d woven around us vanished with her – along with her sprites – and I hurried to make myself unseen as well before some patrol IC spotted me.
Everything was connected in cyberspace. Grids linked to hosts, hosts linked to devices, devices linked to personas, personas linked to the metahuman factor. The sixth world – to most people the only real world – was linked to the Matrix by billions of different tethers, from the smallest wireless speaker to the immense base-coding secured in the data vaults of Zurich Orbital, way up in the heavens. But that’s all they were; links.
Before the crash of twenty sixty-four, the Matrix was formed from the combined processing power of every device on Earth. Afterwards, the next Matrix wasn’t formed from anything. It just was. If every device in the city went dark, the Brockton Bay municipal grid would still be there; a digital ghost town.
There were all sorts of rumours of how they did it, from grounded ones like immense servers buried under mountains or shot into space to the utterly nonsensical – like a hundred technomancers chained together and mind-linked in some barbaric choir – but in the end the rumours were inconsequential. The matrix was here to stay.
Because of that permanence, I could cut the links down to the bare minimum and leave my persona almost entirely on the Matrix, reducing the tether between it and my real body to a gossamer-thin thread. Deckers could do something similar with their cyberdecks, and they were the ones who came up with the term ‘running silent.’
It meant that nobody was going to detect me unless they were looking really hard, but the reduced connections between me and the devices around me meant that hacking them was going to be a lot harder. To make matters worse, a place like this would have Patrol IC whose sole purpose was to look hard for people. I’d just have to hope we were in and out fast enough for it not to notice me, or it wasn’t looking hard enough to see me.
So, shrouded in silence, I hurried over to the hidden firewall that separated the public-facing employment agency from the mildly less public-facing brothel. All the while I was watching the few employees in the room as they logged on and off, cataloguing data or reviewing casefiles before dropping back into meatspace. One of them stuck around, and I saw why the moment another persona entered the host. She appeared human, but from the Japanese peasant kimono she was wearing I could tell she was using the stock persona of a Renraku Aguchi – a bargain basement commlink that didn’t support customising personas beyond its sex.
Satisfied that there weren’t any Patrol IC nearby, I turned my attention back to the firewall. Visually, it appeared to be a floor to ceiling piece of artwork depicting a woman singing to a man as another woman served him tea. All were in Japanese dress, and the whole piece was in a traditional-looking style – to my inexperienced eye – that appeared classy enough for the establishment while also hinting at the host’s second purpose.
As the visual layer faded, I spotted Labyrinth’s mark nestled in amongst the firewall’s code. She was already ahead of me, but I couldn’t let that faze me. If I tried to rush this, I’d just screw up.
The link between me and the firewall was a gossamer-thin thread of data, as small as I could possibly make it. Slowly, carefully, I took hold of that thread and used it to send minute pulses of data into the wall, pushing at the boundaries of its programmed permissions in hopes of finding a loophole I could exploit.
Once I was confident in my positioning, I sent down a sharp burst of data that slipped into the firewall’s code, leaving my mark on the portal. From there, I simply stepped through the painting and into the illegal side of the host.
Where the employment agency was open and spacious, with false views of distant mountains visible through windows, the brothel was snug in a way that some people might have found intimate, but that I just found jumbled and a little cramped.
The décor was all soft carpeting and wood-panelled walls, with scattered chaise lounges and dangling curtains, all upholstered in red. The air was heavy, thick with a sweet scent that worked its way into the mind, softening it and replicating the effects of certain low-level narcotics.
I filtered out the simulated smell. The last thing I wanted was to pick up a virtudrug addiction from an illegal brothel looking to squeeze out a little more repeat business.
It’s hard to imagine anything my parents would disapprove of more.
I was inordinately grateful that there wasn’t any demand for prostitutes at seven minutes past six in the evening. The host was digitally shuttered and dead quiet, without anything I didn’t want to see except for the occasional obscene statue. It also meant there were no personas back here I needed to tiptoe around, and hopefully the security would be a little lighter without any clients to keep safe.
Lighter, but not non-existent, I thought as a geisha emerged from around the corner – a hazy and ephemeral figure with a face that took the appearance of painted white plastic, rather than make-up on skin. More to the point, her feet were floating above the floor and her beady eyes were constantly darting around the brothel, checking every subsystem for error.
An Intrusion Countermeasure. A Patrol variant. This was bound to happen eventually, but I was hoping I’d have more time.
I looked to my right, seeing the second secret firewall that separated the security hub from the brothel. I could hide and hope the IC didn’t spot me, or I could abandon stealth and hope I could brute force whatever was behind that second firewall before the building’s Spider was able to drown me in countermeasures.
Unless… I looked around, frantically scanning the icons of the devices around me. The systems in here were set up so that they could either be linked to rooms in the physical building, or left entirely on the Matrix to coax in extra customers when the place was full. What that meant was that there were systems linked to the lights, sound systems, and all the other little gimmicks that helped set the mood.
With a flick of my wrist, one of the wasps peeled off and flew in front of me, passing before the Patrol IC before driving its stinger into a node of those systems, causing them to go haywire. I don’t know what effect that had in meatspace – whether the systems simply broke or a random room was suddenly filled with strobe lights and mood music – but it drew the attention of the IC like a moth to a flame.
Immediately, I felt the air thicken as the Spider’s attention shifted to the intrusion. They weren’t moving – not yet – but it was enough to make them suspicious. Which was the plan, I supposed; draw the eyes of the Spider away from Labyrinth’s activities, without exposing myself to so much risk that I was overwhelmed or drew the attention of GOD.
Hopefully that distraction was small enough that the Spider would assume it was some first-time hacker doing what little they could to fight the power before running at the sight of a single piece of IC. The Matrix was full of that sort of petty vandal and some people never grew out of that stage, instead joining juvenile matrix gangs who’d hack the carefully-balanced traffic management boards in the docks to play hardcore porn, then brag about the gridlock they caused on every forum out there like it was some kind of achievement rather than small-minded bullshit any hacker could have pulled off.
As the wasp ran rampant through the brothel’s systems, I turned my attention to the second firewall and the security hub that lay behind it. This time there wasn’t even a visual marker to distinguish it from the rest of the environment. It was just a flat piece of wall halfway down a corridor.
As before, I let the visual chaff fade from view and focused solely on the data, testing the resistance of the wall with probing attacks. I was still running silent, and the connection here was just as thin as with the last wall. I could almost feel it slipping between my fingers, and my movements felt fumbling and awkward.
So, inevitably, I slipped, and one of my pulses tripped something it shouldn’t have. The firewall seemed to flare up, angrily, and I felt the retaliatory burst of code it sent back down the thread. It stuck to me, digging into the resonance of my living persona as it anchored its mark onto me.
Immediately, the matrix beside me shivered as an armoured samurai took shape, sword already raised to strike. I backpedalled even as I drew together resonance, desperately trying to counter the sword as it fell, but my connection to the matrix was still deliberately muted, and the host’s mark meant that the Killer IC had a clear trail of data to follow.
Its sword dug into my shoulder, pouring weaponised viruses and logical paradoxes that hurt my head. An instant later, my second wasp counterattacked, driving its stinger right through the snarling faceplate of the samurai’s armour. The force of the blow was enough to dislodge the blade from my shoulder, and with a thought I directed the other wasp to stop causing chaos and focus on destroying the Patrol IC, while the woodlouse sprung from the folds of my robe to dig into the firewall.
Simultaneously, I reached down and dug my taloned fingers into my side, digging into my own source code as I tried to pry the host’s mark off me. Idly, I noticed that it was the same cartoon bomb I’d seen the Yakuza’s decker – Bakuda – using in the warehouse. She must have programmed the security of this place, though there was no way someone like her would be happy enough to play Spider. Which meant so long as I was fast enough, I wouldn’t have to deal with her again.
As the samurai flailed against my wasp – and the Patrol IC disintegrated after a successful hit – I was able to grab hold of the mark and tear it out of my body. It hurt – I was essentially ripping out infected flesh, after all – and I channelled that anger into a vicious attack on the Killer IC.
I dug my fingers into its shoulder, using the connection to drive a spiker of resonance that had it spasming as its form broke apart into staticky, glitched graphics. As it disintegrated into nothingness, I received a pulse of data from the woodlouse as it managed to tease its way through the firewall, placing my mark amongst its code.
I burst through the firewall in a flurry of code, the twin wasps following immediately behind me, and took in the sight of the utilitarian confines of the security hub. For once, the flowing data was more interesting than the visual layer – not least because the Yakuza Spider had plastered the wall with obscene posters, trideo screens and all the other little touches that make a shift go quicker.
It was a hub of data, connected to everything else in the host and with the power to shape all of it. The Spider himself used the persona of a dwarf in an excessively elaborate suit of power armour. He was clearly losing his mind, if his boggled eyes were any indication, but he still had just enough presence of mind to flood the space with IC.
Four more samurai materialised into place around me, along with another geisha. Two of the samurai positioned themselves between me and the Spider, while the other two moved to flank me. With a thought, I sent my Fault Sprites to hold off the flanking samurai, the twin wasps flying through them as they left behind great rents of corrupted code in the samurai’s armour.
Once they were in the middle of the group, they gathered resonance of their own and saturated the air with it, creating electron storms that enveloped four of the samurai in a great blue storm of pulsating data. I felt, rather than saw, the geisha fragment beneath the onslaught, but the samurai were holding out. Damaged, blind, but still functional.
At the sight of the impossible storm, the Spider’s eyes widened with fear and he immediately tried to get a signal out, screaming ‘technomancer!’ into the matrix. His signal couldn’t make it through the noise generated by the electron storms, but that wouldn’t last forever. I needed to mute him, but I couldn’t get close enough with those samurai in the way.
So instead I turned my attention to them, driving a resonance spike into the one on the left and using that as a bridge to slip a steady stream of resonance into its body, opening up a link between us rather than just leaving a mark.
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The eldritch code that made up my persona seeped into the Killer IC, battling against its factory-floor software as it subverted certain key subroutines within the program. It wasn’t enough to gain full control, but it was enough to force the samurai to turn and run its sword through the Spider’s chest.
The Spider sat right at the centre of the host’s security systems, like his namesake on a web, and I’d just usurped that connection to drive an attack right into his heart. The reaction was obvious; the Spider’s face twisted in real, genuine agony before it glitched out as his device began to overheat and break. It wasn’t enough to stop him, but it sure looked like it hurt.
More to the point, it meant he wasn’t going to be sending any signals outside the host.
The Spider only compounded my victory when he reflexively deleted the samurai that had stabbed him, scattering it into nothingness. Maybe he thought I’d taken control of it, rather than just doing the digital equivalent of hitting its knee with a rubber mallet to force out a reflex action. I couldn’t help thinking that there had to be some benefits to techomancers being the world’s first choice in bogeymen.
While my wasps harried the two flanking samurai, I turned my attention to the third and felt my persona shifting as four great spider-like legs sprouted from my back, the tip of each loaded with poisons and scrapcode. As the samurai reached back with his sword, I tugged on the datastreams around him and formed a sticky web that slowed his attack enough that I could catch it on the flat of one of the legs.
Sidestepping the stuck samurai, I darted forwards and drove a leg into the Spider’s chest, driving through a resonance spike that sundered every defence he could muster, forcing its way into his commlink’s data until his persona fragmented and disintegrated with a scream, as he was forcibly dumped back into meatspace.
I smiled, satisfied, only to stumble as another sword dug into my shoulder. I staggered forwards, turning to see that another samurai had materialised, and that one of my wasps had been killed.
Of course, I thought through the pain. The Spider monitored the security systems, but they can still run without him.
The Killer IC was just going to keep coming. I’d slowed it down, but the host could simply spawn another as fast as it could be generated. Maybe I could keep on top of the flow, but eventually they’d overwhelm me and even if they didn’t then the constant fighting would draw the eye of Bakuda, or GOD.
Still, it wasn’t like I had any choice. Labyrinth needed me to distract them, and right now that meant fighting. I’d just have to take this as a lesson on why it’s important to stay hidden – provided I made it out of here with my mind intact.
I dropped into a compact stance, spider-legs ready to strike even as I called the last remaining wasp back to me, only to falter as Labyrinth’s crow suddenly flittered into existence, perching on the foremost leg.
If I wasn’t surrounded by enemies, I’d probably have frozen when the crow opened its beak and spoke.
I didn’t know if it was just relaying Labyrinth’s words or something much weirder was happening, but it didn’t need to tell me twice. I cast my sprites loose, severing the link between me and them, and with a thought I severed the link between my persona and the matrix.
I jerked awake, my vision blurred and my head pounding as I blinked away spots.
One of those spots refused to disappear, and the moment I noticed it had arms and legs my own arm shot down to my holster as I fumbled with the grip of my gun.
The figure reacted immediately, leaping over the booth’s table and drawing a long knife that glinted even under the dim lighting. I felt cold metal pressed against my neck as the figure’s other hand slammed against the wall next to me, bringing his face within inches of my own.
The sudden shock brought his face into sharp definition, and I found myself eye-to-eye with a grinning ork with tawny brown skin.
“Good instincts,” he drawled, “but your reflexes could use some work. L’s the same whenever she jacks out. Always a little sluggish.”
“You- You know Labyrinth?” I coughed out, letting go of my submachine gun’s grip but keeping my hand nearby.
“Yup,” he said, not moving an inch. “The boss asked me to watch you.”
“Faultline?” I asked.
“There any other boss?” he answered, before abruptly standing up and tossing his knife in the air, letting it flip before catching it point-down and sliding it into a holster belted to his neotac pants, where it was partially hidden beneath the hem of his extremely long, extremely low-cut tank top.
“Up you get,” he said, a hand outstretched. “Boss also wanted me to show you something.”
I brushed his hand aside and stood up, swaying unsteadily on my feet at the sudden movement until I grabbed onto the wall and steadied myself.
“Weak at the knees, huh?” the ork grinned – and it was a grin, rather than a leer. “I have that effect on people.”
“It’s just dumpshock,” I snapped back. “It’ll fade.”
“Sure,” he shrugged his shoulders. “I’m Newter, by the way. Another founding member of our little crew.”
“I figure you already know who I am,” I said, before Newter pulled open the curtains and I was almost deafened by the sound of the Palanquin in full swing.
“Not a clue, chummer,” Newter shouted over the noise. “Faultline says to watch some deckhead take fifty winks, I watch them. Don’t need the who or why.”
I followed him to a hidden elevator at the far end of the room, then up two floors and out into a nondescript corridor that could have been the mirror image of the one outside my apartment, except this one was in slightly better condition.
“What does Faultline want me to see?” I asked, as Newter paused outside the first door on the left.
“You’ve been hanging out with Labyrinth. It’s about time you met her.”
I sighed.
“What, another one? I wasn’t aware this place was so full of Luddites. It’s the twenty-seventies; get with the times.”
Newter laughed, his hand resting on the doorhandle.
“That’s what you think this is?”
He opened the door and, in spite of my growing irritation at whatever this was, I followed in after him as he stepped through.
Inside was obviously a girl’s bedroom, with walls absolutely covered in an eclectic mix of posters. From the layering of the posters, I could see the occupants’ tastes changing as they grew up, with niche bands covering up generic teen boybands and maybe five years’ worth of movie releases, plus a few old classics.
There were two beds in the room, but only one of them was occupied.
Labyrinth was an elf, which meant that while she looked a little older than me it was impossible to know for sure. Her features were similar to those of her matrix persona, but only superficially. It was clearly modelled after her real face, but the flesh-and-blood version was gaunt – almost emaciated – and even through her hoodie and sweatpants I could see her body was the same.
But the most unsettling thing wasn’t her appearance; it was how she was simply staring at the ceiling, her eyes wide open without really seeing anything. It was a look I’d only ever seen on the blind, or those too high to see anything. What’s more, it wasn’t a look I’d expect from someone who was diving into cyberspace. Whenever I entered the matrix, the first thing I did was close my eyes. It’s a reflex action, but seemingly one Labyrinth didn’t have.
Unless…
“She’s not online now, is she?” I asked without turning my head, and was surprised to hear Faultline’s voice from the doorway.
“No, she’s not. She just has difficulty seeing the real world, from time to time.” I turned to see Faultline leaning against the doorframe, dressed in a crisp white blouse and a pair of close-fitting slacks.
“What’s…” I wasn’t sure how I wanted to finish that sentence. What’s wrong with her? What happened to her?
“We first encountered Labyrinth in a Mitsuhama Consumer Technologies blacksite, hidden beneath a paediatric hospital,” Faultline explained. “I’d hired on a decker for the job – a talented amateur named Epeios – and he encountered her cell when he was infiltrating their systems.”
I stepped back as Faultline entered the room, sitting on the edge of Labyrinth’s bed and resting her hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“He decided to unlock her cell and disable the cyberware that was suppressing her connection to the matrix to cause a distraction and draw guards away from our target. She was terrified and lashed out, killing Epeios in an instant before taking full control of the facility. She sealed every room in the blacksite, then switched on the fire suppression systems. Everyone inside that building suffocated as carbon dioxide was pumped through the air vents. We only survived by offering to take her with us.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, wide-eyed.
“Because in the five years she’s been with us, Labyrinth has almost never spoken to anyone outside the original crew unless it was required for a job. Whatever MCT did to her, she responded by shutting out the world. Reaching out to you is a good sign, but that means you need to be aware of the situation.”
“Aren’t you worried?” I asked. “You don’t know me, and that information seems like the sort you’d want to keep in-house.”
“I know more than you think, Taylor,” Faultline said, as I stiffened. “For one, I know you’re smart enough that I don’t need to waste my breath explaining the consequences of betrayal.”
Faultline stood up, looking up at me for a moment before turning to leave the room. She paused at the threshold, turning to look back at me.
“You have my permission to learn from Labyrinth, so long as she is willing to teach you, but don’t forget there are people waiting for her in the real world.”
“Sure,” I said, as she left, before turning to Labyrinth. She seemed so much… less like this. So much smaller than she did in the matrix, and not just because my persona was closer to human-sized than troll.
“Labyrinth,” I spoke to her, softly, “can you hear me?”
There was no response, but I wasn’t exactly expecting one after what Faultline told me. I just wanted to try, before I reached out and reconnected myself to the matrix, suddenly lighting up the room with vivid AR artwork that was clearly Labyrinth’s handiwork.
The moment I was connected, Labyrinth’s eyes darted over to me and she smiled, shifting her body into a sitting position in an almost ponderously slow movement. As she did, she twisted the matrix around her to layer her persona over her real body.
“Bug,” she spoke, her voice hoarse. “So that’s what your shell looks like.”
“Yeah, uh, did you get what you were after?” I asked.
“I did,” Labyrinth continued, her voice doubled in meatspace and the matrix. “Your distraction was very useful.”
“So…” I began, uncertainly. “One job for one lesson, right? I can come back another day if you’re a little weary.”
Labyrinth shook her head, the persona layered over her features smiling.
“I’m refreshed and ready. Tell me, what do you know about resonance?”
I looked around, grabbed a chair from where it had been set against the wall and sat down before answering. Labyrinth might not care about her physical body, but I was still a little unsteady on my feet.
“Only what I’ve been able to figure out myself. I know it’s everywhere in the matrix, but that most people can’t really manipulate it like I – like we – can. I’m not sure if they can even see it.”
“They can’t,” Labyrinth clarified. “It is our connection to the resonance that allows us to interact with the world. Our abilities are stronger when it is stronger, and weaker when it is absent. There are even parts of the world where the resonance is twisted, and dissonance reigns.”
I shivered.
“You wanted my help in becoming stronger,” Labyrinth said. “You can learn techniques like any other skill, but if you want to improve the amount of resonance you can draw on then you must submerse yourself in it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I use virtual reality every day.”
“The matrix is a tightly-controlled environment,” Labyrinth said. “Metahumanity created it, and metahumanity monitors it. Resonance is something else entirely. It bleeds into the matrix from outside.”
“So it’s like the foundation?” I asked, thinking back to what Labyrinth had told me in the auction house.
She shook her head. “The foundation is still part of the matrix. It is the soil of a walled garden; a planned and orderly place surrounded by strange and uncharted spaces. Those are the resonance realms, where every piece of datum that has ever existed echoes in perpetuity, and resonance flows freely across digital plains. Submersion means passing beyond the confines of the matrix, and into those wild spaces.”
“And these are real places?” I tried not to sound too disbelieving. “Not some sort of vision quest, right?”
“As real as anywhere else in the matrix,” Labyrinth said, before she looked around – seeming to take in the physical room for the first time. “Certainly more real than this place.”
I had no idea what to think of this. I’d always believed that my abilities were grounded in reality – that they were just some genetic quirk that let me interact with the matrix. This talk of gardens, resonance and other realms all sounded far too much like the opening spiel of a cult leader.
But Labyrinth had been honest to me so far – open, even when she didn’t need to be – and part of me couldn’t help but think of the ethereal air she had, of how she seemed almost woven into the fabric of the hosts she made. If resonance was something that existed beyond the matrix, she was a lot more in-tune with it than I was.
And then there was her sprite, and the way it behaved. The fact it could speak.
“How do I get there?” I asked. After all, I’d come to her to learn the kind of tricks I couldn’t find anywhere else; the kind that were unique to Technomancers. This was just a little weirder than I was expecting.
“In the future, you will have to find your own way. Find somewhere in the matrix that most resonates with you and fully cut off all connections to your living persona. Quieter places work best for this. Then you must sever the final connection – between your living persona and your organic shell.”
My eyes widened, and Labyrinth picked up on the expression.
“You will not be able to cut it completely,” she said, “but you must let it fray. Only then will you be able to find a backdoor in the matrix and leave its confines.”
“As simple as that?” I asked, sarcastically.
“No,” Labyrinth said, either not noticing or not caring about my sarcasm. “Once you have found a door, you must pass through the Event Horizon.”
Some of her persona’s ethereal air seemed to slip away at that, and I saw a rare burst of genuine emotion pass across her digital face.
“The Event Horizon strips you to the core. Your innermost thoughts, desires, fears and hopes are laid bare and analysed by the Horizon itself. It passes no judgement, but seeing your soul laid bare is a…” she trailed off for a moment, her organic voice faltering before she continued, speaking purely through the matrix. “A harrowing experience.”
“But I’ll be stronger once I’m through it,” I said, more to myself than to her.
“With any luck,” Labyrinth nodded. “If you truly wish to do this, then follow me to the auction house.”
She laid herself back on her bed and closed her eyes, as her persona departed her body and disappeared into the ether. I quickly followed her out of the Palanquin and into the familiar escheresque Ancient Greek temple. Labyrinth was waiting in the centre of the space, having changed her persona to match the host’s style.
What was immediately apparent was just how quiet the place felt. Labyrinth had shut down all but the most essential systems, banishing the Patrol IC and severing all the connections between the auction house and its clientele. It only made the remaining connections more apparent, and the most notable of those was between Labyrinth herself and the host. It was almost like I could hear a background hum, like the ever-present rumble of heavy goods vehicles around the docks that could be felt even within the heart of the administrative building.
“This is where I submerse,” Labyrinth said. “Whenever my tasks require it, or simply for the sake of it. The resonance realms are not just a place of physical power, as you will no doubt see. More importantly, I can anchor you to this place and save you the effort of finding your own backdoor out of the matrix. All you have to do is sever your connections.”
I nodded, stepping off the floor and floating up into the centre of the space. I let myself hang there, motionless, as I focused on shutting out all the constant ambient streams around me. I lost the time, lost my connection to my commlink, severed the constant link between me and the computers back at home. I focused on that background hum until it was all I could hear, before turning my attention to the one remaining tether.
I let the connection between me and my body fade, pushing down the feeling that I was weakening my only lifeline. Labyrinth was right; it was impossible to get rid of it completely, but my body felt more distant than it ever had before.
Floating beside me, the woman in question tilted her head in an unspoken question, her hand poised to do something.
I nodded. The thought of the Event Horizon was terrifying, but I knew exactly what was waiting for me there. I’d already had two years alone with nothing but thoughts of all I’d lost.
A dagger appeared in Labyrinth’s hand; a web of resonance pulled into a spike, with strands leading off somewhere I couldn’t see. She raised it high above my chest as I closed my eyes, shutting out the visual feed entirely and plunging my world into darkness.
The blade pierced my chest, the resonance hooking into my living persona and pulling it off into the distance. I felt an incredible pressure all around me, like my body was warping and reshaping as it was pulled through an impossibly small gap.
And yet I could somehow feel a light at the end of the tunnel; harsh and bright enough that it would cut through the darkness and lay my soul bare.
Hello, mom, I thought, before everything went white.