Corps. Corporeal interfaces; the tiny nanophotonic chips implanted beside, and as vital as, the radial artery.

No man was an island, and corps were the bridge that connected you to the mainland. You prayed to hear the bell toll, to feel the vibration that told you the gates to the spheres were open once again.

Corps were stomachs that ingested information, and it hurt to be hungry.

Corps were the air, and you needed to breathe.

None of this had been apparent when they were first developed. Corps were nothing but a sideshow at a time when the main stage was occupied by players of a different game. What, after all, was the point in simulating tactile and somatic sensations when you could physically experience them? Why use an extra-sensory tool when you could simply become the tool?

Why, in the end, would you choose to look when you could be?

It had all gone bad in the end, of course. The era of bio-augmentation, of body butchery, came crashing down around the ears in a cacophony of accusations, recriminations, and blood. Somewhere along the way somebody noticed that the very concept of humanity was under threat, and a movement swiftly grew to end it.

The fact that bio-augs were able to defend themselves so powerfully only hastened their demise. Images of torn and bloodied norm-bodies littering the floors around a hulking metal monstrosity added fuel to the flames.

The Body Butchers had had to go.

And so the corps came into its own. Once the idea of physical modification became anathema, once the body, pure and simple, was accepted as the most perfect form a consciousness could wear, it was the corps that provided the link to the world mankind had built around itself. It was the one piece of technology allowed within the flesh, placed there in early childhood to spread and develop along with its host.

The corps was your lifeline to the world outside, the access point through which you controlled your vehicles, your habitats, your friends and social circles and business and pleasure and life and death and...

The corps was everything. This was understood.

And part of this understanding was that the corps was inviolate. Encrypted at the levels of the very photons that passed through it, the key to each was randomly generated and held within the Terminal.

Nothing could breach the Terminal. This was guaranteed by redundant layers of programming both physical and metaphysical, and granted a further layer of protection through treaties between the few remaining governments that promised vicious reprisals against those who attempted to do so.

The Terminal was humanity's greatest achievement, and would continue to be so until the Conception, the goal that had been held in mind when it was developed. Until that moment, until the technological singularity was achieved, the Terminal was the guardian watching over a people who could not be trusted with their own fate. The Terminal was the hub through which all corps connected to each other, and through which they connected to the spheres themselves. The Terminal controlled when and where a person entered the online realm, how long they spent floating and surfing through its boundless horizons, and forced them home when they drifted too far.

The Terminal prevented the return of the Butchers.

But Keri had seen a Butcher, and she had seen the corps spring to life to aid him.

She dreamt that night, a dream that a Butcher's face projected itself on the stickscreen on the opposite wall. Only it wasn't the Butcher she had seen before. The augs were wrong, different, the face had a thin, ragged beard, and it smiled. It smiled as her corps glowed beneath her skin.