Keri floated in the info-sphere, surfing on the current of information that fed directly into her hippocampus and from there spread across her neural pathways, ions flowing across membranes at the whims of the Terminal, voltage potentials changing at the behest of a technology beyond her comprehension. Such simple changes, yet they altered everything that was her.

She had no way of knowing how long she'd been here; time didn't matter, in the spheres.

It was difficult to describe to one who had never linked in. Structures of language that had been developed over aeons to describe actions, thoughts and feelings crumbled in front of the temporally-inert, consciously-unformed revelations reached at the instant of connection.

The corps fed directly into long term memory, rearranging neurons in milliseconds so that the brain just knew, though the act of remembering never took place. Everything the user chose to learn was already known, possibly even before the conscious decision to do so had been made.

To compensate for the jarring shock of this sudden knowledge, the corps hijacked the optic nerve and spinal cord, projecting a sensation of weightlessness directly into the user's head though they were not truly feeling, a series of soothing, soft colours across their vision though they were not truly seeing. The user was placed into a state of waking-dreams, a river whose flow could be guided but never fully controlled. The corps could respond to the wishes of the user even here, of course, though it took time to learn how to fix requests and seek out knowledge in this state. Much of the early years of a person’s life were devoted to learning this skill.

Once you had learnt to dive into the depths of the spheres, the next skill had to be developed. It was easy to spiral down so far that the reason you had first entered was forgotten and you found yourself learning/downloading something completely unrelated[1]. The next skill you developed, often poorly, was to focus your mind and avoid these distractions.

No one knew why a person under the influence of the corps naturally bent their head and looked towards where it lay, buried beneath their own flesh. No one had any remembrance of doing so when they resurfaced. The faint glow emitted when online was for others, not for the user. Anyone disturbed whilst under the influence of the implanted machines reacted only at the level of the brainstem, an unintelligible groan and occasional spasm, whilst their minds sailed over an ocean of knowledge.

It felt good to be online.

And it felt like a dagger thrust into her chest when she was unceremoniously dumped back out.

Cassandra was standing over her, looking furious, but it hadn't been her. Time had just run out.

"You went online?” she snapped. “What if that thing can track you? We only just got away from it,"

"Track me? You can't track a person's corps," replied Keri, through the usual fuzziness of disconnect.

"You don't know what it can or can't do. According to you it did something to Jayme’s corps, didn’t it? That thing’s out of a horror story."

They were in an info-cafe, miles away from where the truck had been overturned. It had seemed like the only place they could go. It was still only early afternoon; Keri found it difficult to believe that it had only been a few hours.

The place was busy. They always were, but at least being here amongst people felt… safe.

It was weird, realising that. Keri had always felt safe, so she had never noticed the feeling. It was as if a background noise she hadn't known was there had suddenly been shut off.

The info-cafe was a small one, a couple of floors, the top one of which was hardly any size at all, easily accessed by a set of small stairs to one side. The walls were white, between which lay pale cream sofas and chairs forming small clusters throughout the cafe, moved as needed by customers.

It was a place you went to when you weren't online, a place for people to actually communicate[2]. Of course, all you spoke about was your last experience in the spheres, about what you had seen, read, felt. It was a way of processing what had been put in your head. Somehow, the mind felt a need to share what it now knew, as if it wouldn't be real until spoken.

The problem was, this wasn't Keri's kind of cafe.

The cream colour of the furnishings, of the sign outside, of the metallic casing that was the auto-greet near the entrance, was a shade that told anyone who wanted to know what sphere those inside tended towards. On a spectrum that ran from deep black to bright white, encompassing all the colours in between, Keri was a pale blue.

This was not her scene.

She didn't know when it had begun or who had organised it, the categorisation of the spheres into wavelengths of visible light, but it was now as much a part of life as eating or breathing, and as natural. Those who inhabited the same spheres shared the same tendencies, the same opinions, the same moral scaffolding that meant they saw the world in a similar way. She had nothing to say to the people in this cafe, even if she wanted to.

From what she understood of it, spheres verging this close to the white must be staunchly establishmentarianist, technocratic and majoritarian, defenders of the status quo. Keri could understand this; after all, the paleness of the blue that represented her own sphere symbolised similar tendencies, but intermingled with a more individualist, inclusive stance.

She was not going to find herself dragged into an acrimonious debate on majority rule, she repeated to herself, so she kept her head down when newcomers approached, signalling that she was not looking to talk. She only looked up again once whoever approached had departed. Cassandra, on the other hand, seemed ignorant of the whole business. She met each and every person’s inquisitive gaze with one of her own. However, something in her look made it clear that what would usually have been an invitation was something quite different. Most didn’t even take another step towards them, instead stumbling in hesitation and turning sharply, hurrying away with an awkward mumble as if remembering an urgent appointment elsewhere.

Eventually their small patch of floor was empty of chairs, taken for more socially-receptive groups.

“You didn’t know about that… thing?” said Keri, after a while.

“No, of course not. Are you glitching?[3] You honestly think we’d have been driving around casually with a fucking Butcher on our heels?” Cassandra hissed.

Keri jolted at the reality of hearing the term spoken aloud. She looked around to see if the sudden angry outburst had drawn any attention, but no one seemed to be paying them any heed.

“Now, tell me exactly when you first saw the damned thing,” continued Cassandra, subsiding slightly into her chair. The rage drained from her face, and she just looked tired.

Keri explained it all from the start, recounting everything that had happened after she walked into the club, how she had met Jyme… Jayme, how she had followed him into the relax room and his subsequent fit, how she had seen the Butcher, carving his way through the crowd, and ran.

“But I told you Jayme was dead,” she said, finally.

Cassandra’s brow furrowed in an impatient frown.

“Did you say, at any point, that he was dead?” she asked.

“Well, no, but…”

“That’s a bit of an oversight, don’t you think? We thought you meant he'd been caught. What were you thinking, telling people someone’s dead without using the word?” Cassandra said, scowling, arms folded across her chest. “Not even a similar word. You could have said he was deceased, departed, wiped. Hell, you could have said he’d been deleted, you goddam tech-head. That’s the sort of thing you people say, isn’t it?”

Keri felt anger rise in response.

“What do you mean, you people? What’s your problem with me, anyway?” she snapped, sharper than she meant to be.

“Not you. You people. Look at you all..,” said Cassandra, taking the entire cafe in with a sweep of her hands. “You’re sheep. Electric sheep, all desperate to get into the android’s dream.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Keri. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You’re the freak…”

Even as the words escaped her mouth Keri knew she had crossed a line. Cassandra’s face turned to stone, her eyes cold and fists bunching.

“Tread… carefully,” she said, between gritted teeth.

“Look,” said Keri, arms held up in placation, “I didn’t mean it, but... come on. Everyone has a corps! It’s the analogues… uh, it’s those without a corps who are unusual,” she said, treading over the final word with care.

“That doesn’t make it right,” said Cassandra, calmer now. “You worship at the altar of a god you created, and sacrifice your dreams to it.”

“Worship? What are you talking about? I’m not some kind of canonist. They’re even rarer than you, around here.”

“You believe. Everybody does. You were promised immortality, so you stopped living. We stopped living.”

Keri looked at her blankly. The words didn’t make any sense.

“Come on,” said Cassandra, standing up with a sigh. “I want to show you something.”

“Do we have time?” asked Keri, surprised at the sudden shift in mood.

“I guess so. I have no idea how to get in touch with the others, nor where they’re likely to be. They're not connected to the great techno-hive mind. Hiding out, I hope. I hope they got away from that thing. Come on.”

Cassandra headed for the door, knocking to the side anybody too slow to get out of her way.

There was nothing Keri could do but follow.

[1] Keri was mildly ashamed about how much she knew of the domestic habits of cats and other small, now sadly extinct, furry mammals.

[2] The descendants of internet cafes, yet ironically now some of the only places devoted exclusively to not going online, Keri had been committing something of a social sin when she entered the spheres while in such a place, but you couldn't decide when the corps would call. The background muzak covered her singing, at least.

[3] In a different era, she would have asked if she were deranged.