(1)

The skyline of the city trembles around me as enemy aircraft roars low overhead. It's no city I recognize, though. The architecture is vaguely familiar, consisting of grand towers comprised of steel and glass. But none of the buildings look like any I've ever seen before. No landmarks stand out and none of the street names look familiar. It would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the fact that it was so thoroughly engulfed in flames.

I'm crouched amongst the rubble of these sagging buildings, structures on the verge of collapsing under their own weight. Blood clouds my vision. I wipe it away only to have more take its place.

Everything's red.

The blood is mine. I'm wounded, but I can't tell how badly. Nor can I remember who I am or how I got here. My head is pounding nearly as hard as my heart, worse than any pain I've ever known.

Stop.

Breathe.

Think.

I know I'm separated from my unit, and I know that I'd been deployed here to defend the city. There are sounds of battle in the distance. The city has fallen. If I'm lucky, I'll be captured alive. But by who?

And why?

There's another low rumble in the distance. It grows louder as it draws closer.

Not aircraft.

Not artillery.

What, then?

Something groans and snaps behind me. I can feel the pavement beneath my feet move, pitching upward at an un-natural angle. I do my best to will my bulky ursine frame to move, my desperate push toward shelter and safety fueled entirely by the strength of my will to survive. However, being weighed down with all this gear, including a weapon so large that it requires all of the strength in my near seven foot tall frame just to lift (which I dare not abandon), this is no easy task.

With a grunt, I throw myself clear of the crumbling crust of asphalt and into the nearest sheltered alleyway. The street and buildings slowly crumble around me like the melting of some ponderous urban glacier. I glance over my shoulder just in time to see the skyscraper collapsing behind me, a great chaotic plume of dust rising where the angular crystalline structure once stood.

I hunker down in the darkness, breath mask protecting me from the smoke, dust and toxic fumes which swiftly envelope me. I wait in the smoldering blackness for the dust to clear and the rubble to settle.

Time passes.

I'm not sure how long it is before I dare to peer out from the rubble, but sound of distant voices spurs me to venture forth. They're close, picking their way through the rubble-strewn street at the edge of the sinkhole that opened up beneath me Gods only know how long ago.

I'm scared, and I desperately need to get back to some place I don't remember.
My brain can't remember, but my gut knows. I can feel it down to the core of my being. In my bones. I need to get back to that place and this enemy is standing in my way.
If they find me, they'll kill me.

I prop my weapon on a house-sized boulder of concrete and twisted steel. I see the enemy. Three of them, clad in crimson and silver. They don't see me. My HUD reads two canines and one feline, and begins calculating the range to target. I ready my weapon, taking aim at the lead canine.

I pull the trigger.

It's a direct hit.

The round is intended for a much more heavily armored target, and the lead canine explodes into a confetti of crimson, pink, orange, and white. Bone and blood, muscle and brain, fill the air where a body once stood. It's like some kind of morbid victory celebration. Decoration befitting the carnage that has been visited upon the streets of this once prosperous, bustling metropolis by these invaders.

I sight in on the feline, as I hear something streak through the sky out of my field of vision. Could be air support, could be artillery. I never really get a chance to look. Before I can pull the trigger a second time everything goes white and I feel myself falling.

(2)

I land much harder than I intended to, my bare paw pads making a dull slap as they come in contact with the cold floor of the club. Synthetic canine legs absorb the landing as my virtual tail holds my balance steady. The thud rattles around in my brain for a few moments, just long enough for my nervous system to sort things out. My field of vision to clears and the scene around me begins to take shape.

That wasn't my landing...

That is music.

[Thud. Thud. Thud.]

Or rather some noise that may have passed for music several decades ago. Trop loves this place, but it's just a little too retro for my taste. I filter it out as best I can, but that does little to dull the blinding headache that arrived with my sudden change of scenery. It lingers right behind my eyes like a vibrating needle embedded in my frontal lobe. It finds fuel in the lighting of the club that I've unceremoniously dropped myself into. Green and yellow and red bolts of aggravation streak through the air at several thousand times the speed of light. The crowd has cleared a space around me, the dancing figures painted in a palette of colors that I judge to be wholly original. Owing the extra breathing space to my abrupt landing, I give a few courteous nods to the patrons nearest to my point of arrival. I straighten myself and make my way through the throbbing mass toward a booth near the back of the room.

I have an appointment to keep, after all.

[Over here!], the message renders in the crawl at the very bottom of my field of vision. It's nestled between a text-filled log window and a cluster of bars and graphs that tell me everything I need to know: Network latency, sensory input/output levels, and my current location: New Horizon City, Sector A-3. The club is called Club Metallic, and is located just south of the old Aurion Systems office block.
Seated at the table, as I'm waved over, are three figures... The first of which I don't recognize.

Do I?

She's clearly a canine, but the garish neon purple and green dye-job makes it virtually impossible to determine her nationality and breed. Her features are too perfectly sculpted to be natural, and she practically reeks of sex. She vibrates there, in the electric atmosphere, as she regards me with a clinical, emotionless gaze.
Something familiar gnaws at the periphery of my awareness.

"Is she real?", I ask of the second figure, with a jerk of my thumb. I know this canine, a black and silver coyote dressed in a simple leather tunic and jeans. His frame is muscular and his hair is close-cropped. His choice of attire makes him look something like a village blacksmith from one of those ancient history simulations. His terminal hovers just over his right shoulder, an ornate re-creation of a two millennia old copy of the Book of Epochs. He goes by the handle Tropic333. Why? I couldn't tell you. I don't know his real name. I just call him Trop.

He's a religious man, but not so religious that it interferes with our working relationship. He tracks down interesting tidbits of information, I find a market for them, and we split the proceeds between ourselves (with small portions going to his Church and my Guild, of course).

"Well, yeah," the coyote responds, "But idle."

He speaks with the clip of a northerner, and is probably logged in from some run-down apartment in the suburbs of Skyline, or maybe even Horizon itself. Those that still read the ancient holy books tend to be decidedly... Well, working class would be the polite way of putting it. He e-mailed me a few hours ago, saying that he had found something good for me. He's the one who set up our little meeting.

I take a seat.

"An avatar with a built-in AI?", I whistle, "Pricy... and dangerous, if she's going to walk around smelling like that."

My gaze drifts over to the third figure at the table, A sloppy jumble of misshapen polygons that appear to have been assembled by a third-grader. It's an avatar as shoddy as Unknown Female's was pricy. Occasionally an ear will drift off into space before re-appearing back in its original position, or one eye will glance off in the wrong direction. The frequent glitches and bugs are the hallmark of a hastily coded avatar. If you called it a fox you wouldn't be too far off the mark, but nobody is really sure what it's supposed to be. I'd seen him around before, calling himself Vertex. I call him Jumbles.

Me? I go by the handle Aleph. Aleph Sigma, member in good standing of the New Horizon Merchant's Guild. Officially, I trade in data: Entertainment, simulations, news, and code. Unofficially, I'm something of a, well, I suppose Private Investigator would be the most politically correct term for it. What do I investigate, exactly?

We'll get to that.

I've chosen a modest, but attractive, avatar. In my business, it doesn't really pay to stand out. At least, not too much. It's a tall, somewhat lanky, canine; a particular mix of wolf and fox that is characteristic a genetic lineage that stretches back to a distant and ancient age. All the way back to the Old Duchy of Mandria, recorded in the Book and the Histories. It has white fur with clear blue eyes. It's clothed simply in black pants and a long black coat that, in the real world, would have to be made up of something shiny, black, and synthetic. The avatar carries no obvious weapons, and my terminal floats just off its left shoulder; a simple jet-black cube bearing the insignia or the Guild, a Swan and Crescent.

[I've got something for you!], scrolls the message, as Jumbles' avatar stands up abruptly, [I found it while I was sniffing on one of the trunk lines outside of New Skyline... I think it's a Daemon's session, or something.]

"A Daemon?", I snort, "How on earth did you mange to pull that off without getting killed?"

[Because I'm not Active,] his avatar suddenly re-renders in a sitting position.
Users like Trop and I, and possibly Unknown Female, are referred to as active users (Actives, for short). We don't rely on the passive neuro-chips and quantum transponders that every pup and cub is implanted with at birth. We use black-market hardware and after-market body modifications to wire our nervous systems directly into the network. Fully immersive and completely unsafe.

"But your terminal's still in one piece?"

[I snuck in as a passive user and used a pseudo rig. It didn't notice,] he said as his head slowly rotated three-hundred sixty degrees, [Or, if it did, it didn't care.]

Pseudos use a bunch of clunky monitors and antique VR gear to log in through old-style solid-state terminals. It's much safer, as the technology is centuries old and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt... But, no matter how good your hardware is, you're never really there. It's a mode of access that really should have gone out of fashion 400 years ago. Passives, on the other paw, are every other Joe Fido in the world that's been chipped-in from birth.

"Well, that's not unheard of," I say, feigning thoughtfulness, "It's difficult to tell what will or won't bother a Daemon."

In the back of my mind I'm already configuring the filters in my terminal to begin to analyze the data. Nobody really knows what the Daemons are, or where they came from. They know the network like nobody else, though, and theories abound: They're a part of the network, a sort of maintenance and/or security system. They're AI programs that are imbedded in to the architecture of the network itself. They're members of a closely guarded group of high-ranking corporate executives and politicians with administrative privileges on the network. Trop believes they're digital manifestations of the Gods, come to usher in a new Epoch.

What do I think? Well, I haven't collected enough evidence to make up my mind one way or another. However, investigating this great mystery of the network has become something of a hobby of mine. I spend the hours between transactions and assignments piecing together the tidbits of knowledge as they come to me from my various sources, in the vain hope that a few of the seemingly random pieces of data might somehow fit together in such a way that might shed some sliver of light on the great truth buried within the network. Some who know me would say that it's grown into a bit of an obsession. Those individuals would be drastically overstating the truth of the matter.

"What do you think?", I say, returning my attention to Trop, "Is this... Thing legit?"

"Couldn't tell you. He showed me the dump, and it's some heavy shit. Figured you might wanna look-see."

"How much does he want for it?"

"Eighty."

"Eighty?", I pause a moment, in the back of my mind I verify that my terminal is loaded and ready, "I'll be the judge of that."

Trop reaches back to access his terminal. He opens it and plucks out a single silvery page from the book. I grab my own terminal and unfold it before I take the representation of file from him and download it. With a few quick commands my avatar goes catatonic as I wave goodbye to the scenery around me.