The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

The girl was seated on the futon, watching the hologrphic screen of the television. Gren heard the sounds of unintelligeble vocal spasms. She could tell that whatever was on the screen was violent and Japanese. In the car where Gendo had waited for her, she got homemade shumai from the man she called Uncle, and something Gendo had owed her...



"Hello" said Lilium coldly, as Gren sat on the futon that faced parallel to the one Lilium was on. The set up of the holographic TV was so that Gren could watch the video in the same orientation as Llilum even sitting in the opposite direction.



A pink haired heroine who was probably a cyborg was shooting up the bad guys in fetish ninja suits. There was alot of blood, shiny black and "hyaa!".



"You're not going to bed?" Gren asked, her voice coming out tired and worn.



"I am not tired" said Llilum, in her stoic, blunt way. The girl had the pet robotic sheep Gren had bought for her in her lap. She wore the same airtight white body suit that she always wore, her hair white and stiff over her narrow shoulders, eyes dark ringed with egg-plant purple, it looked airbrushed, but it was permanent.



"How did Walter do today" Gren asked as she finished the last shumai in the plastic container her uncle sent. Gendo tidied the suite while they talked.



"Walter did well. He did not talk. He projected all day, playing games" said Lilium, stroking the robot lamb's fleece. "I want to read something. There are too many games here".



Gren's interest was piqued. "Then I'll buy you a reader" she told the girl, who seemed to be sitting a mile across from her. "What do you like to read?".



"I do /not/ read. I want to read." she replied coldly. Now on the screen, the pink haired heroine was being pulled from the ground by a chimera of autonomus wires and mechanical arms, struggling, half squeaking, half moaning. One of the black, metal clawed cables slunk up from between her white legs to stab a hole into the middle of her sternum with a crack, peeling down her perfect skin to reveal a silver skeleton...



Lilium's small, doll-peach lips formed a crescent moon shape, the most disturbing smile Gren had ever seen. Maybe she would see worse in the future.



"Walter is still in his machine" came Gendo's pristine male voice, breaking the silence.



"You left him in there?" Gren demanded, standing up, casting a shadow over the small figure of Lilium.



"I did not leave him in there. He just refused come out".



"How the Hell are you helping my nephew huh? What kind of parody did those freak doctors send me, huh?!"



"Officer, please stay calm. We will sort this out together" said Gendo in a calming manner, his dark, glass eyes sharply decorated by green shadow, his chiseled Roman features framed by a white helmet haircut. He walked around the donut shaped suite, vanishing behind the cylinder that stood broad and vertical in the center of the place to where Walter's section was. Gren followed. She glanced back at Lilium: still as a statue in front of the TV.



She was greeted by darkness and blue black light, Gendo's hair showing extra white, as his face and hands. Gren stared down at the small machine, the small casket where her nephew lay, cables and wires everywhere, hardware evreywhere, over flowing, making his section bad for walking. A snake pit of snakes who live to shove their heads into computer ports and nodes in flesh.



"We can't just pull him out" said Gren, looking down at the 9 year old and then up at the dollita.



"I will attempt to contact him via the internet" said Gendo. "He most likely fell asleep". Gendo froze for a few long, agonizing moments, Gren's heart pounded behind her rib cage, and she asked herself in an unending procession, "why is he still in there? What made him forget to come out? Is he afraid of Lilium? What could she have done? What should I do to her if she had done soemthing? How will this affect his sickness? Is this an affect of his sickness?"



Gendo turned to look at Gren after a while, and nodded with a faint grin. The boy began to stir in the casket, built for a child, and his closed eye lids began to clasp tighter, his choppy hair like wet brown grass over his forehead and under his goggles, green like hers.



"Walter" said Gren. "Baby can you hear me? What are you doing in there? Do you know what time it is?!"



She began to help him get out of the casket, undoing the nodes, removing the BCI hardware and toys from off of him.



"Auntie Gren" he cooed, sitting up, rubbing his eyes, poking his fleshy cheeks, flexing his limbs slowly. He glanced around him. Looking up at Gendo, then he was lifted on the casket and stepping down out of it. Before Gren could smack the boy across his face, Gendo gently placed his hand before hers, and gave her what she took as a knowing glance. The by was sick, physically, and she had no business hitting him.



"Explain yourself" Gren demanded, taking Walter by his hand and leading him to the bath.



"Noooo!" he protested, weakly trying to struggle away from the shower stall in one region of the donut. "Lilium didn't want to play with me, I was just looking around!" he whined, his voice small and like a solvent to Gren's hardness.



"Did you fall asleep yes or no?" Gren asked, looking down at the child, in his green eyes.



He looked away, pouting, eyebrows furrowed.



"You never let that happen again, alright?! Go take a bath, you have school tomorrow".



In moments, Gren could hear running water and video game music. The shower stall looked like a large refrigerator mounted against the wall, and stood nect to the toilet stall, which was wider but took up little space.



Gren turned around but let out a gasp when she saw Lilium and the baby sheep where she thought Gendo would be. Gren swallowed, closed her eyes and spoke;



"Why couldn't you at least /try/ to play with him?"



She opened her eyes, and the girl, two-thirds her height, grinned.



"I did" she began, "but I do not understand him". Then she looked down at the fake baby sheep. "Not like I understand /him/".



"I'll have Gendo turn that thing into scrap metal if I have to. I'm keeping you, so that you can somehow help my nephew recover from his illness" said Gren, losing her patience. Gendo stood behind Lilium now, his arms crossed over his chest. Lilium did not look behind her, and Gren shuddered.



"Even if so, this sheep will still be inside that machine" said Lilium.



"Its not that kind of 'bot" said Gren. "Go to bed", this time in a harder tone.



"I'll charge this for you,' Gendo said coolly, picking up the robot sheep by the fleece of its neck region. It dangled as he walked away with it.



"You don't have to Gendo. Not if you don't want to" said Gren.



Gendo paused. "If I begin to 'want' anything officer, that is when you should begin to worry" he said, and continued to tend to the fake animal.



A silence.



Gren walked back over to the futons, picked one and with relief, collapsed into it. She shut off the television.



"I am not tired" Lilium reitterated. Gren did not open her eyes.



"I don't care, kid. Go to bed. I'm your guardian and you do as I say. Go to bed, or your pet's scrap metal".



She did not have to speak again. She listened to the tiny, light footsteps receed to where Gren knew her section was. Then she heard movement on the slab of gel mattress that the girl slept on, and knew that Lilium did as she said.



"Think she really cares about the sheep?" Gren asked the futon.



"Perhaps" said Gendo. She could feel a warmth coming off of him as he leaned over her to unfold the futon. She could smell the leathery smell of latex and something else like factory fresh plastic fibers. She began to undo her clothing until she was in nothing but her own skin. Gendo brought her a black silk yukata with green biohazard symbols repeated allover it in place of flowers, to throw on until she got to shower. He pulled her uniform out from under her body with precise strength and movement.



Soon Walter was bouncing out of the shower stall in his fuzzy brown robe, and off to his gel mattress. Perfect timing.



"Night Walter" Gren called sleepily from the futon.



"night Auntie Gren!" he called back. He was sleeping in not time.



Suddenly, Gren was aware of herself, pulling the yukate sash tighter around her midriff for warmth.



"Gendo, want to lie down" she half asked, half suggested.



"Actually, I need to make sure all of the computers are off, and that security is on" he said. Gren groaned into the temperafoam, low enough so that only she could hear.



She opened one eye to see Gendo's sophisticated smirk towering over her sleeping body. Then he was gone, doing what he said he would do, and Gren inhaled, willing herself to fall asleep. She dreamed of being weightless, of surging through space as an essence, and then rolling over on something soft as two essences, breathing deeply. Then the dream darkened, lost soul, and she was naked in a decrepit and dark corridor that led to an abysm. Walls coiled with metal pipes and tubes whose destinations and origins confused and frightened her. Then, in the darkness, the wet, unlit and copperish surreality, she saw the white, prepubescent figure of Lilium, glaring at her with empty white eyes, and the thing, the body-form, began to glow a bright white that did not reflect on the surroundings, and Gren was seeing the void, the white void, the inverted space inside of the form's contour, and she tried to wrench herself from the rotted dream, fearing its descent into decomposition...The body, the cherub body, the matured eyes...

She plunged from a sky scraper, thrusted her collected conciousness forward, feeling herself momentarily unravel as the flat black aspahalt became larger and closer. She fell and crashed, but felt nothing. She recoiled and drew herself back up, causing a little stir. A few passerbys moved out of the way, recognizing her net police uniform and Personal Data Signal.



Like a shark intent on the tail of its much weaker prey, she pushed forward so fast, she felt disoriented just slightly when the movements finished processing. She tossed one of her new fishn3ts, trapping the fuzzy black figure under a flourescent red mesh made of heavy antivirus. All of the criminal's data reeled up in her vision like a net full of garbage being pulled up from the sea.



"Nice catch" said a co-worker to her right. They were way downtown Neu Times Square, where the people liked to sport hair that reached a foot high and bootheels that went even higher, and the body mods were just an inch away from alien.



The man's voice came clear and without static in her perception. She nodded and stood over her prey as he writhed inside of the fishn3t, trying to pull up codes in his small contortion on the ground, failing miserably.



"So, Gren" the man said, standing next to her, head to toe in the black latex net police uniform with a bald head and big black, round shades. "That's how the new toy works".



"Thanks to my Uncle, the developer. Tell chief its a wrap". she said, tossing her stylus to her fellow officer. He caught it, with no sound to confirm its landing in his palm.



They were joined by two more officers, whose vitals were going low, according to Gren's goggle interface, which worked smoothely in the New Dead Sea. She nodded towards them, and then looked down at the struggling criminal.



"This one attempted to hack into our database" she said. "The sucker thought calling me a whore would deter me. I wonder when was the last time I sold any part of my body to anyone? What a festering piece of shit. Lets have him arrested, he's already snagged some of our personal info," she said, purging his stolen goods using a multi-utility fishingr0d. "This game never bores me".



"Good job Gren. Next time, if one of these guppies calls you a dirty name, send me a signal so I can eat 'im myself" said the bald one.



"Don't have to, Bennet" said Gren. "Anyway, we've got to wipe his history, in case anyone else is tracking /him/ simultaneously. You know how these shits even steal from each other".



"Something like ''leets' against 'noobs'. Different species I presume" said Bennet.



"On it" said one of the others, surging forward with a fading effect, smoothing accross the 3D view like something thick smeared across a surface. He was crouched next to the figure in seconds, paralyzing its soul data. The figure had taken the form of a fuzzy black silhouette, like some phantom.



"Somebody take care of Ghost boy. My Intuition tells me there's another one on his tail" said Gren. Bennet proceeded to wipe the criminal's net history and trace his location. Ground police would seize the perpetrator in their physical homes after eceiving the data sent by Gren and her fellow netcops. The Chief , someone they never saw, planned on upgrading their systems to do all of the fancy work with the data autonomously, but that could cause sensory overload if they did not have a test run at it first.



Gren left the scene to run again, running faster than any of the other surfers were allowed to go. She passed by surfers glaring into floating modules of data from any point on the ground as they explored the replicated city as disembodied souls. Gren laughed as she ran up the side of a building, seeing a little dot swimming on the radar at the corner of her vision behind her green, unilens goggles.



She urged her soul forward, and she gained momentum enough to lift herself onto the top of a sky scraper without bending her form forward. The sky was pitch black, but she could make out the black figure against it, her goggles revealing a crimson halo over its head. "This tech is getting good" she said, throwing a fishn3t. The new programs made it so easy, she thought. She figured that even a mutated dolphin could do it.



"I just want to get back to my cage, alright" she said to the figure, as it tried to use a virus against her, tried to fragment her soul data with a Spyderarm program, that almost tore through the fabric of the fishn3t.



"You Po-po are getting good" it said, in an alarmingly raspy metallic voice that was like a wrench being dragged accross steel."You can see us in this form now. I'm impressed".



"Too bad I can't see how you look" said Gren, as she pulled up his PDS and scanned it in her vision. "I might have been able to see if your voice and your face matched in ugliness. That'd be a laugh. What is that, some kind of modification?"



"Yes it is!" said the figure, and it laughed a laugh like thunder ringing off of a thousand metal gongs in an enclosed space. Gren wanted to cover her ears, but those weren't exactly ears without her body. "I see now, that sound is supposed to irritate me, make me want to get back in my cage".



The figure kept on laughing, untill she used her fishingr0d, and he was gone into the tip of her stylus, compressed and unable to feel.



Then she felt relaxed, feeling naked in the system again, and fell backwards from the building, free falling, descending into the neon lights, chatter and high static buzz of the virtual version of Neu times Square. She landed on her feet like a lioness in front of a man in a grey hoodie seeling his best ASCII art, an old but now classic cyber art style that went in the hundreds in cash. His work was impressive, and Gren nodded towards it with approval. The artist winked, and probably smiled underneath the collar of her jacket pulled halfway up his face.



"Thankyou officer" he said, and waved at her as she walked away backwards, and lifted her conciousness up into the air, and onto another building again. This was freedom, this was true transcendence. She did not know if she wanted to love her job or to hate it, because when the faces or voices of those she has caught come back to her at nights when her soul is sitting in her flesh again, she wants to forget.



When she is left to herself, left in herself, she has to face herself, she has to recognize her limitations in a way that can actually cause physical discomfort in her gut. In the Sea, there was none of that. There was not gut, only awareness that was /outside/.



She sent her newly acquired intelligene to the Chief, who probably never left his Soul Data Projectory System machine. He, or she, was always there in the Sea. Gren never met the Chief, but did not really plan to either. The Chief was the sort of entity that reminded her of a wizard, a magic wizard, someone you consulted but who sat behind an old rotting tree so that you couldn't see their ancient ugly face.



"Chief, thats 2 down. They're really busy tonight. like its war, they're tongues are getting sharper as well".



The essence of language settled onto her soul like something cold and dense. The Chief communicated that way, by meaning, not by words or anything aural. Gren had no idea how the Chief did that, but for whatever reason, she did not want to know that either. something like praise was dumped on her. Then something like "some.people.never.change.cliche--but true.".



She smirked, because she could not help but respect the Chief.



Then Bennet was communicating with her aurally: "Fuzzy One escaped".



"You mean Ghost Boy?" Gren demanded, looking around the cityscape for the other officers.



["Yes, his netname is PiggyB@ck. He managed to slip from a paralysis spell"]



"Where did he go?" she asked calmly. Outside back on land, she would be shrieking into his ear. "Cut his ass. We can use the guns. He's unyielding to arrest".



Gren was mist through space, her surroundings blurring, the feedback slow; buildings she saw further back would quickly disappear long passed their actual locations. Glitches allowed her to see, for tiny pieces of seconds, the information that composed the tall figures of building complexes and city props.



There.



Running passed her into a bank. Her gun was in her hand in seconds, and it was loaded with bullets of S-bit dissolvers. Programs that dissolved components of soul data. It was a cruel weapon, probably worse than a real gun. The null she felt inside the Sea made it easier to use. Made her feel less.



She was fire on the figure's trail, and startled more users who blurred out of the way as she surged into the bank, aiming and then shooting at the figure.



"Hacking into peoples' bank accounts is something only scumbags do. Go get a job. Leave the damned machine and go get a job!" she said, her words like quicksilver, conveying none of her anger. Perhaps no one would really have a voice if a person did not first record it into the system. Perhaps everyone would be like the Chief.



She answered one of her own questions.



The figure began to slow, trying to recover the lost S-bits. Gren could see the holes in the figure's black matte manifestation where the bullets went. The holes bled with emptiness, white void. Gren was deathly terrified of whatever lied beneath a person's soul data manifestation. It must be like seeing space without stars or planets or clouds. At least in the Sea, her fear did not deter her. Still, she felt it, naked and real.



She used the fishn3t before the remaining officers entered into the bank, now filled with chatter. The figure collapsed against the sleek metallic surface of the counter. A few users watched with curiosity, pausing, quitting their browsing. The figure was overtaken by the fishn3t, and damaged by the gun.



"Quit hoggin' all the catches, Ledner" one of the officers said to her.



They all laughed.



She was lifted out of the subexistance like being lifted from a dream, the dream itself seeming to be evaporating from where her head rested. She was back in her body, in a claustrophobic space, dimly lit, her coffin, her mchine. She felt sick.



She was out of the coffin in seconds, cables popping out of the nodes grafted in her skin, and crashed to the floor feeling the weight of gravity over again. She crawled accross the black marble floor towards the lavatory, fighting back the urge to regurgitate. Bennet was out next, she could hear the servos' decompressing air as the coffin lid rose up to let the man out. He groaned, and she ould hear his boots heavily colleid with the floor.



"You alright, Gren?' he groaned, his hand massaging his temples, pale and shiny with sweat.



"Hell no" said Gren in a short gasp, attempting to stand up. This was the part that gave her a reason to hate her job.



She did not get sick, instead she leaned against the wall to let her dizziness and confusion subside, as now she was working with her brain instead of just concious impulse.



"Shiiiiiit" she moaned. The other officers were all going through their own fits, in their own shocked states of awareness.



"Where's Gendo?" the officer with the dirty blond hair asked.



Gren looked around the small room for the famillar designer's face of her dollita, Gendo. Nothing but screens and machines and fat anaconda cables slinking from the ceiling and branching off like Medusa's hair into the various SDP systems.



"He's probably...I don't know" said Gren, feeling a little migraine brewing somewhere behind her left eye. She dragged herself towards the vault door.



She snatched her fanny pack from off of a stand that resembled a Chinese staircase that reached the ceiling. She clipped the thing around her waist, then fished inside of it for the smoothe, round form of her cellular phone. She found the cirular object, touched its screen and began to trace out the numbers of her dollita's IP address.



She placed her phone on one of the shelves of the Chinese staircase as Bennet brushed passed her, bidding her farewell and moving a hand across her shoulder. The feeling made her involuntarily alert.



Gendo's voice was in her headset then.



"Hello officer. I am in the car, parked outside of the station. Your uncle sent something with me, for you. Also, it is 0:55".



"Grat, Gendo" she thanked him, and then ended the call. Now, after all of this, she had to go home and see her nephew, and Lilium. She pushed her goggles up onto her forehead, and let her eyes adjust to the dusk of the room on their own, as organs.

She felt less in the Sea, it was easier to focus on rationality within its folds of varicolored 3 dimensional CG interface. She looked down at the accurate rendering of her black leather platform boots, and then at the black, neon lit cyber sky that looked exactly like the one back outside the New Dead Sea, only more infinite somehow. As if the fake version would subsist even long after the real one fell apart.



Her task was done. It would fill her quota, this last one. Net criminal who had fished medical data before, and attempted to go after some governmental cod in a trick freezer, was taken care of. The boy was just like all of the others. They did not seem to care much about life, but they were still looking for something. They looked for soemthing that most likely just /was not there/.



"Chief", she said sharply, directing her soul signal towards the essence of the chief in her metaphysical contact list. "I'm out".



Irrediscent light.



Her body felt heavy. It was like lifting out of a pool after hours of swimming, finally remembering gravity and its perpetual pull on the muscles. bones and epidermus. She sat up inside of the sleek black coffin as a glass cover receeded for her incline. She was back at the department, greeted by the tall dark, wan-faced figure of her dollita, Gendo.



"The car is on, Officer Ledner" he said in his calm, perfect-toned manner. "In the garage, waiting".



"Waiting" she repeated, as she sat up, aware of her bladder, her stomach, and the meat inside of her skull. "Shit...Gendo, you can go to the car. I need to have a chat with nature in the lavatory".



Gendo nodded, she watched white helmet hair and black latex disappear beyond the vault door that led out of the room where walking bags of flesh lied down in electrical coffins to be ghost cops on the internet.



The light of her own coffin dimmed, and vocifierated her exit and job status.



On her way to the lavatory she glimpsed the other coffins, and without any intended conciousness scratched lightly at one of the nodes grafted into her sides. She entered the small cramped cubicle of the lavatory and glimpsed her gaunt face in the dark mirror, the tiny place lit only by blue neon tubing that acted as decoration.



Dim magenta eyes, blue lips, black jaw length hair and the green unilens goggles around her forehead, held there by a thick rubber band. She stood there, unzipping a zipper that started at the small of her back and ended at her naval. She relieved herself over the narrow triangular basin that adjusted to her height, and reminded her of her poor diet in a metallic, synthesized female voice.



Automatic soap, automatic dryer, and she was back in the coffin room, seeing other officers rising from their coffins like uniformed corpses from eternal rests.



"That was 12 hours" one of them said. "That was overtime, and all I found was a little girl spreading offensive ASCII banners".



"If only life was overtime, right?" she asked, walking towards the exit, flexing her fingers, settling like sediment into her body all over again. "Wish life worked this hard".



Her bootheeels made metallic /clokk/ sounds on the strip of sidewalk outside of the station. She evaded a quick silver vehicle to cross over to where the garage slept in the city's eternal night. The buzz of traffic, her boot heels, the naunchalant smirk of the net criminal who she had just imprisoned fresh in her mind...She would deal with the documents later. Court stuff would get done in the car, she would send the files and the report to the chief.



The garage was dark and quiet at such a late time. The time on her phone read 23:42 by the time she got into her two seated car next to Gendo, her loyal dollita. His green rimmed eyes were intent on the road as they drove, but it was surely a pretense. The car drove itself, and fast when they hit the 95 parkway, the jugular of Neu Times Square, which was once called Manhattan. It was off to the suite by 30th street.



"How did work go today, Officer Ledner?" Gendo asked, as he switched the car's mode to manual as soon as they were on the streets. A plastic black boot caught the glint of the car light down by the gas petal. She put her hand on the android's thigh...



"Why'd you switch to manual" she said, without meaning for it to be a question.



"I would like to work as much as you do, Officer" he replied, matter-of-factly. He barely smirked, the expression could hardly be picked up in the dim glow of the city neon. His eyes dull and green under steep thin eyebrows, under steam-colored bangs.



She laughed, a low and transient laugh, then folded her hands together in her lap, toying with the strap of the seatbelt accross her black pleather clad waist.



"I hope Walter is doing OK back home with Lilium" she said to the dark.



"Would you like me to call the suite and check in?" Gendo asked, his pale silicone hands moving sideways over the car's controls to make a right turn, momentarily catching the green glow of the street light.



"Yes. Send the message that we're almost home. That'd scare them into tidying up before I get there. I don't want to walk out of the station into a landfill with pizza sitting out" she said. Then she sighed and closed her eyes, listening only to the muffled hum of the car engine, dreaming up Gendo's hole-black latex behind her eyelids.



"I can't wait to be far from that mauseleum of a place. I'm throwing myself on the temperfoam and getting some real fucking shut eye" she muttered to the leather of the car seat. "the kid better get to sleep, he's got school..."



"Don't forget to nourish yourself Officer Ledner" said Gendo, parking in front of a dark sky scraper, cylindric and self satisfying. "Tomorrow you still have billing for the social security bureau during the day".



"Don't remind me" she groaned. "...you owe me now, Gendo".



"Now I do?".



The elevator up to the suite was round, black and lit with flourescent navigation buttons, a mirror and lightspace floor that performed the illusion of rippling like water under foot movements. The officer imagined if the elevators on the net simulated the gravity felt by the ascending car. She did not want to find out, really. It would only make life feel more like a dream than it was already successfully capable of.



When they got to the thirtieth floor, the elevator door peeled away as it rotated, revealing the familliar grey carpeting and walls of the circular hallway of part of the suite, near the metal stands with real, dead flowers on them. The place was like a donut around a huge concentric cylinder where the elevator shafts were located. The whole tower was composed of suites. One room living spaces that went around and around endlessly.



"Lilium" she muttered, when she looked down to see her nine year old nephew's game console on the floor, taped there with bright scarlet duct tape. 'What on Earth were they doing tonight?".



Gendo followed her inside, close behind, so that she could almost feel his presence behind her, like heat.



"Lilium, Walter!" she called. The pizza she predicted would be sitting out was there, on the small black coffee table that sat between two, black leather futons. It was dark in the house, except for the running holographic television that floated above a small base in the middle of the coffee table.



"Gendo...check their rooms?".



She examined her Rubik Com, the black cube blank and ambiguous at her work center, all three of its screens blank, making it look nothing like a computer and more like a small metal box where ground bones are kept. Something that did not need to be touched. The old thing collected the dust that was not filtered out from the air...



She took a bite out of the half finished pizza on the coffee table soon after approaching it, and sunk into the futon that faced the wall that ended both ways around the outside of the donut shape.



Gendo returned from a curve in the suite's circular setting, from around the cylinder where the elevator shaft was. Tall, austere and ethereal.



"Sleeping" he said, and joined her consecutively on the futon with mechanical naunchalance. "Together in Lilium's sector"



"That's a lie" she muttered, with a slight grin, shaking her head slowly.



"If you like, I could show you a projectin of my last recorded memory of them, or--"



"I'l go check, thanks".



She walked around the disc shaped suite to the walled off sector that served as Lilium's "room", and saw the two children sprawled on the slab of pink gel cushion surrounded by children's gadgets and electronic toys. Lilium opened one of her eyes. The officer almost lost her stomach for a split second.



"We played games" came the raspy, adolescent voice from the prepubescent looking body in a white, form fitting jumpsuit. Her white hair was sprawled about her pale doll's head as her limbs were around her body. "He got irritating, after a while, so I taped his game to the floor" she explained, not a drop of life in her tone or manner.



"Try to play nice" the officer said sharply. "He's my nephew...he doesn't /have/ to please you if he's already being nice".



The girl's mouth smiled, but the eyes did not change. The robotic lamb that the officer had bought for the girl joined her on the gel slab, quiet as a souless body.



One small, white hand rose up to stroke the artificial fleece of the thing. The officer shuddered invisibly.



"I will sleep now" the girl said, the smile gone.



"Have a pleasant one," said the officer, turning away and leaving the sector, leaving the thin divider partially ajar, so that dim light shined on the girl's spread eagled body. She forgot to kiss her nephew goodnight.



She removed her goggles, tossed them on the futon next to Gendo and fell asleep on the futon opposite the dollita. She'd had nightmares, realistic ones involving moving arms with no soul data in them, and eyes that blinked because of servos.

It came over him like a thick black wave of polluted sea, only without the asphixiation or the toxic smell. He surged forward into the void untill a neon green grid made itself visible like some poisonous web over a light forsaken abyss. The "New Dead Sea", they so tasefully named it. The Intangible Realm of Visions and Data. Like the disembodied soul he had become, he passed through walls of knowlege, the virtual cityscape coming clearer over the neon green web. He was in the city now, the Sea had formed itself to that image, and he knew where he would first go to steal.



This time around, his task would be tricky, meticulous; he could not risk being caught, and having his physical body given away to some invalid whose soul-data was being preserved in some database somewhere in a hospital vault. He projected his conciousness down a spotless black street under the looming height of a city spire whose windows were supposedly lit artificially from the inside. He was wary, coding himself so that he would go undetected in other users' interface radars.



He wasn't alone out there in the New Dead Sea. He passed by other wandering souls. Some cared not the slightest for his rushing by, for his stalking in the fake shadows of that simulated world. The code worked like sorcery. Neu Times Square was replicated to a T in his sector of the New Dead Sea, constantly updated and patched by the corporate chimeras who ruled over this space of the Net.



There it was, down an alley way with clean black asphalt ground and a floating Rubbish bin made of blue optic light. He saw it, a large black gear mounted into the dead end wall where the alley way ended. All he had to do was use the illegal key that he had obtained and saved from the last submersion. The same key that allowed him to see it in the first case. "BINocular Worm" they called the key. It was hard to come by.



There was no need for him to reach out one byte-composed hand to de-cypher the lock. Soon he would have access to information that would aid him in reeling in large surpluses of wealth, maybe enough to stop him from losing himself before he drowned in the New Dead Sea ...



A crimson beam wrung him like a fist of iron from his transitory dream, and he lapsed into the cold reality of the city again. He sensed the presence of someone else being in the alley way simultaneously as he--At first the gender was ambiguous under the pleather jacket and behind the toxic green unilens motorcycle goggles. A pale hand held a device towards him that shined the crimson beam that had robbed him of his fantasy.



"You're under arrest for attempted theft of government data via a de-cypher code". The voice was a woman's, and it was cold and crude as steel in tundra. "Don't play dumb, Net Crim'. I detected it before you could even use your fancy magic to put in the stolen code".



One black boot moved towards him, but he was not afraid, as he simply smirked with blase', feeling like he was in just another familliar dream. He raised both of his arms.



"You got me" he said. "You got me again".

"Again?" she asked, now holding a small black stylus towards him. It was a 'fishing-rod', by the look of it. He proceeded to step towards the female officer, chin bowed into the polyester of his jacket collar.

"Arrest me again, officer. I've been arrested so many times now".

"No you haven't" she lacertaed, letting the unspoken ends of his sentence fall to the dark cyber representation of the ground below them. "You've never actually been caught".



She was smart, too smart for his vague sense of comfort. He tried to pull himself out of the Sea but failed, feeling like he was in a virtual spell of paralysis, as if tied down by bike chains to the ground. Police tricks. Phantom game.



"You always escaped. If you were ever caught, you wouldn't be here. You'd be in either Hell or a lab, and this is neither" she said, the stylus now pointed directly between his eyes. "Think I should let you go? You were waiting for this data port to show up for a long time weren't you?".

Cerouline blue lips mocking shapes of speech.



"I wait my whole life" he said. "I never /not/ wait".



"Well, the port is fake. You would have cracked it and ended up with a virus that holds you underwater for about an hour in info from the Devil's ass. It'd fuck you up psychologically, you'll need help after that, double help on top of your klepto tendencies".



"You gonna let me go, miss?" he asked, expecting the contrary to a positive response. A pale hand raised the green lens to reveal two beautiful, magenta modified eyes. She did not appear to take her own utterances with much earnesty, and looked calm, maybe a modicum of boredom in her eyes, unlike most officers who usually just got angry.



"I'm not letting you go, you cause too much damned trouble" she said. "Your name? I mean you're real name too, not your basement nerd psuedonym".



"Fuck: he muttered, still paralyzed. Thinking any solution into being would be futile and utterly embaressing. "Name's Coven. Andru Coven".



"Really?" she asked. She lowered her lens back over her eyes again. "Telling the truth, what a surprise. Makes me want to spare you" she said, examining his info in her goggles. "I'm pulling up your records. You've stolen multi-grand worth of data before. You left tracks but was never caught" she said, reading his life out to him.



It was like judgment day, according to the myths. You' would stand before somebody who claimed to be better than you and they would read out all of your sins before you to make you feel like scum before you received your punitive. He laughed, and the woman laughed. He glimpsed her white, church pew teeth.



"Sorry, Coven. Thief" she said, "Heavy data crime, medical shit", and pressed a micro buttom on her stylus. He felt himself compress, feeling momentary sensory pain that was incoordinated like in a dream, and found himself in total darkness without the sensory awareness of the self that the physical world reassured one with in the body. His state of mind became neutral, and emotion did not exist. He forgot his name...For a few seconds he could hear the woman's voice, distant and muffled by walls of unknown liquid like hearing a mother's voice from inside the womb;



He did not panic. It was just a little dark.