Storyline: 7-Alpha-6 - Point: 7

When the time comes to hack into someone, to hijack and take over their corpse for a while, I tend to think of it like a long blink. Where some kind soul has also tattooed the inside of your eyelids with white dashes and dots on a lovely vivid blue background. Well, I see blue – others apparently see black, but I’m glad I have blue.

The ‘wake-up’ is always the first test, and can be the first surprise. Its that moment when you establish complete ultimate control over the new vessel, the new host that will help you on your Task. I like the usual standard wake-ups – nodding yourself awake on a train or airliner, sitting up in your seat in a darkened theatre or cinema. I like those best. Less traumatic for everyone.

The ‘crash wake-ups’ are a lot worse, hurried takeovers in emergency situations or inappropriate moments. I’m not that much of a fan, despite the enhanced reflexes, and Angel chattering out instructions, and the hyper-surge you get from the Grid. Is there such a thing as virtual kinetic force? Certainly feels like it sometimes. Anyway – taking over from someone driving a car, or falling or diving, or mid delecto humper time – its just not good for the karma.

You think you would get used to the surge, the drop from comfy time idling on the Grid absorbing new files and data, before you pile into some stranger’s cortex. You think that after doing hundreds of these, sometimes several in one day, you’d get blasé. Believe me, there’s nothing easy about it. Bollocks to anyone who says otherwise.

You wrench yourself away from everything you’ve ever actually been, to end up, often uninvited, in amidst something you’ve never known, all for a set time, to complete a phase or a Task, before the elastic hurls you back to where you started. No wonder perhaps that I do bother with the after-care I guess. And that I take the meds as Doctor orders.

Hacking back out is easy, Angel calls it, you agree it, then it’s another blink and another wake-up, but this time you’re back to being you. I always hesitate, always check my own tell-tales, just to make sure.

It still flips your heart, catches your breath, makes you wince or brings on a cold sweat. That bit never leaves you, because what we do, the whole hack-in and hack-out, well it can never be described as natural. There is no natural equivalent action. Just before your first time you ever do this, the scientists and the tech people tell you it’s unique with a big monkey smile. Nothing can prepare you for what happens, nothing they say can pre-warn you.

After my first time, I puked, used more swear words than I thought I knew, and wanted to punch out anyone who came near me. I was alright once I had a short spell of recovery time. Well, OK – short – took me about two days to come down off the ceiling.

It was scary, alien, unnatural, insane and bewilderingly confusing. And I loved it. And guess I still do.