He opened his eyes. His virtual eyes. Then realized, with a shock, that he had eyes again.

His body—his Aura—was intact once more. He looked down at himself, touched his arms and legs, patted his chest. He was completely injury-free—it was crazy, but nothing even hurt. Finally, he looked to see where he was.

He still floated in darkness, but everything around him had changed. An endless purple sky filled with what looked like planets floating in the distance behind him. A bright, shining wall of orange light pulsed before him. Michael craned his neck and looked up, then down. The orange wall stretched in both directions as far as he could see. And as his eyes adjusted to the brilliant light, he could see that it wasn’t just a flat wall. It was broken into a repeating pattern of thousands of pods. A figure flashed in one pod and he squinted to better make it out, then realized the pods were full of dark shapes. Like ghostly fish, they swam one to a pod.

This was the Hive? He stretched his arms out, maneuvering himself in a circle to confirm what he’d already suspected.

He was alone.

He turned back toward the wall of orange pods. The pulsing light hummed rhythmically, he realized, almost like a heartbeat. It vibrated through his bones and filled his body. He wanted to get closer, to see what those shapes could be. He worked his arms and legs through space. In places like this in the Net, he’d always been able to maneuver from one location to another as if he were swimming, but no amount of flapping his arms or kicking his legs would move him more than what he’d already mastered—spinning in place. He stopped, intently studying the structure in front of him. There was a flash of movement, and suddenly his nose was almost touching the orange glow. He’d moved instantly—somehow he’d done it with his mind.

He looked back toward the vast purple sky, then sent out a quick thought and the world bent as he was catapulted miles away from the thrumming orange light. He turned back, shot to the next place his eyes met. For a moment the exhilaration of this instantaneous travel, this moving with his mind, made him forget the reason he was there. He focused more intently, concentrating on where he wanted to be, and with a snap, once again he was floating just outside the massive, never-ending wall of brilliant orange pods.

He thought himself closer, now in complete control. His body moved slowly forward until a pod was just a few inches from his face. Those same shadows he’d noticed before, starker now, slithered behind the filmy surface. He leaned in, following the forms, but the moment he caught one with his gaze it would move away, slipping just out of sight.