If someone had asked him to describe the cesspool of broken code into which he’d flung himself, he would’ve said rot. He imagined the inner workings of the human body—muscles and organs and tissue—slowly being destroyed by rotting cells. Broken down and eaten.

Everything around him looked sick.

Lines of code were broken, crooked, hitched as they streamed by. The code pieces themselves—numbers and letters from countless alphabets and symbols from mathematics and science—they didn’t look right. Wavy lines where they were supposed to be straight, and straight where they should be wavy. Ragged holes and truncated commands, units that had been warped or stretched and splayed like amoebas.

And that wasn’t all. The background was full of colors—pale green and deep yellow and an orange that made Michael feel seasick.

But he had to face it all head-on.

Programming in this VirtNet felt almost like learning from scratch. But if anyone was capable of it, he was. He knew that. Already, as he studied the cyclone of virtual nonsense around him, his mind was adapting. Oh, that symbol has transformed into this; that line of code actually does this task; those three functions add up to what these two functions once triggered. Maybe it was because his essence itself was made up of code, but he started to see through the muck, like a nearsighted child putting on glasses for the first time.

Excited and scared at once, he threw himself at the disease-riddled mess of code like he’d never done before. And that was saying something. That was saying a lot.

3

Time lost all meaning as he worked. He concentrated so furiously that his head felt like a crushed grape. His virtual eyes begged him to stop, the pain like knives pressing directly through them into his skull. But he was on a roll, and the adrenaline-laced rush of it all kept him going.

Finally, he released himself from it, catapulting away from the strange alley of no-man’s-land. It was like literal flight, wind rushing past him, blowing at his clothes and hair. Exhilarated, breathless, he opened himself up to the euphoria. He was a rocket, flying through space. Butterflies swarmed in his chest, and his mind was light as air.

He knew when he’d arrived, just as someone sleeping in a dark room knows when a light has been turned on. He felt the soft ground beneath him, heard the breeze rustling the virtual leaves of the trees, smelled the pine and earth.

He opened his eyes.