>>5944098The metallic exterior of the external deck is cold to your touch as you draw it out from within your blue jacket, the rectangular device still quite unfamiliar to you even after cleaning it of tracking soft and installing your own new shards. Tracing a finger over the faint relief of the Arasaka logo on its exterior, feeling the fine texture of it, you let out a sigh - there’s no putting this off, you’d better be ready now. Flipping the deck’s screen up, you start it up with the tap of a button and then pull your personal link from the small port in your wrist and jack in.
Lines of code flash across the deck’s small screen as a connection is established, and just as it did this morning you feel your perception begin to fragment, to slip into two places at once.
You remain half aware of your physical body in the dimmest sense, and are nearly overwhelmed by the rush of sensory data as your avatar’s form materializes within the Net, displacing your awareness from the physical to digital world as you slip through a hole in the walled gardens put up by the corps to keep clueless gonks from wandering too far into the wilds of the Net. The stolen Arasaka deck cuts right through that safety railed garbage, and instantly you understand that you’re in the <span class="mu-i">real</span> Net, a shattered patchwork of servers and infrastructures slowly pieced back together over the decades post datakrash.
Cold awareness spiderwebs through your mind like freezing tendrils of supercooled mercury as you survey the digital landscape rolling infinitely far off to a horizon that never quite materializes. Only the distant menacing form of the <span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-r">Blackwall</span></span> cuts across the infinite closing off one ‘side’ from access, but that is far, far off still. Monolithic and monochrome data-fortresses loom much closer, towering behemoths of corporate might among the ‘hills’ and ‘mountains’ of net infrastructure half a century older than you or more. Verdant holographic forests of smaller data centers carpet the landscape, swaying in the winds and streams of data flowing between on the ground, and below, and above. This visualization of the Net, this naturalistic look - excepting the Blackwall - is partially constructed from the software the stolen Arasaka deck you’re jacked into is using, partly from the transmitted images presented by corporations, but <span class="mu-i">mostly</span> because of your own mind and preferences. The Net looks like this <span class="mu-i">only</span> to you… And perhaps one other person.
