I wasn’t dead, which was good. Obviously. What wasn’t as good was the state of the shard when I finally got it out of my port and inspected it.

  These things were called ‘shards’ because of their make. They resembled regular chips, but included in their production was a piece — or, well, a shard — of special crystal. The M3M0R1 crystals were a synthetic product of experiments on data storage, and they’d pretty much catapulted the initial development of the net.

  Their ridiculous storage capacity made it possible to set up simulated learning environments on a single data shard, which could then be conveniently inserted into a wetware port. Something that would otherwise require several dedicated servers and even more complex connectivity solutions.

  The thing is, M3M0R1 crystals were always a pale green color and kind of see-through, no matter the design philosophy of the different chip manufacturers. Altering the coloration of the crystal was expensive and tricky. My research had even suggested it tended to mess with the crystals’ effectiveness.

  But the shard I’d used for this simulated learning session wasn’t pale green anymore.

  It was currently black.

  Not just black, even. When I tilted the stupid thing and held it up to the light, it almost looked like viscous tar was sloshing around inside of it.

  That, well… I’m not gonna lie. It terrified me.

  That thing had been in my neck port.

  My first urge was to immediately chuck the shard at a wall or flush it down the toilet. A single idea held me back, and it wasn’t my worry about what a waste of money that would be.

  No, what stopped me was the thought of those shadow creatures getting out.

  If they were, in fact, trapped inside the shard now, I was never going to take the risk of destroying it and setting them free. No, sir.

  Instead, I carefully wrapped up the shard in the scraps of an old shirt and then stuffed it in a plastic container from one of Feyo’s lunchbox sets. I filled up the container with the rest of my shirt’s remains to eliminate any chances of the shard bundle getting jostled around in there. Then I shoved the entire thing behind my wardrobe.

  I was pissed off something fierce. Out of the entire shard set, that simulated reality shard was probably the most valuable. Was it as important as some of the shards the mystery netrunner had made for their apprentice? Probably not. Still, I’d have a hell of a time if I wanted to replace just a single shard of a set.

  If I wanted to. Right then and there, I was tempted to swear off entering virtual spaces altogether.

  I couldn’t, of course. But I wanted to.

  It would have been so easy to just ignore things from that point on and try to move on with my life, but I had no such luck. Things began to go wrong remarkably fast after I finished my crying session.

  Shadows shifted at the edges of my vision. My eyes glitched onto faces that vanished a split second after I’d caught sight of them. I swear I felt the phantom brush of twiggy fingers against my cheek once or twice.

  It all got worse when I finally had to leave my apartment.

  The faces of anyone who so much as looked at me on the streets briefly glitched into those shadow creatures. On more than one occasion, I ‘saw’ them go for a weapon. I flinched away. Then reality snapped back into place, and I was left cowering from normal people who just gave me weird looks in response.

  The alarming thing was that, post-glitching, I could still see the shadows’ weapons on those ‘normal’ people. Shooters, knives, even a sword… whatever the shadow-face had been about to draw on me, I saw that weapon on that person. It was always well concealed, but it was there, and it was real. I hadn’t imagined it.

  My one lucky break was that the glitching didn’t happen around the people I knew well. Catill never transformed into one of the shadows, and neither did most of the Kittens. Oh, there were a few exceptions among the latter, but no one I got along with, so staying away from them when I was at the HQ wasn’t exactly difficult.

  The other big downside of what had happened was the sudden terror that now gripped me when I so much as thought about netrunning. I still wanted to learn about the discipline. But there I was, wincing at even the idea of working on some code.

  Three days after the incident, though, I forced myself to resume my studies.

  It was… odd.

  Everything that had been happening before I so foolishly dove into the simulated reality shard still applied. The eyes still pointed out errors in my coding. They still gave their own suggestions.

  Except everything was enhanced.

  The suggestions came more easily and more quickly, and the bits of code my eyes offered were even more brilliant. At the same time, I found myself soaking up knowledge with way more ease than I ever did before.

  On paper, all of the changes were positive. A real premium package, you could say.

  I was, of course, terrified.

  The only event that could explain the sudden shift in both the functionality of my eyes and my ability to process knowledge was glaringly obvious. Anything that came from that… experience, let’s say, felt like a trap at best, and an outright threat to the sanctity of my mind at worst.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  As for what exactly had changed, I found that out the next time I opened my RE software.

  On the plus side, I was almost out of the depressing ‘0. whatever’ stats! On the other, I still didn’t really understand the changes to the creepy, opaque stats.

  At least one of the changes was to Cognition, which I actually had the dictionary definition for. If I could treat the dang thing as ‘the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses’, or even as my ability to ‘process the world around me’, then the change did make sense.

  Did I feel exactly twice as capable of learning and perceiving the world around me, having gone from one to two points in the stat? No. Was I making noticeably faster progress while studying programming? Yes.

  Was I going to keep the fact that one of the affected stats was ‘Soul’ as far away from my conscious mind as possible? Fuck yes. Even just the implications of that particular stat made me want to puke.

  Instead, I thought about more palatable things, like how the Acuity stat was a scam. According to my previous research, it was supposed to be about vision. My eyesight was not any better than it used to be.

  Unless you counted the weird glitches, of course. Which I, of course, refused to do.

  Ultimately, I just decided to accept my ‘good fortune’ and move on. I mean, learning faster wasn’t something most people would decide to whine about. And I definitely was learning faster. It wasn’t like I got to elevate my quickhacks to a whole new level or anything, but they were absolutely quicker, used less RAM, and just did their job better.

  In theory, that is. I still had never used them. Not once.

  That lack of anything to show for all my work continued to chafe at me, especially when my programming progress stalled again not even a week later. It wasn’t that I’d grown bored of it, but out of everything I could possibly do, it yielded the slowest progress.

  I needed to use the quickhacks. Seeing them in action would let me pin down any problems with their functionality or deployment. But trying to perfect them through programming alone?

  Well. There was only so much time I could spend staring at code and willing it to give up its arcane secrets. Sure, in my case, that genuinely worked. But even with my fancy eyes, my rate of discovery was slowing down massively.

  It had been a suspicion at first, but the last week of basically wasting my time had confirmed it: the functionality of the eyes improved only as I learned and grew. There was a tiny feedback loop between pondering the code adjustments my eyes suggested, and then using that knowledge to get them to give up more secrets. It was a slow process, with diminishing returns. And I knew that it would eventually grind to a halt.

  In other words, if I wanted my eyes to help me, then I was going to have to do something to earn that help first.

  That’s how I went back to the second item on my ‘ignore, ignore, ignore’ list. The cyberdeck.

  Luckily for me, after several thorough inspections, I couldn’t spot anything obviously wrong with it. No darkened crystals that seemed to slosh with tar. No glitches of terrifying faces peering at me from inside it. Nothing.

  It still took a chat with Mela, when we were having a snack in the cafeteria after one of our ‘training’ sessions, to push me into action.

  “Ya look downright miserable,” Mela noted, with all the grace and empathy of a brick to the face.

  “Really? You look radiant as well, dear Mela. Your face is almost pretty enough not to scare random children on the streets into tears!” I snarked right back, glaring at her over the rim of something sweet and steaming. A tea of some sort, I was pretty sure, though I didn’t think tea was supposed to be so… thick and sludgy.

  “Of course. Had to doll up before meeting with my favorite chew toy,” she cooed, in that forced way that made me want to try and commit suicide by stupid buff redheaded ganger. “Seriously, though. The fuck crawled up your ass?”

  “I’m fine! I’m just…”

  She narrowed her eyes, and I trailed off, running a hand through my hair in frustration. “Look, I really am fine. I’m having some issues with the netrunner training.”

  Predictably, this topic caught her attention quickly, though I was honored to say she looked worried for me rather than greedily frustrated that I wasn’t already stealing the credits of half the city or something.

  “What kind of issues, exactly?”

  “I just need a bit more experience. You know?”

  Mela just arched a brow and shook her head.

  I sighed. “Basically, I need to go out there and actually hack something, not just learn about it all day. If I don’t, I’ll be stuck. Unable to improve.”

  “Then why dontcha?” she asked, in a tone that suggested I was an idiot.

  Which… well, fair enough.

  “It’s not that simple!” I protested. “People are going to notice me lugging that deck model around. What if I get in trouble for it? What if someone decides they want to rob me?”

  Those were weak excuses, and by the look she sent me, she thought so too.

  “Please. I picked out the model myself, so I know most people went for it ’cause it was subtle. It looks like a regular briefcase! Shabby too, if I’m being honest. Who’s gonna wanna rob you?”

  “And how did we meet, exactly?” I asked. A bit acidly, if I’m being honest.

  She just laughed right in my face. “Sure, boyo, sure. One freak coincidence of some druggie too desperate and off his rocker to pick his target properly. Just trust me, okay? Ye’ll be fine! Want me to come along and hold yer hand if yer scared to do it on yer own?”

  “No!” I snapped. Then I took a sip of my tasty sweet drink and grumbled under my breath. “Fine. I just want you to know the cables are pretty obvious, and someone’s definitely gonna shoot and rob me. When you find my corpse later, don’t think I didn’t say I told you so.”

  “Oh, ya big baby. Ye can just cover those up,” Mela insisted.

  I dared her to prove it. She did, and in a way I never expected her to.

  Grinning, she told me to wait a minute, then vanished to one of the upper floors of the HQ. Ten minutes later, she returned with a package under her arm and dropped it unceremoniously on the cafeteria table we were using.

  I unwrapped the package to find… a jacket. A black leather jacket with a large Pink Kittens logo on the back, much like the jacket Mela herself wore.

  When I looked at her, my eyes so big they threatened to pop out of my skull, she just motioned at me to get on with it.

  “Whatcha looking at me for? Yer a Kitten, aintcha? Well, ‘s high time ya actually dressed like one of us on occasion. Wear that, and tell me ye can’t hide the wires in the sleeves, or something?”

  I could. I could already tell that I could. That didn’t matter to me as much as what else it represented, though.

  Under the shit-eating grin of my friend, I quickly wormed my way into the jacket. It was still a bit too big for me.

  But as I sat across from Mela, in our HQ cafeteria, I told myself I’d grow into it.