This is it.

One hand adjusts my glasses while the other unkinks the cords coming out of
the deck: power, video, headphones.  Call it a nervous habit, but finding your
hand tangled in an meatworld audio lead tends to get you caught in an
infospace tangleweb.

Sure, I could go all wetware like some consumer who watches a few vids, trades
some stocks, and trades friendly insults with his buddies from work.  I've
never liked the metaphor though.  It's a world of information.  Yeah, it's
ziggurats and cubes of phosphorescent color, but it's still just stacks and
streams of ones and zeros.

Snap! goes the switch.  A blizzard of primary colors washes my eyes.  I relax
and focus on the images a meter or so ahead of my eyes.  The walls fade into
periphery.

I twist my fists inward.  A plain text window appears as the gloves interpret
the sign for typing.  Tiny fingertip motion switches grab hold and paint
hushed yellows over a sky blue sea.  I'm logging in, checking the diagnostics,
killing programs I don't want today and starting services I've been too lazy
to install properly.  It seems that there's always some new way to save ten
keystrokes or five seconds.  Still, this is my machine.  I know almost
everything on it by heart; I put it all there.

Though muscle memory wants to start me at Rick's American, I head down a
level.  There's more traffic here, though it's confined to a few major
thoroughfares.

That's the metaphor again.  Not even a certifiable graybeard Luddite can
escape it.  We're all just tiny jewels flying through infospace to dock at
some great corporate teat.  Sometimes I'm less kind, using "flies" instead of
"jewels".  You can guess what the popular destinations become with that
imagery.

It's not really motion, though.  That's what gets me.  You stay put and the
world moves around you.  You're always right where you are.  So are they.
When you connect, infospace folds and you're suddenly right next to each
other.

Of course, try to imagine that with more than one person.  Try a thousand,
then a million, and you can see why the illusion of motion is so popular.
It's much less painful.  It browses nicely too.

Still, humankind tends toward the visual.  The first person to categorize
infospace by proximity made a mint.  The second lost his shirt.  The third
refined the concept into something a little more useful than Lojban.  You
don't so much map infospace as you draw thousands of little circles.  Hey,
Euclidean geometry doesn't play here!  Choose your subject and watch a whole
city unfold right in front of you.

Underneath it all still lives the idea of a real address -- a true name, of
sorts.  Can a thing exist with no name?  How would you know what it is?  You
certainly can't tell anyone where it is.

I digress.  Just know that beneath the pyramids and blocks lives a patchboard
capable of a billion simultaneous connections.  If you dig deeply into the
hows and whys that make the universe run, you can ride those wild wires
wherever you want to go.  That's how the real talents fold space, you know.
That's how there the wormholes work that flip you suddenly from the bland
safety of mutual fund graphs to faux-African scam artists and worse.

To know the nature of reality is the power to shape that reality.  That's
where I'm headed.

Snapping my wrists outward lets me manipulate the symbols now before me.
There's a pattern to the madness, a maze of interconnections you'd never solve
with a crayon before spilling boysenberry syrup on the placemat, unless you
had a key.

It's a name of sorts.  Edde Loveless.  Viewed from just the right angle (and,
if you know what you're doing, you're always at the right angle), you can
spell out anything in a path through infospace.  The small-scale groups use
code words or Kanji.  You can tell the kiddies with their special brand of
illiterate profanities.  I connect the dots between infobanks dedicated to
some plot to decapitate the Tower of London, writing Edde's name across the
sky.  Whatever vanity lead him to this choice, it's my only way in.

I'm on the right track.  Wormholes open up in front of me at just the right
spots.  They'd seem random if you hit one by accident, and the graffiti they
tack to my virtual backside has the desperate verisimilitude you'd expect from
someone selling shortcut maps during rush hour.

Take the right tags through the right wormholes in the right order, though,
and you have what I see right now.  A little pocket universe carved out of the
nothingness in the big universe.  Sure, someone somewhere assigned this place
its own true name, but when those names number more than the stars of the
galaxy, who has time to track them all down?

This must be Edde's place.  I approach cautiously.

It's just your normal cube, in metaphor land.  No open docking ports.  My
instructions say to go high, very high, and knock once.  Something in the
2000th floor should do it.

A tap on the window.  Nothing happens.

Normally, you'd approach the front door and be escorted to the closest open
window on the appropriate floor.  You wouldn't notice, of course, as this all
goes on behind the pasteboard shopfronts.  A good and paranoid infobank will
send you someplace random, in the hope that no one's can predict the next
available window and jump right in between you.  It doesn't always work, but a
little unpredictability can't hurt.

Nothing at 2000, but that's what the rules say.  It couldn't hurt to go up
another 500 floors and try again, maybe a little more strongly this time.

I stop for a moment to peel off the tags from the wormholes.  From one point
of view, they flutter away on an uncertain breeze.  Gravity's strong here, or
at least weird.  From another point of view, a few bits in my deck's memory
succumb to raw chaos again.

A bang on this window.

That attracted some attention.  A greenish fire spreads from the area of my
touch across the face of the building.  I've set off a warning.  I back away
to a reasonable distance with the fire arcing like electricity after me.

I'm not fast enough.  There's a cold tingle as I realize I've made a mistake,
like the time I cut my fingertip to the bone.  One point of view shifts wildly
as my deck grinds, self-defense programs eating up all of the spare processing
power I have and more.

I've just enough control left to pull out.  It's not a hazard yet, though
another few seconds will likely overwhelm my little deck.  (Cleverness and
finesse usually make up for a lack of power, though a full body blow still
hurts.)

That's not what I do, though.  Loveless told me how to get here for a reason
and that opportunity won't likely come again soon.  I've control of another
box elsewhere -- and nevermind that story -- and it's a matter of two commands
to migrate some of my shields there.

That leaves just enough power to dive forward and down, just beneath the
electric tendril, and head for the window again.  One gesture summons a logic
bomb, just a series of requests for highly encrypted connections on port after
port, in the hope that sending only connection attempts and offloading the
math to my factoring accelerator will be enough.  Another gesture takes aim
and fires.

The shield ducks and bobs above me.  It's just a distraction, but anything
that sucks up their processing power keeps them from noticing me as I push
toward the window again.  It's a waiting game now, at least for the next ten
seconds.

Finally, a stutter.  A flicker.  The fire shudders briefly as the infobank
pulls in other resources and tries to weave them together.  It's now or never,
so forward!

There should be an audible crack or a shatter.  I'll have to remember that for
next time.

I'm in.  I'm in a dark room lit feebly by a bare bulb.  There's a note on a
table.  No chair.  Nice calligraphy.  It's addressed to me, or, at least, to
my deck's true name.  That'll suffice.

Bits escape as I open the envelope. The tiny sparkles scurry to the lightbulb
and evaporate.  Inside's a plain, cream-colored card.  There's no text.

I flip it over and some dark beast leaps out, pushing my deck back through the
window, back through the fire.  I collide with my shield, still jinking and
the cube grows smaller as if it were being sucked into a singularity.  In a
way, I suppose it is.

Then all of infospace does the same thing and I'm again just a guy wearing
goggles and wiggling his fingers.  The power light on my deck is off and I
flip the switch, hoping it's not fried.

Fortunately, it boots again.  I'm hop back into infospace just long enough to
power down the other box.  It's time to lie low for a while.  Again, muscle
memory takes over and I flip the view to look for new messages.  I don't catch
myself in time to avoid noticing a familar name.

"Good enough, kid", it says.  It's from Edde Loveless.

I'm in.