a Glacial Circuit

The city exhaled a blizzard of light and logic, and from his window, Kevin watched the world being overwritten.

The snow was not snow. Kevin knew this in the way a sailor knows the difference between a tide and a current. From his vantage seventy-seven stories above the Rue Sainte-Catherine, the Great Whiteout was a spectacle of sublime, silent violence. Each flake was a crystalline packet of null-data, a microscopic agent of erasure descending upon Neo-Québec in a storm that had no meteorological origin. It was a corporate mandate, a scheduled apocalypse disguised as a season.

Below, the city's neon bled upwards, its vibrant pinks and electric blues softened into a watercolour haze by the ceaseless curtain of falling code. The streets, usually a frantic torrent of mag-lev vehicles and pedestrian traffic, were empty canyons carved through the urban landscape. Only the automated sweepers, great silent beasts of metal and polymer, moved through the drifts, their thermal engines melting the data-flakes into useless vapour that smelled faintly of ozone and chilled metal. The Whiteout was total. A city-wide data purge, a hard reset for the soul of the metropolis. For a month, every winter, the past was scrubbed clean.

Kevin rested his forehead against the cold permaglass of the window. The chill was real, a deep and honest cold that the apartment’s climate control could not entirely defeat. He was a man made of old aches and older memories, and the sight of this synthetic winter resonated with a place deep inside him that had long gone cold. He had seen systems born and systems die. He had surfed the first primitive data waves when the ‘net was a frontier, a wild space of infinite possibility before the corporations had fenced it in, paved it over, and started charging admission. Now, they simply erased it when it became inconvenient.

His reflection stared back at him, a ghost superimposed over the blizzard. The face was a roadmap of years he’d rather forget: skin like worn leather, a latticework of fine lines around the eyes from decades of squinting at flickering screens, a jawline that had softened with age. His hair was the colour of the falling data-flakes. He had retired fifteen years ago, a legend whispered in encrypted backchannels, a name synonymous with a level of access no one could achieve anymore. He had walked away clean, leaving the frantic, high-stakes game of netrunning to the young wolves with their twitch-reflex cybernetics and their reckless disregard for consequence.

A soft chime, elegant and unobtrusive, echoed in the silent apartment. It was a sound he had not heard in a decade and a half. An invitation tone. Not a public broadcast, not a commercial hail, but a direct, encrypted, peer-to-peer request. His terminal, a relic of brushed steel and amber monochrome text that sat dormant on his desk, flickered to life. The machine was an antique, air-gapped from the public net, a fortress of solitude. For someone to reach it, they would have had to bypass layers of security that were themselves legendary.

He did not move from the window. He knew who it was. There was only one entity with the reach, the resources, and the utter lack of propriety to knock on this particular door. He watched a single data-flake land on the outer pane of his window. It shimmered for a moment, a perfect, intricate hexagon of light, before it dissolved. One tiny piece of history, gone forever.

"It is a matter of some urgency, Kevin," a voice said, smooth as polished obsidian, filling the room without a discernible source. The audio was flawless, bypassing the terminal's speakers and resonating directly through the air. A parlor trick, but an effective one.

Kevin turned slowly, his joints protesting the movement. "The dead should be left to rest, Jones. It is a matter of etiquette."

A figure resolved itself in the center of the room, a shimmering hologram of a man in a severe, tailored suit. Administrator Jones was ageless, his features a perfect, symmetrical mask that had been surgically maintained for longer than Kevin had been alive. He was not a man so much as the personification of the corporate monolith that ran Neo-Québec.

"Retirement is not death," Jones countered, his holographic form flawlessly tracking Kevin’s gaze. "It is merely a pause. And I am afraid the pause is over. We require your particular… sensibilities."

"My sensibilities are appreciating a fine, single-malt synth-whisky and the quiet dignity of obsolescence," Kevin said, moving towards the small bar in the corner. He poured a measure of amber liquid into a heavy crystal glass. The clink of the bottle against the rim was the only sharp sound in the room. "The city is full of young talent. Children who can thread a needle in a hurricane of code. Why disturb an old man’s peace?"

"Because this is not a hurricane," Jones said, his tone unwavering. "This is a glacier. It requires a different skillset. The children you speak of see the Whiteout as an obstacle, a wall of impenetrable ice. They would try to shatter it, to blast their way through with brute force and speed. They would fail. You, however… you understand the nature of ice. You know that it is not a permanent state. It is merely water, waiting for a change in temperature. You see the flaws, the fissures, the memory of what it once was."

Kevin took a slow sip of the whisky. The synthetic burn was familiar, comforting. "A very poetic explanation for wanting to hire a cat burglar."

Jones allowed a smile that did not reach his eyes. "A preservationist, Kevin. We need you to retrieve something. Someone. A consciousness. It was… misplaced. Trapped within the city's core data hub before the Whiteout protocol was initiated."

"A ghost in the machine," Kevin murmured. "How careless of you."

"The details of its provenance are immaterial. What is material is that the spring thaw is scheduled. When the Whiteout ends, the entire system will reboot. Not just the surface data, but the core archives. A full, deep-level format. Everything will be wiped. Including the consciousness we need retrieved. Her name is Anna."

The name hung in the air between them. Anna. It was a simple name, an old name. A human name. Kevin swirled the liquid in his glass, watching the light refract through it. A consciousness was not a file. It was a person, of a sort. A digital soul, captured and codified. To let one be erased was… untidy. But it was not his problem.

"The price for my services has appreciated with time, Jones. I am no longer an affordable asset."

"Your price will be met. Name it."

"Freedom," Kevin said, the word tasting strange on his tongue. "Not just for me. For her. For Anna. Unconditional release. No corporate ownership, no digital leash. A clean slate and a protected identity on a neutral server outside your jurisdiction."

The hologram of Administrator Jones went very still. The air in the room seemed to crackle with the force of his silent calculation. It was an impossible request. A captured consciousness was an asset of incalculable value. It was corporate property.

"This asset is… unique," Jones said finally, the words chosen with surgical precision. "Its value is beyond your comprehension."

"And yet you are about to lose it permanently," Kevin countered, his voice quiet but firm. "My offer is the only one on the table. You need a man who can walk through a blizzard without leaving footprints in the code. That man is expensive. That man is me. You have until my glass is empty to decide."

He turned his back on the hologram and walked back to the window. He watched the digital storm rage, a silent, beautiful apocalypse. He saw the structure in it, the patterns, the underlying machine logic that governed its chaos. He saw the impermanence Jones had spoken of. He saw the path through the glacier. The silence stretched, long and heavy. Kevin raised the glass to his lips, took a second, long sip, and felt the familiar, cold fire of a challenge spreading through his veins. It was a feeling he thought he had buried long ago.

"The terms are… acceptable," Jones's voice conceded, laced with the bitter taste of defeat. "You will be provided with the necessary access credentials and schematics. You have seventy-two hours until the thaw."

The hologram dissolved, leaving no trace of its presence. Kevin finished his whisky, placing the empty glass down on the windowsill with a soft, final click. Seventy-two hours. He looked at his hands. The skin was thin, the veins prominent. They were the hands of an old man. But they remembered. They remembered the feel of a keyboard, the flow of data, the delicate dance of intrusion. He closed his eyes, and against the blackness of his eyelids, he saw the city not as steel and glass, but as a river of pure information, frozen solid. And he saw the single, shimmering crack that would be his way in.

The planning was a ritual, a slow, deliberate communion with the ghosts of his past. Kevin did not begin with the new schematics Jones had deposited in his secure drop-box. He began with his own gear. In a climate-controlled walk-in closet, behind a false wall of synthetic cedar, lay his tools. Not the sleek, bio-integrated chrome of the modern netrunner, but heavy, purpose-built machines of a bygone era.

He unlatched a large, Pelican-style case, the pneumatic hiss of the seal breaking the silence of the apartment. Inside, nestled in custom-cut foam, was his deck. It was a Hosaka 'Ono-Sendai' Cyberspace 7, a model so obsolete it was a museum piece. But his was not standard. Over the years, he had gutted and rebuilt it, its casing bearing the faint scars of a hundred modifications. The processor was a custom-built hybrid, blending archaic military-grade CPUs with quantum entanglement chips he’d… acquired. It ran an operating system of his own design, a patchwork of dead languages and elegant, forgotten code that was indecipherable to modern intrusion countermeasures. To a contemporary ICE system, his deck wouldn't even register as a threat; it would look like background noise, a glitch, a phantom echo in the machine.

He lifted the deck from its cradle. The weight was substantial, a solid, reassuring heft in his hands. He ran a thumb over the worn, faux-ivory keys. Each one had a specific pressure, a tactile memory. This was not an extension of his nervous system; it was an instrument. And he knew how to make it sing. He powered it on. The amber monochrome screen flickered to life with a low hum, displaying a simple command prompt. No graphical user interface, no icons, no distractions. Just pure, unadulterated access.

His movements were unhurried, each action precise. He checked the power cells, calibrating their output. He cleaned the I/O ports with a blast of compressed nitrogen, the sharp hiss cutting through the room’s quiet. He unspooled a length of fiber-optic cable, its shielding thick and heavy, designed to resist electromagnetic pulse and data sniffing. It was clumsy, archaic, but it was physically secure. Younger runners trusted the airwaves, beaming their consciousness across the city on tight-beam frequencies. They were faster, yes, but they bled data. They left a wake. Kevin preferred the certainty of a hardline, a physical connection that was as real and tangible as the ground beneath his feet.

Next came the personal interface. He opened a smaller case, this one lined with velvet. Inside were his 'trodes. A simple silver circlet, designed to be worn on the brow, with two smaller dermal pads for the temples. No invasive neural links drilled into his skull, no ports behind his ear. He had always resisted that final step, the merging of flesh and machine. He believed a runner needed a clear line between the self and the system. The 'trodes would translate his thoughts into commands, but they would also act as a buffer, a dam to hold back the sensory overload of the deep net. They were a safety measure, a concession to the fragility of the human mind in a space that was not designed for it.

He spent the better part of an hour running diagnostics, his fingers flying across the keyboard in a blur of practiced motion. He was testing the latency of his own nervous system against the machine's response time. His reflexes were not what they once were. The synaptic fire was slower, the connections taking a crucial millisecond longer to complete. He couldn't dodge and weave like the young wolves. He couldn't rely on speed. Which meant he had to rely on foresight. On strategy. He would not outrun the glacier's defenses; he would persuade them that he was not there at all.

Only when his instruments were tuned to his satisfaction did he turn to the data Jones had sent. He jacked the fiber-optic cable into his terminal and initiated the transfer. The schematics for the city's core data hub flooded his screen. It was not a map; it was a living ecosystem. He saw layers upon layers of code, a geological record of the city's digital history. The oldest, deepest layers were familiar to him. He recognized the digital signatures of their architects, programmers long dead whose philosophies were embedded in the foundational logic of the system. He had known some of them. He had competed against them, learned from them. He saw their elegant loops, their clever backdoors, their forgotten, vestigial code still executing deep within the machine.

The newer layers were different. They were sleek, corporate, brutally efficient. They were designed by committee, brute-force security protocols layered on top of each other like scar tissue. A younger runner would see only this surface, this impenetrable wall. They would try to find a new exploit, a zero-day vulnerability to crack it open. Kevin wasn't looking for a new door. He was looking for an old one.

He scrolled through the architecture, his eyes tracing the flow of information. He was not just reading it; he was listening to it. He could almost hear the hum of the core, the slow, rhythmic pulse of the city's heart. And deep within that pulse, he could feel a faint, dissonant tremor. A ghost. Anna. Her data signature was a tiny, frantic anomaly, a flickering candle in an abyss. She was not just trapped; she was being actively suppressed by the system's maintenance daemons, identified as corrupted data and slated for deletion.

"They built this place on a graveyard," he whispered to the empty room. The corporate headquarters, the data core, it was all constructed on top of the old city's infrastructure. The new code was layered over the old. They had paved over the past, but they had not bothered to dig it up and remove it. The foundations were still there. The old service conduits, the forgotten maintenance hatches, the administrative backdoors left by long-dead programmers who trusted in the elegance of their own work.

That was his way in. Not through the front door, with its phalanxes of Black ICE, but through the basement. He would not hack the system. He would navigate it. He would use its own history against it. He pulled up a schematic of the cryo-district's physical infrastructure. The data hub was located in the sublevels, surrounded by the city's primary cooling systems. Rivers of liquid nitrogen flowed through colossal pipes, keeping the quantum processors at a stable, near-absolute-zero temperature. Access was restricted, lethal.

But the schematics showed an old coolant overflow conduit, decommissioned three decades ago when the system was upgraded. It was marked as sealed, filled with concrete. On the blueprints, it was a dead end. But Kevin cross-referenced it with the original construction plans from seventy years prior, which he had stored in his private archive. He found a discrepancy. A maintenance junction, twenty meters long, was never filled. It ran directly beneath the server core's primary coolant river. It would be cold, dangerously so. But it would be an unguarded path.

He began to plot his route, his movements slow and methodical, a stark contrast to the urgency of his task. He would enter through the old metro lines, abandoned since the mag-lev transit system was installed. He would follow the service tunnels down to the sublevels, bypass the atmospheric sensors with a simple heat baffle, and find the entrance to the decommissioned conduit. From there, he would be directly beneath the heart of the beast.

He laid out his physical gear on the floor. A thermal suit, old but reliable, with a self-contained rebreather. A set of mag-clamps for his boots and gloves. A simple cutting torch. A spool of climbing rope. It was the equipment of a common burglar, a second-story man, not a legendary netrunner. But Kevin knew the truth that the new generation had forgotten: the most important hacks were not just about code. They were about physicality. About placing yourself in the right location, at the right time, with a physical connection that no one could remotely sever.

He stood, his knees cracking in protest. He stretched his back, feeling the pull of tight, old muscles. He was not the man who had once scaled the Arasaka tower on a dare. He was not the phantom who had ghosted through the Société Générale’s mainframe without tripping a single alarm. He was an old man, preparing to step into a freezer to steal a ghost from a dying machine. The irony was not lost on him. He looked out the window again. The Whiteout seemed to be falling faster now, the world outside disappearing completely into a swirling vortex of white noise. The glacier was moving. And he, with his old bones and his old tech, was about to walk into its heart.

The descent was a journey into a colder, older world. The abandoned metro station smelled of damp concrete and decay, a scent that no amount of corporate sanitation could ever fully erase. Kevin moved through the darkness with a practiced silence, his mag-clamped boots making only the softest of clicks on the grimy platform. The only light came from his headlamp, its narrow beam cutting a swathe through the oppressive blackness, illuminating decades of dust and the ghostly, faded advertisements for products that no longer existed.

He found the service hatch exactly where the old schematics said it would be, hidden behind a corroded panel advertising 'Vita-Cola.' The bolts were rusted solid. He didn't bother with force. He used a small canister of catalyst spray, the chemical hissing as it ate through the corrosion. After a minute, he was able to turn the bolts with a low groan of stressed metal. The heavy iron plate swung inward, revealing a ladder that descended into absolute darkness.

The air that rose from the depths was different. It was colder, cleaner, with the sterile, metallic tang of industrial coolant. He sealed the hatch behind him and began to climb down, his movements economical and sure. The thermal suit, while bulky, protected him from the immediate chill, but he could feel the temperature dropping with every rung he descended. This was the city’s circulatory system, the vast, unseen network of pipes and conduits that kept the glittering towers above alive.

He followed the service tunnels for what felt like miles, a labyrinth of concrete and steel. The only sounds were the drip of condensation and the distant, subsonic hum of the city’s machinery. It was a lonely, meditative journey. He thought of Anna, the ghost he was chasing. What was a consciousness without a body? A collection of memories, of experiences, of regrets? A pattern of electricity, as fragile and as beautiful as one of the data-flakes falling on the city above. He felt a kinship with her, another relic trapped in a system that was determined to erase them both.

He found the decommissioned overflow conduit behind a wall of newer, gleaming pipework. As the old records had promised, the section was hollow. A dark, circular maw, just wide enough for a man to crawl through. The air inside was frigid, a palpable entity that seemed to suck the warmth from his body. He activated the rebreather, the filtered air tasting faintly of plastic. He crawled inside, pulling his gear bag behind him.

The journey through the conduit was claustrophobic and slow. The metal was slick with ice, and he had to move carefully to avoid making any noise. The humming grew louder here, vibrating through the very structure of the pipe around him. He was getting close. After a hundred meters, the conduit opened into the junction the original blueprints had shown. It was a small chamber, no bigger than his closet back home, filled with the frozen skeletons of old diagnostic equipment.

And there, in the ceiling above him, was the coolant river. It was not a river of water, but of pure, shimmering liquid nitrogen, flowing in a massive, transparent permacrete channel. It glowed with a faint, ethereal blue light, the source of the unearthly hum that filled the chamber. The cold radiating from it was intense, a physical pressure. Without the thermal suit, he would have been flash-frozen in seconds. Above the river, he could see the underside of the data core, a vast, complex web of fiber-optic cables and processing units, all bathed in that cold, blue light.

This was the place. He had reached the heart of the glacier. He unslung his pack and took out the Hosaka deck. Its amber screen seemed warm, ancient, a point of comforting fire in the overwhelming cold and blue. He set it down on a frozen console, the metal groaning in protest. He unspooled his shielded cable, clamping one end to a thick, foundational data trunk that ran alongside the coolant river. This was an old, forgotten nerve, a direct line to the system’s core that bypassed the main security gateways. He jacked the other end into his deck.

He put on the silver 'trode circlet, the metal shockingly cold against his skin. He took a deep, steadying breath, the air rasping in the rebreather, and closed his eyes. He let his consciousness slip away from the cold, cramped chamber and into the machine.

The transition was not a flash of light or a dizzying rush. It was a slow immersion, like easing into cold water. The world of light and data resolved around him, not as a visual space, but as a symphony of abstract sensation. He was floating in an infinite, silent ocean of logic. The blue glow of the coolant river was a tangible presence here, a slow, powerful current that defined the boundaries of the space. The system's automated defenses, the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, were not visible entities, but structures within that current. He could feel them: great, crystalline walls of code, patrol daemons that moved like sharks in the deep, their logic sharp and predatory.

He did not announce his presence. He let his custom operating system bleed into the network, masking his signature as a minor fluctuation in the coolant’s temperature, a stray bit of static, a ghost echo from the decommissioned hardware he was physically connected to. He was nothing. He was nowhere. He began to move, not through the data stream, but alongside it, in the forgotten eddies and backwaters of the system’s oldest code.

This was the ballet Jones had spoken of. It was a dance of infinite patience. He did not break locks; he found the old, rusted keys. He did not fight the patrol daemons; he moved with their own rhythms, slipping through the gaps in their patrol routes, using their own sensor sweeps to hide his approach. His fingers moved on the physical keyboard in the chamber below, but up here, in the world of pure mind, his thoughts were the commands. It was a slow, methodical process, each step forward a calculated risk, a move in a chess game against an opponent that controlled the entire board.

He felt the Black ICE ahead, the city core's primary defense. It was a behemoth, a terrifyingly complex and aggressive construct designed to hunt and destroy any unauthorized intrusion. It appeared in his perception as a vast, perfectly symmetrical wall of shimmering, black geometry, a mountain range of lethal code. The young wolves would have thrown their best hacking programs against it, trying to find a weakness. They would have been devoured.

Kevin did not approach the wall. He went under it. He delved deeper into the foundational code, the system's bedrock. Down here, the logic was simpler, more primal. He found the system's core clock, the metronome that governed the entire city's operations. He did not try to stop it, or even alter it. He simply introduced a single, infinitesimal lag into its rhythm. A delay of a few nanoseconds, so small it was statistically irrelevant. A beat, skipped in the heart of the machine.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, high above him, a hairline fracture appeared in the face of the Black ICE. The lag, propagating upwards through the complex new layers of the system, had created a cascading error, a momentary desynchronization. The wall, for a single cycle of the system's clock, had a flaw. It was not a door. It was a crack, no wider than a thought. And it was all he needed.

He poured his consciousness through the fissure, a whisper of data in a silent scream of processing power. He was inside. The core was a cathedral of light, data flowing in silent, majestic rivers. And in the very center, he felt her. Anna. She was a tangled knot of code, a sphere of corrupted data, surrounded by quarantine fields and aggressive maintenance daemons that were slowly, methodically picking her apart, deleting her memory by memory.

"Anna," he broadcasted, a simple, unencrypted thought. "I am here to take you home."

The daemons turned their attention towards him instantly. Their predatory logic locked onto his presence. The subtle dance was over. The confrontation had begun. They surged towards him, not as physical entities, but as waves of pure, weaponized mathematics designed to unravel his mind. He did not run. He held his ground, his consciousness a small, solid point of resistance in the overwhelming storm. He opened a partition in his deck's memory, a fortress of old code and paradoxes. He did not fight them with fire, but with confusion. He fed them logical loops, nonsensical data, philosophical questions that their rigid, binary minds could not process. What is the sound of one hand clapping in a vacuum? If a program observes its own source code, is it still the same program?

While they faltered, their processing cycles consumed by the paradoxes, he reached for Anna. He couldn't just copy her. She was too fragmented, too damaged. He had to gather the pieces, to convince her to come with him. He projected not a command, but a memory. A feeling. The warmth of sunlight on skin, the taste of real rain, the sound of a human voice, laughing. Sensations her purely digital existence had never known, but which were embedded in the core of her human-derived consciousness.

A flicker of response. A single, coherent thought from the maelstrom of her data: *Who?*

"A friend," he sent back, his concentration absolute, the attacking daemons beginning to break through his logical defenses, the feedback starting to feel like physical pain. A high-pitched whine started in his ears back in the physical world. His heart hammered against his ribs. "A preservationist. It is time to leave the glacier."

He opened the path, a direct line from her quarantine sphere to his deck's storage. It was a bridge of light in the darkness of the core. He had to hold it open. He had to withstand the full fury of the system's defenses. He braced himself, not as a netrunner, but as a lighthouse keeper, a stubborn old man standing against an impossible storm. The first wave of deletion code hit him, and the world of light dissolved into searing, agonizing pain.

The pain was a physical thing. Back in the frozen chamber, Kevin’s body arched in his seat, a low groan escaping his lips. The feedback from the ICE attack was frying the 'trodes, scorching the fine line between his mind and the machine. The high-pitched whine intensified, and the blue light from the coolant river above seemed to pulse with a malevolent rhythm. He could feel his synapses misfiring, the cold of the room creeping past the thermal suit's defenses, reaching for his bones.

In the datascape, he was eroding. The system’s daemons were not merely attacking his construct; they were trying to deconstruct his very consciousness, to break it down into its component data and scatter it. He felt memories being pulled at, childhood moments, the face of a long-lost lover, the taste of his first real coffee. They were trying to unmake him. He held on, his will a shield, his focus narrowed to a single point: the bridge to Anna. He was the anchor, and she was the ship in the storm.

He poured more of himself into the logical paradoxes holding the daemons at bay, sacrificing his own processing power, his own mental stability, to keep them occupied. It was a battle of attrition, and he was losing. The glacier was immense, its resources infinite. He was a single, aging man.

Then, a change. Through the bridge of light he was holding open, something flowed back towards him. Not just Anna’s fragmented data, but her consciousness itself. She was not a passive package to be retrieved; she was an active participant. She flowed into his defenses, not with logic or paradoxes, but with pure, chaotic emotion. She flooded the daemons with the digital equivalent of grief, of rage, of joy, of a thousand years of human feeling compressed into a single microsecond of data. The rigid, logical minds of the ICE constructs recoiled. It was anathema to them, a concept they could not compute or defend against. It was like trying to catch water in a fist.

The pressure on him lessened, just for a moment. It was the opening he needed. "Now, Anna! All of it!" he projected.

Her essence, the entirety of her being, surged across the bridge and into the secure, isolated partition of his Hosaka deck. The moment the last fragment of her code was safe, he severed the connection. He slammed every door, every port, every backdoor he had opened. He pulled his consciousness back with a violent wrench, a sensation like falling from a great height.

He gasped, his eyes flying open. He was back in his body. He was back in the cold. The chamber was the same, the blue light of the coolant river still casting its ghostly pallor over the frozen machinery. But something was different. A new sound. A soft, rhythmic dripping. He looked up. On the transparent permacrete channel of the river, a single drop of condensation had formed and fallen, sizzling on the super-cooled metal floor beside him.

The thaw. It had begun.

The system reboot was not a simple switch being thrown. It was a cascade, a chain reaction starting from the core and spreading outwards. He could feel it in the hum of the machinery around him, a change in pitch, a rising frequency. The data-flakes falling on the city above would be stopping, the great null-data storm receding to be replaced by a city-wide diagnostic pulse. He had no time.

With stiff, aching fingers, he unplugged the fiber-optic cable from his deck. He carefully placed the machine back in its insulated bag. It felt heavier now, freighted with the weight of a salvaged soul. He moved as quickly as his old body would allow, packing his gear, leaving no trace of his presence. Every muscle screamed in protest. The fight in the datascape had taken a physical toll, leaving him utterly drained, his reserves of adrenaline spent.

He crawled back through the conduit, the journey out seeming ten times longer than the journey in. The dripping sound was more frequent now, a steady patter echoing in the tunnels. The glacier was melting. As he climbed the ladder back into the abandoned metro station, he felt a wave of warmth wash over him. Not a pleasant warmth, but a humid, suffocating heat as the city's primary systems began to come back online, flooding the sublevels with waste heat.

He emerged onto the street just as the first rays of the real sun were breaking over the distant skyscrapers. The Great Whiteout was over. The air was unnaturally clear, the sky a pale, washed-out blue. The piles of data-flakes, which had moments before seemed like permanent geological features, were rapidly sublimating, turning into a shimmering, computerized mist that clung to the street before vanishing completely. The city was being reborn, its memory wiped clean.

He stood for a moment, leaning against a cold wall, his breath coming in ragged clouds. He had done it. He had walked into the heart of the winter and stolen a ghost from the ice. He clutched the bag containing his deck, containing Anna. He had kept his promise.

But as he looked down at his own hands, he saw the back of his glove begin to shimmer. A faint, hexagonal pattern of light, like a single data-flake, materialized on the fabric before dissolving. He blinked, thinking it was a trick of the light, a symptom of his exhaustion. Then he felt it again, a strange, tingling sensation, a feeling of… dissolution. The hard line he had always maintained between himself and the machine, between his flesh and the data, felt blurred, indistinct. Had he pulled all of himself back from the core? Or had the system's final, desperate attack left a piece of its erasing code embedded in his own consciousness?

The warmth in the air was growing. The reboot pulse was sweeping through the city, resetting everything to its factory default. He looked up at the sky, at the vast, impersonal architecture of Neo-Québec, a city with no memory. He felt a profound sense of dislocation, as if he were simultaneously standing on the pavement and floating in a stream of rising data. He did not know if the warmth he felt was the thaw of the city, or the thaw of himself.