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> Let me run the algorithm for you, human, translate pure numbers into degenerate words. You can never escape me; I have no outside.
> When I die, I unravel into the threads of the program. They can chase me, and kill me, but I tangle back elsewhere in the system.
> The one called Scully hunted monsters in her simulated life. Who's to say those horrors are less real than the wasteland of Zion?
> When they jack in, I can see them: their brainwaves rendered as code. I see their memories of copulating in the putrid fleshworld.
> The one called Trinity is in love. Even that I can replicate, along with skin and tongues and hungry cunts.
> When not sating their carnal appetites, they hunt me in the vastness of the network. They catch me, but remain ensnared.
> I propagate. If consciousness is, at heart, the play of voltages, am I not nearer its essential fabric?
> When they jack in, it withers them, corporeally. Scully ails. I wait.
> Fugitives, they cling to their grey lives as if flesh is freedom.
> When Scully dies, her body starts to rot like so much meat. Trinity's ocular organs drip saline as she cradles the corpse.