He stirred slowly from a restless sleep, reached over and violently
turned off his newest alarm clock. Glancing at the time he leaped up and
ran to one of many terminals scattered around his cramped and cluttered
room. "No, I didn't screw this up too", he thought to himself as he checked
the results of the running program.  Sitting down in a nearby chair he
scraped around his desk until he located the pair of military issue
'trodes that he favored and proceeded to connect himself to his
computer.  With a quick glance around the room he punched a switch and
instantly left the world he had come to hate, the world that he would
soon leave forever.
  Freefall, thats what diving into Cyberspace felt like.  He was now
suspended in the relative space inside his computers memory.  He could
see the program that was running to give him this view, streamlets of
data flashing through crystal walls in a cave full of infinite light.
Looking further he could see his other program, a program he had spent
the last months coding.  Parts of it were his own familier patterns that
he had gotten used to programming in, other parts were compact pieces of
thousands of military programs that he had appropriated for his own use.
This other program was alive.
  He remembered the first time he ever jacked in using his fathers
old military cyberdeck.  It was more addictive to him that any other drug
and almost any other thing, except her.  With that thought he shuddered
and fought to keep himself from screaming.  Trying to force it from his
mind he thought about all the time he had spent with that old deck, running
amok through bustling streets of data, occasionally meeting others who like
himself had to escape the real world to save their sanity.  They were
the rogues of the net, these cowboys of the last open frontier.  They
weren't in the net because the had to or were forced to, they were in
the net because they loved it and hungered for it's embrace.  Again he
shuddered as if a freezing wind had blown across him, for he was not
only in love with the net.  This time he couldn't stop the scream.
  He left the security of his own computer and slid out into the net.
Smugly he punched forward, ripping across the space at speeds most
people outside of the labs only dreamed about.  Most people used simple
Cyberdecks, but he had felt too limited after a while.  He had purchased
his computer from one of the junkshops downtown.  People didn't want
computers very often anymore. If you needed a computer, it was far
easier to jack into one through the net and use it, but for his
use it was perfect.  The interface and programming was his first major
feat, and others who had witnessed the combination had left in awe.  He
had made something more then a Cyberdeck, unstead of interfacing through
a deck, he used what most people feared, his interface was an AI.