"Can I have real sex with a beautiful woman?"

"Of course you can," said the balding man sitting upright behind the grotesquely antique wooden desk. His practiced smile was pasted across an otherwise bored face.

"Because I've never - well - not really, with a beautiful one."

"I hear you. Who has, right?"

His laugh was a little too loud. It echoed against the painted concrete wall and pierced into Brian's sensitive ears, making him want scrunch his eyes and turn away. He took a sharp breath and fell into another coughing spasm.

"Your last day of carnality, after all, has to last you an eternity."

Brian smiled, and after a brief moment remembered to reply with an upward movement of his head, visual feedback. Body language the Normals called it. He hated having to beg like that about something so private, especially to a sub-human who wouldn't or couldn't jack and had to live in only half a world.

"We'll get you a girl. Ten, if you want, but once your a Head, you'll be bored with input that's a hundred times better than anything your tired old flesh can deal up. I understand that Head sex isn't like those trashy jack fucks you get on the red-web.

The salesman looked down and opened Brian's folder. Real paper forms with real ink were stacked inside. It seemed to Brian about as useless and old fashioned as having to drag his flesh around just to take care of business.

Brian shifted restlessly in his chair, feeling constricted having to wear clothes.

"So, Mister Babbage, you've pretty much been a Jacker all your life?"

"Since I was fifteen."

The salesman hummed, scratched the side of his face, and examined the papers one at a time. Finally, he looked up from the papers and sat back in his chair, examining Brian with the disinterested boredom of another random, rote bureaucrat.

"It says here that you're Carlson/Kramer positive."

"Yes."

"And what is that, exactly?"

"Where have you been? It's everywhere. Can't you Normals even read anymore?"

The narrow little man closed the folder and answered, "I read very well. Books. Have you ever seen a book, Mister Babbage, or held a real journal in your hands?"

"Whatever. C/K is the latest wetware virus. It causes soft tissue cells to degenerate during mitosis. Stuff turns to jelly inside."

"And is that why you want to become a Head?"

"It's terminal. What the hell do you think?"

"I think you Jackers should all be rounded up with your neuro bugs, your Jack holes, and the rest of your God forsaken excuse for humanity and burned. That's what I think."

"Just do your job, Normal. Nobody asked you to think."

"Here," he said, closing and scooting the folder across the desk. "Take this to room 17C and make an appointment with the cutting team."

Brian rose and farted before he caught himself.

"Excuse me," he said.

"Get the hell out of here, you filthy Jack-animal."

"Watch your mouth, meat-boy."

"Bitch."

The cutter's office was accessible only through a maddeningly inefficient series of corridors, intersections, elevators, and wrong turns made worse by the sore bruise that was now covering his entire right foot. He wanted to be home and off his feet.

"The receptionist took his folder and said, " I have an opening tomorrow or in three weeks. Which would you prefer?"

"Tomorrow, please."

"Be here with your consent and beneficiary forms at 4:30."

"Is that 4:30, or 16:30?"

"Afternoon. We don't work in the middle of the night."

Brian left and found a public jack booth, pulled the chord from the wall and inserted the plug into the jack behind his ear. He checked text mail from his sister.

"Dear Brian," it began. "The lawyer has Mother's estate settled, finally. The trace on the inheritance was cleared this morning. How's your foot? K."

An audio message was from his boss: "Brian, you need to devolve the time tracker lineage. Hacker 17 was able to slip a pseudo mirror into the line and modify the activity log. Talk to Sheena. She grew a program sort of like this last year."

As he was listening to the message from work, an interactive message appeared from Gina's House of Heavenly Whores. The message wanted to know his preference for girl size, color, shape, weight, and the intimate details of what he wanted to do with them. Some of the items on the activity list were unfamiliar to him, so he selected the Light Fun Straight Sex Package Number Three with a petite red head.

While he waited for the agent to book an appointment for him, Brian flew to his work node, pulled out the latest release, gathered the programs he had been working on for the past two days and marked them for extinction. He dropped an sniffer to gather statistics from the hacker pool and then hopped out to his bank to check on the inheritance deposit.

If his work was good enough to fool the Company's lawyers, it would certainly be good enough for the folks at Head Hotel.

His mother was infected with the famous Carlson/Kramer virus last year through some bad tripper soda at a neo-rave party thrown by her boss to celebrate the ten millionth download of his art piece, "Ocean Fred," a tribute to the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Fred Flintstone cartoons. It's was a still rendering of Fred on a deep sea fishing boat catching Charlie the Tuna, finally at the end of someone's hook.

She didn't tell Brian or her daughter, Kellie until it was far too late. She volunteered to test a vaccine at the Center for Disease Control in Anchorage, but it was only partially successful. Brian contracted the virus when she insisted her children visit her in person one last time. Kellie missed it, luckily, but when the familiar rings began to appear on his legs, Brian had himself tested.

"You have three basic options," the clinic nurse had told him. "You can ignore it and let it eat you up in about three years. Two, you can try to medicate it, but that means little or no time on-line and may not be successful. Or, if you have enough e-notes, you can go the Head rout."

"How much?"

"Fifty thousand or more."

So he sought out a friend of a friend who was supposed to know how to hack unsecured e-note transactions. He had a trick of intercepting paymail, adding a bogus hop fee, and forwarding it. When Brian contacted him, he learned that he had to incorporate himself as a non-profit church, give the man a legitimate business account id, and allow anonymous donations. He also learned that he took all the risk and got only fifteen per cent of the take. Brian then laundered it through the street market by purchasing block bandwidth slices for his company, and then, rather than donating them, as his church license indicated, he sold the time to jack-hustlers for fiat dollars, to break the electronic chain. This money went into the nightly deposits of another friend of a friend that owned an orange juice store, who then paid a salary to Brian's mother as a marketing consultant. After he convinced his mother to let him help her settle her financial accounts, he invested her salary in high growth commodity funds and then let the machinery spin.

In the next ten months, as the disease began to show external manifestations, he raised enough to supplement her own savings and investments so that, once her estate was settled between Brian and his sister Kellie, he had almost enough. He was short only fifteen hundred notes.

He received a static message from Gina, confirming an appointment for that evening for two hours with Peggy starting at 19:45, courtesy of the Head Hotel.

It was time to call Kellie.

He opened a voice connection and waited for her to answer.

"Hello," he heard her say.

"Kellie, it's Brian. How was the ceremony?"

"Nice. Not many people were there. Jeremy said to tell you that he misses his Uncle. We though you'd be there."

"Maybe I should have."

"No. I understand. Are you feeling better?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Oh. Do you think you're going to have to have your foot amputated?"

"Something like that."

There was an uncomfortable pause. Brian added, "I need a little extra money."

"What for?"

Her tone suggested she had already guessed what he was about to say next.

"I'm going to the Head Hotel?"

"Oh, Brian. That disgusting infomercial thing? It's not that bad."

"Yes..."

"You can fight this."

"Yes it is. I don't think I want to try that."

"There's another nano-spore that's supposed to arrest it. The doctor was telling us about it just last week."

"Kellie, it's into my lungs. I can't wait for that."

There was another long pause that grew uncomfortable until she said, "How much?"

"Seventeen hundred."

"Okay, but I want to see you first. One last time."

"It's not like I'm going away. I can still send messages, or synth my voice. I'll still be here."

She began to cry. "Not you too, Brian. I can't loose both of you."

"I'll still be here. I just won't have to live in this infected meat anymore."

"When?"

"Tomorrow. I need you, Kel. Please."

"I want to see you."

"I'm still in Nevada. There's not time. It's better this way. I'll call as soon as I'm settled in."

"Turn on video, Brian. I want to see you."

He sent a command to the booth's vid-cam to activate it and looked up to it.

"I'll miss your blue eyes."

* * *

The little red head stood in front of the sofa with a short, black skirt and a green vee neck sweater and asked, "Ever been here before, sport?"

Brian shook his head no.

"Do you like it any particular way, or just take it as it comes?"

"I don't know, really."

"What do you want me to do, honey? Do you want me to lead?"

"Okay."

She pulled the sweater over her head, past her short hair, revealing her bare stomach and breasts to Brian's staring eyes.

"Can I..."

"Can you what, sweetie?"

"Can I hold you on my lap, for a little while?"

"Honey, you can hold me any way you like."

The first hour was awkward and, if not for Peggy's reassuring encouragement's, Brian would have felt like running away. She was a real professional, a healer, a whore, in the best sense of the word. She never once asked about or even seemed to notice the thick bandage that covered Brian's right foot. By the second hour, he was feeling comfortable and was able to get into the spirit of the role playing and other games of Light Fun Straight Sex Package Number Three.

There was no need for him to go home. He spent the night at a real hotel, expecting to find it luxurious. It was nice having such large, private space, but the bed was uncomfortable and he wished he could sleep floating in the salt water of his jack crib.

The next day he paid for a whole hour at the city park, and he spent the whole time sitting by a splashing fountain, looking at pretty girls, families, birds. He noticed the occasional squinty, slouching gait of a jacker out of his hole. The Normals were also easy to spot with their vacuous giddiness. It was a mild source of embarrassment at work that his own sister had decided to live on the outside, a weird pathology they liked to call "going natural." To Brian it seemed as ignorant as a child declaring that he never wanted to learn to read because he preferred being stupid all his life.

By the time of his appointment, Brian's foot was a pounding ball of bloody flame and his coughing was hurting his throat and chest. Some of the phlegm he coughed up was turning red, not that it mattered much any more.

By 16:30, we was well ready to be rid of his body.

He was ushered into the cutting room. He was told to strip naked and lie down on a plastic table. The cutter and her staff came in and told Brian to jack in. He plugged in the cable that would be part of him from now on and closed his eyes. He accessed the camera from above and was able to watch the whole thing.

She lifted his head, swabbed the back of his neck with a numbing solution, then injected a nerve inhibitor, to paralyze and numb the area completely. Then, she stuck a needle into the jugular veins on either side of his neck and began routing his blood through a filtering machine.

He felt dizzy and nauseous as the blood feeding his brain was replaced with an artificial, oxygen rich plasma. She cut open the back of his neck, letting his body drain its blood onto the plastic slab. Then she sliced quickly across his spinal chord and his body went completely numb. The team stopped his heart and carefully cut through his neck. After they took his body away, and his head was propped on a tripod stand, he tried opening his eyes. He saw the bright glare of the lights above. He tried to cry out but had no voice.

The cutter put her hand over his eyes, turned to the camera and said, "It's best not to do that. Let me know if you have any questions.

He accessed the voice synther and said through the room's speakers, "I'm okay."

"Good. We're almost there."

His face was swabbed all over with more of the numbing solution, and the staff gave him several shots of the nerve killer.

"You might not want to watch this part. We have plenty of activities while you wait. Follow the yellow arrows if you want."

Brian decided to stay and watch.

Once the medicine took effect, they cut the skin away from the scalp and peeled his skin away from the skull. The optic nerve was severed and the rest of the skin was removed. It took only another ten minutes to cut away the jaw and the top of the skull.

Now it was time to wait for the nano-surgeon. Brian dropped a trigger event on the room door and followed the yellow arrows into a full media room. He tried out a jack adventure and suddenly he had a body again. This time it was the body of the leading actor. He felt his legs move as Dirk Kerrigan, Master Detective, walked into his vintage 1995 office, complete with a flat screen computer running X-windows terminal sessions. He felt breaths moving his chest up and down as he saw the headlines of the paper: "Hacker Sue, still missing."

He started to read the article when Dirk's secretary, wearing her always appealing yellow summer dress, came into the room.

Brian felt himself ask, "Yes Darla?", hearing Dick's voice in his own head.

He watched as the Actor swept his eyes across Darla's high hem line.

"There's a woman to see you, Mister Kerrigan."

Just then, Brian's door event triggered and so he backed out of the drama and returned to the vid-cam in the operating room.

The nano-surgeon set up his telepresence set, covering most of the head. However, Brian saw that he was allowed to fork the doctor's visual stream and so he watched as micro veins were grafted into his brain, replacing the crude intravenous feed that the cutter team had installed.

In a half hour's time, he had a complete set of grafts that would feed him artificial plasma loaded with the appropriate balance of oxygen, hormones, and synthetic antibodies. It was then a simple matter to lift the brain from the skull and place it into a saline solution.

"All done, Mister Babbage," the nano-surgeon told him, speaking to the camera. The cutter crew will transport you to your new home."

The cutter removed the end of his jack wire from the wall. It was plugged into a low-res rf node and so, once his plasma feed was transferred to a mobile unit, Brian was able to watch his brain being wheeled down the hall and into the vault as a series of jerky, grainy, faded images. Even so, the vault was amazing. There were rows and rows and still more rows of tall cabinets. Each one was a wall of small cubby holes, cubes two feet on a side.

His brain pan was installed into the hole that had his name etched onto the door. His plasma feed was connected to the artificial body that would provide food and energy for him for the rest of his long life. When his jack wire was plugged in, the low resolution images were replaced with full, high-definition, and he was able to see himself over the shoulder of one of the cutter staff: a brain floating silently in a pan, in a box. The door was closed and locked.

Brian felt nervous. He expected to feel his heart beating fast inside his body, but he only felt numb. He felt like he needed to yawn, but found that he couldn't even feel his face, or click his teeth together. He felt as if he had to scratch his left arm, which was strange because he couldn't even feel his arms. It felt funny not breathing.

He accessed the video of the storage room one last time, saw the unending rows of head cabinets, and then resolved never to access that feed again. He turned his attention back to his home account. Tomorrow he would arrange to terminate the lease of his old jack booth. He nervously accessed a few of the familiar sites: his work account, Cyberia, The Arcade, Capacitor Cafe, the History Channel. It all worked. He could see. He could hear. He could even smell the tangy, sweet aroma of his background processes operating smoothly.

He opened a connection to call Kellie. He heard one ring and then the line went dead. He dropped a fault query agent onto the line, but suddenly, his vision was filled with the video feed of the office of the snotty salesman. Sitting in the seat across the desk was a man wearing the unmistakable brown plaid jacket of a Network Administrator.

The admin turned his faced toward the camera and said, as if by rote, "Mister Babbage, due to unauthorized usage of network resources, including fraud, illegal interception and tampering with packet traffic, and failure to report bandwidth resale, your account is being terminated. After your outage is complete, you will report to a probation officer who will assign work to you so that you can repay your debt to society. After the period of one year, you will be allowed eighty characters of text output per day and two thousand characters of text input per week. Your outage shall be for the period of six years."

Brian was suddenly surrounded by blackness. He no longer heard the background hum of processes and events. He was numb, dumb, blind, deaf, and alone. It was the darkest dark, and the quietest quiet. Words formed in his mind, almost as if he were hearing them, demanding, pleading, raging, whimpering. His brain wanted his body to run, to be afraid, to fight, but even the outlet of physical terror was denied him as his brain floated alone in box, screaming and crying inside itself.

:^D