"Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
What is the way to the abode of light?"

        The Lord speaks: Job 38:17-19

 

     Zakariah Davis surveyed the V-net booth from across a darkened, deserted boulevard, feeling a prickly unease like static electricity on the nape of his neck. The booth was an early suburban model without the usual armaments, about a dozen years out of date but still fully functional. A technician had tested the electronics down to Sublevel Zero only a few days prior to rendezvous.

     In a habitual gesture born of stress, Zakariah reached up and scratched his scalp where the network cable entered his skull just above and behind his left ear. The side of his cranium was permanently hairless in a semicircle around the cable, and his wavy brown hair was swept up in a wild and unkempt tangle. His V-net plug hung like a crystalline pendant from his left earlobe, blinking with V-life.

     Zakariah's ice-blue eyes and furrowed brow betrayed a grim determination, a street wisdom far beyond his thirty-four years. He'd been a field runner his entire adult life since receiving the virus at twenty-one, his only vacations spent underground when he was too hot to surface on the net, squirreled away with his young wife and baby boy in dark basement apartments in downtown free-zones. He reached up to his V-net plug and tapped out a simple binary code with a pointed fingernail. The correct time flashed briefly in the upper right-hand corner of his field of vision. He had three more minutes until rendezvous.

     Camouflaged in standard green coveralls like a common city rep, Zakariah hurried across the street and keyed open the V-net booth with his brand new set of retinal prints. He surveyed the photoelectrics and deadbolts in search of tampering, then set up his doorstop and mirrors with care. Safe inside, his eyes strayed ritually over the ceiling in search of nerve gas ducts or any thing untoward as he unclipped his plug and inserted it into the V-net console in front of him. A two-way flatscreen monitor came to life with a menu of possible realities, but Zakariah was already diving to Main Street.