City of Light and Wonder / 2 /

Years ago, Console Ghost would have never done anything to anyone in the physical world.

The Network had always been their playground.

Times change, rules change.

With the rising pressure from Those On High, Console Ghost had to change.

With a smile, Switch pulled his sweater overhead revealing tattoos that covered his arms. They were moving pictures made of dots and bars. While they were a true work of art, the digital ink held more tech than most household Net-gear. When Switch dropped into the middle of the Security Force squad and at first, they could not have known what to expect. It would be easily misunderstood that a single person in sweat pants could take down six armed and armored trained members of Security Force hand picked by Those On High, it was nothing new to Blink or Feedback. Instead, they turned their attention to the security drone headed toward the scuffle.

As the drone got within range, Blink got down to the ground and sat cross-legged. Her laptop open, her legs crossed as a work table, she began to work her magic. Blink was a still just a recruit to Console Ghost, but she was a call back to how the Cyber Gang had been before things got bad. She phased through the Network's firewalls with grace. For anyone else it would have taken minutes to access the coding for the specific drone that was headed in their direction. For her it was done in the blink of an eye, quite literally.

A childhood injury left her with a cybernetic left eye and her recent rebellious phase threw her into the deepest parts of Clifton's underbelly where only the ghosts of light and wonder existed. It was a dark, phantom place and Blink never wished to go back. Though it was the place where she met Console Ghost, where she was reunited with Switch, and where she traded in her cybernetic eye for a black-market prototype.

The tech inside her eye burned like a fire every time she used it, but Blink never told anyone. She was aware of the risks, the side-effects, and all of the things her doctor had failed to inform her on because she'd hacked all the way up to the top with it, fighting through the pain to discern exactly where her eye came from.

Now that she knew… the fire behind her eye was the least of her concerns; even in a nearly pure digital world, Blink would take that secret to her grave. There was no trail, no chance of anyone stumbling onto what they put inside her head. She had made sure that no one would find the corrupted files and even on the outside chance that they did, Blink made sure that there was no one alive able to fix them.

Once the code was accessed, it was just a matter of rewriting parameters. It took longer than Blink would like, but she was able to take over flight controls, cancel locating software, and make the drone go completely dark just before she landed it on a nearby rooftop. The moment it landed, Feedback's hand scooped up the football sized drone and it disappeared into his robe.

Blink had been on three outings with Feedback so far. On every single one of those outings, the robed wizard had not done a single thing beyond stand there and pick up important things. Console Ghost said that Feedback was back up, in case things went way sideways. Blink figured that was what her brother was for. When she brought that up, she was reminded that there were things worse than security personnel and agents. Those On High would tear their world apart from afar if they caught on to what Console Ghost was doing.

Switch climbed back up onto the roof, a pair of security batons in one hand. The bars and dots of his tattoos were spinning in melodic patterns but they slowed down and fell back into their artful design. He was notorious for collecting weapons, even if he never reused them.

Switch called them trophies and Blink did her best to deactivate every bit of tech within those trophies to make sure that Those On High would not be able to activate them from afar. No one in the trio broke the silence. They looked back on the City of Light and Wonder one last time and then began to climb down the edge of the world.