Deni bristled. What was this fragger trying to talk his sister into? Was he trying to get her hooked on BTL? But that was chips. You needed a chipjack for that. Not a data-jack. Datajacks were for computers…

"We're going to take a lot of people to the special place today," the kid told Pip. He glanced at the watch on his wrist. "In just a few seconds. Would you like to come too?"

Pip nodded. A smile lit her tiny face.

The kid handed her an electrode net and smiled as she strapped the array of sensors onto her head and plugged its fiber-optic cable into the deck on her lap.

No! Deni raged. Don't trust him, Pip! He flailed forward, but his astral body bounced back as it encountered Pip's aura. He whirled, reached out* tried to claw the thing off her head. But it was no fraggin' use. The hands of his astral body were thin as mist.

Pip closed her eyes. Her body relaxed into a slump.

Deni stared at the kid on the couch beside Pip, wanting to take the silly scarf around his throat and choke him with it.

The kid stood up and walked over to a telecom outlet. Seeing him pull a fiber-optic computer connection cable from it, Deni figured he was going to attach it to a cyberdeck. But instead the kid slotted the cable directly into the datajack in his skull. Carefully paying out the cable, the kid sat back down on the couch beside Pip. Then he too leaned back and closed his eyes.

A strange thing happened. The kid's aura went totally weird.

The weirdness began just above the kid's scalp. His aura turned a bright silver color over a point on his datajack, and then lines of energy suddenly sprayed out from this point. Tiny bolts of light, maybe as long as a monowhip stretched out straight, spiked out like roving spotlights, growing thinner and thinner the farther out from the kid's head they got, until they just disappeared. They smelled hot somehow, like electricity.