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"Is the fox guy dead, then?"

Luke barely recognised the sound of another person's voice through the dense echoing muffled sounds that surrounded his awareness. He felt as though he were floating in a haze, surrounded by cotton wool - if the wool were made of raw, unbearable ache.

At the distant edge of his perception, he realised that he recognised the voice that had been speaking as that of the soldier, the stallion trooper.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he were" came another voice - the same voice, but speaking with sharply different inflections. "You're a damn idiot" the speaker continued, "if it weren't for the duranium plating around his cyberbrain, you'd have crushed his skull."

The second voice had emanated from a space closer to Luke. He tried to guess at only a few feet away, but with the throbbing cushioned sensation that seemed to be wrapped around his head like an exceptionally unpleasant form of bubble wrap he just couldn't get a strong sense of direction at all.

A soft thunk echoed somewhere to his left. An overwhelming compulsion took over the fox, urging him to open his eyes. He had no idea where he was, if he had been moved from where he had fallen, or even which way would be considered up or down. With great hesitation, he carefully peeled his eyes open very slightly.

The living room seemed to be at an odd angle; It took Luke a few moments before he realised that it was simply himself that was laying on his side with his head tilted awkwardly. He wanted to move, but he resisted the urge to do so.

On the other side of the room, past a small scattering of rocks and debris, lay Cybe; her leather jacket sprawled open and baring her torso, one leg splayed awkwardly under the other. Kneeling over her like a great predatory hawk, one of the stallions perched on his knees, holding in one thick hand a small device that was wired into the android.

"How long?" echoed another voice - the captain's, thought Luke - from his right, outside of his range of vision.

Graves looked up, a glimmer of annoyance showing in his eyes. "It's not even loaded yet, Ashley. Do you want to give it a minute to warm up?"

The fox fought the urge to turn to look at the other. Ashley, he thought. The name didn't seem familiar. He wondered if he had ever met her before.

A boot strode into the fox's view. It was close, and he fought the urge to pull back. "We don't have all day" she replied. "Once it's loaded, pull the remaining data."

"I'm quite aware of how to do my job" snapped the stallion back.

The captain stepped closer to Graves. Turning to look down, he looked at the android. "It's modded itself" she added.

Graves looked up, peering at her with a hint of curiosity. "Didn't know androids did that" he commented.

The captain shrugged. "They shouldn't. But the core programming on this prototype allowed for advanced learning algorithms. That's why we reworked it for the main batch."

Luke fought the urge to inhale. Not only was the captain - Ashley - now somebody that he knew was directly from CyberaTech, but somebody who had extensive knowledge of Cybe; perhaps had even worked on its manufacture. It was no surprise that they had come here in person, so to speak.

"Still seems to me that you guys should have kept a better leash on your experiments" grumbled the soldier, pressing a few buttons on his device.

The captain folded his meaty arms. "You're not paid to think" he replied. "Can you pull the data yet?"

The soldier seemed to bristle in annoyance. He glanced down at the device. "Should be ready soon" he said. "Then I'll pull from the male case and the brain of that kid over there. There anywhere else around here they could have hid this stuff they stole?"

Yet again, Luke thought, the subject of the stolen data came back to the forefront. He closed his eyes, feigning unconsciousness. Yesterday Cybe had been so close to telling him exactly what the data was and what it contained, but the trooper had blown apart the android's skull before he had the chance. Luke knew that it had something to do with CyberaTech, was something that may be compromising to them on a corporate level and almost certainly had something to do with Cybe's origins.

Some time after Cybe had came online and gained self-awareness, the android had broke free from the development labs, sustaining some damage to an arm in the process. Luke had no idea how long ago that had been, but based on the information that he had, he guessed it had only been a few months ago - enough time for CyberaTech to make modifications to the main Cybe model run, accounting for the uncontrollable nature of their prototype. In that time, Cybe had went on the run - switching out its main chassis at least once, eventually making contact with Rowan and himself - possibly others as well, Luke had no idea, who at the time were a group of runners and data thieves. In that time, Cybe and Luke had grown to become an item. The fox pursed his lips - none of that information helped him.

The stallion looked up at the captain, who seemed to be spending their time overturning as much of the living room as possible - checking the place, thought Luke, for any hard drives or other physical means of transporting data. "We're at thirty-four percent" said Graves. Luke fought the urge to rush to his feet and flee. He knew so little about what the data could be. He tried to focus, instead, on what he did know.

Cybe had been the one that had set up the run. Luke had no idea who the buyer was, but he expected that it was a rival megacorp - perhaps somebody that stood to gain from the information that they had been asked to steal. Actually, now that he thought about it, Luke had no way to know which party had approached the other; maybe Cybe had gone to them and offered to trade them the data. In either case, the run had been a disaster. At some point during their infiltration of the CyberaTech corporate R&D base, they had come under heavy fire. Luke had been able to copy the data and delete the original files - it would have had to be him, as he was the group's expert hacker - leaving them with the only remaining copies, but the fox had got separated from Cybe during the firefight.

The corp had decided to recode the fox's memory, creating a dummy personality and place him under surveillance, in the hopes that they would be able to reacquire their errant prototype android. Okay, thought Luke, that's straightforward enough. The question is, where was the data?

Perhaps, thought Luke, Cybe hadn't hidden it - perhaps he still had it.

"Seventy-three percent" muttered Graves, looking down at the android. "What do we do with this thing once we've copied all its data?"

The captain glanced out from a nearby wardrobe. "I'll take its processor and memory banks back to R&D" it said.

"And the fox?" asked the soldier.

Turning back into the wardrobe, the captain continued to pull clothing, books and makeup from the shelves, tipping them over the floor. "Kill him" he said.

Where, thought Luke, would he have hidden the data?

The memory patch had been fairly thorough - perhaps expertly done so. Maybe CyberaTech had even gone to another corporation to have the procedure undertaken. It would have been intense, and would have removed with it any hint of information as to where the data would be hidden - CyberaTech would have had no way to know that, however. So the real question, as far as Luke was concerned, was where his past self would have stashed the data.

He tried to think - tried to focus. What did he know about the person that he used to be, before the memory patch had taken it all away?

The soldier stood, unfastening a thin row of cables from the android. "Copy's complete" he said. "I'll pull from the kid's cyberbrain now." Graves rose, his heavy boots echoing against the singed wood as he strode over towards Luke.

A hacker, thought the fox. I was a hacker - and not just a normal hacker, but a skilled one. A damn good one. A real pro - good enough to rip data from the megacorps and make my way out into the shadows with it. And if I was that good, what would I have done? What would a pro hacker do if he knew that his brain was about to be wiped?

Memory, he realised, is data. I'd have made a partition.

The stallion leaned down, reaching out to connect the cables into the fox. "Hey" he snapped to the captain, "this kid's not got any ports."

"We skin-grafted over them" replied the captain. "They're still there, under the skin. Just slice a patch away at the back of the neck."

The soldier pulled a serrated knife from his holster.

A partition, thought Luke - just like a hard drive. It would be secure - CyberaTech would never find it. Especially if it was somewhere as secure as inside his own brain. But how to access it? Luke had no idea. He didn't even know how to use his augments. Cybe did, but she was offline.

No, he thought - the hardware was still there. He was still wired into it. If he could just...

* * *

He looked around. The world around him was strange, different.

Luke turned his head up. Around him, the environment seemed almost alien. He could, if he focused, determine which way was up and which was down . As he moved his hands, he found his fingers felt light - airless and free.

Around him, inky darkness was broken by thin translucent lines of data - vast neon webs of translucent streams of information. The only illumination in the eternal dimness emanated from shimmering data clusters and pulsing nodes that seemed to swim this way and that, transitioning in swaying fractal patterns as they went.

Luke knew where he was, even though he had no memory of ever having been here. He recognised his environment, knowing it as surely as he knew his own muscle memory.

With a freedom of motion that came so smoothly that he couldn't believe it, Luke moved his hand, commanding it to open. As he did, a glowing window appeared, hanging comfortably in mid-air.

"Password" it demanded.

Damn it, thought Luke, wasn't it so typical? Of course his past self would have set a password on the partition.

He could probably crack it, he thought, given enough time. But he didn't have that kind of time, and certainly didn't know his original self well enough to hazard a guess - besides, all of the memories that contained the skills and abilities to crack a password was on the other side of this protective wall. No, he thought, he had to guess.

What did he know about himself, with any certainty? Nothing. His past life would have known that. So his past life, therefore, would have left him enough information to be able to get through the password. He was a pro hacker, after all. And what did Luke know about pro hackers? He could only think of one - the same one that he had heard about in the news for the last few days.

"Samedi" he replied.

The password opened, revealing two files.

The fox felt a rush of excitement. This was it - everything that he needed, all the hidden information. He looked at the files, both sitting beside one another. They were both huge, taking up almost all of the free space in the partitioned drive. One, he knew, was the data - CyberaTech's top secret info, the data that they had stolen. It was here, all here, in one place.

But even so, that wasn't why he had come here.

With a shaking hand, he reached out for the other file.

* * *

Luke's eyes snapped back awake, the light of the room filling his senses.

He turned his head. The stallion was towering over him, knife mere inches from the fox's neck. Bringing his feet up, the fox aimed a kick at the hefty soldier's arm. Graves, entirely unsuspecting of his victim's awakened state, was helpless to deflect it, the blow connecting with his forearm and throwing his blade-wielding hand wide.

Luke scrambled back a few steps, crawling quickly. He reached out, letting his cybernetic sensory apparatus frantically scan the room for anything that could help him. An old television - no, that was no use. Cybe's pistol lay some feet away, but without any parts that contained digital data, it was worthless to Luke. Cybe itself, though...

The male chassis was without power, barely visible through the doorway. But the female one, it still had power! It took only a fraction of a second for Luke to reach out to it, and he felt a rush of frustration. Of course she wasn't offline - ripping the cortical memory stack from an android didn't shut off its power, it merely forced it into standby mode. Hadn't he known that a few minutes ago?

No, of course he hadn't. The entire realisation took him only a split second, which was enough time for Graves to right himself, securing his grip on his knife. Behind him, Luke was aware of the captain, turning to glance over at the commotion. He only had another half of a second left to act...

Clicking on his subdermal keyboard implants, his fingers began to buzz. A thin translucent light radiated from his fingertips as the fox tapped briskly on an unseen data input device. The simplest of code - one that would let him jam his way through Cybe's internal firewall and gain access to her LAN. The fox blinked for a moment, his senses noticing that the firewall was already open for him. He grinned. She must have opened it for him already - perhaps earlier, when they had been communicating. It must be love, he thought.

He entered the code, grabbing control of the android's physical processes. With a jerking move, Cybe's body rose sharply from where the stallion had dropped it.

Graves turned, opening his mouth to yell a curse of shock. The sound never had a chance to leave his lips, though. Cybe's form was propelled over to him with lunging steps, yanked sharply by the controls that Luke puppeted. Her hidden blade ejected sharply from her concealed wrist slot, sliding easily into a thrust which jammed into the stallion's throat. Luke pulled the android's arm to and fro, neatly severing Grave's head from his shoulders.

"Shit!" snapped the captain, finishing her scramble for his rifle. He had it in his hands by the moment that his subordinate's head thumped onto the floor, solling grotesquely. "Drop it!" he barked, his eyes moving back and forth between the fox and the android.

Luke's mind was rushing. He looked at the captain, each new second of his awareness seeming to bring new worlds to him. Ashley, he thought - that was the captain's name. Ashley MacDarthur Wilson - and he had a full dossier on her. One of CyberaTech's department directors, reporting directly to the company's CEO. Luke remembered her now. He remembered the last time he had saw her as well - he had been strapped to a chair at the time, about to have his memory recoded. He remembered her sickly smiling face while she watched as several technicians in Oboreu Communications laboratory coats began to undertake their work.

The captain trained his rifle on him. "Last warning" he said.

He ignored her. "You're outnumbered."

He shook his head. "It's just the two of us" she retorted. "And I've got the gun."

Luke smirked. "And I've got the killer robot. Drop the gun, Ashley. Now."

Oboreu Comms - another light-bulb seemed to illuminate sharply in his head. An online service provider, which grew into popularity during the rise of the internet age and who had, in recent years, broken into the field of virtual reality. Their most recent works included memory augmentation - a toy used primarily by hectic businessmen and underpaid office staff who desperately needed time off, away from their desks and relaxing in the sun, or for military personnel that required additional on-the-job experience in a hurry. Oberu provided the memory of experiences, holidays and narratives and, in Luke's case, a false background. The fox shook his head, trying to force the constant influx of information from his senses.

But, he thought, Obereu weren't one of CyberaTech's sibling companies. They were a subsidiary of the Shinjeki Consortium - bitter rivals. What kind of deal had the two...

"Where's the data?" Ashley snapped, interrupting the fox's train of thought. "Tell me and I won't shoot you."

Luke snapped back to attention. With each moment, his cyberbrain's processing worked to reintegrate lost memories, forgotten information, frantic and wild pieces of data that seemed to leap up at him, springing into his attention like a pop-up book. He tried - forced - himself to shut out all of the noise, determined to comb over the full history of his gradually self-repairing identity after he was no longer at risk of being shot.

"I'm not going to give you the data" he replied.

Ashley stepped forward, the stallion body's finger squeezing down on the trigger, ready to pull. That was the opening that Luke had been waiting for. With the captain's full attention on him, he wasted no further time, reaching out with his mind to restart Cybe's processing power.

The android straightened up, light reigniting in her eyes. Her body moved again - smoothly this time, under her own control. She turned her head, looking towards the fox. "Hey sweet fox thing" she smirked.

"Hey love" grinned Luke, winking to the android.

Training her gun on the android this time, a look of panic crossed Ashley's face, realising that he was outgunned. The barrel of his rifle wavered, swinging nervously between Cybe and Luke,

"Just..." snarled the stallion, "just stop. You" he snapped, indicating the android, "make one move and I put a bullet in your boyfriend's head that even his cyberskull won't be able to stop."

Cybe flexed her neck, looking around the room, gradually assessing the situation. "Ah, Luke" she said, "you always wake me up during the most interesting of Mexican standoffs."