Free Escapology by Ren Warom

Pysch-Fails, but not so. Avi-creation is dangerous and complex, requiring more than mere Tech knowledge. Octopus is from when he was Min-seo, obtained when her hard drive, thus her connection to the Slip, was installed.
    Everyone gets a hard drive and therefore an avi as a toddler, free of charge from Fulcrum. His other avi he designed for the stuff he had to do for his less than salubrious contractors. It’s a shark—a Great White. A vicious, predatory son of a bitch. He’s not fond of it: it’s a tool, a means to an end, and that pre-cog he feels with Puss is missing, as is the ability to access his whole brain. Maybe it’s because he built it after all the damage, or maybe it’s because he’s not as hotshot with avis as he is with everything else. Either way, he sees Shark as imperfect work and it frustrates him.
    Shock stretches each tentacle, testing reaction times and data-access speeds. Perfect. Could it be this Slip shop hides some seriously state-of-the-art servers behind its cheesy neon glow? Shock pulses his tentacles and exits the avi-pod into the seething waters of the Slip. Noisy and balls-out insane as the Risi party district, the ocean of the Slip is fathomless as the horizon and filled with golden avis; great whales, eels, little swarms of fish, sea lions, dugongs… If you can name a fish or some form of sea-creature you’ll find its golden likeness swimming here amongst these sea-life submarine consciousnesses, hunting and sharing information at the millions of skyscraper-like corals riddling the waters.
    Each coral rises from profound depths to dizzying heights, where fake sunbeams lay veils of diffused light within which the golden bodies of countless avi glide with balletic grace. Gaudy as Plaza on a Friday night, these intricately constructed conjunctions of network link-ups and nexuses bristle with avis at all times of the day, as though no citizen in the Gung, sea or sky were ever away for more than a second at a time.
    Wearing Octopus, Shock spins fathoms deep, to the bottom of the Slip, to where no one but Haunts and system avi-bots ever go, the hidden data troughs and gullies. There are billions of them, a circulatory arrangement of sub-superhighways for all that information the system needs to keep moving from place to place.
    Some, like this, are almost empty. Others are like water slides—raging torrents of information, commands and communications, rife with avi-bots. Riding the gushers is an out and out buzz, full-on tripping, drowning and weaving in data. He lives for those moments as much as he lives for the moment the nugget of data, or morsel of code he’s after, is locked tight in his flash and being slunk out of the cells right under system’s eyes.
    Hidden in the sub-network, he heads for the business nodes, another place only avi-bots come, because beyond the nodes, behind layers of VA only a select few could crack, lies the central nervous system of Slip: Hive. Home of the Queens, massive AIs who oversee all info. The Queens are dangerous and clever, and the only thing between them and the Slip is Emblem, a code-lock kept in the Core at the centre of Hive which the Queens cannot see or enter, although they probably know it’s there. And for good reason. Emblem is the key to everything virtual.
    Though Emblem’s a lock and a good one at that, the Queens are past masters at picking the Queen-targeted VA it places between Hive and Slip and escaping for short periods of time. Fulcrum hides their escapes and the devastation they frequently wreak from the Passes, the WAMOS, but Fails see everything. Working in the nodes, this close to Hive, is about as dumb as it gets, but Shock doesn’t care. If the Queens escape whilst he’s here, there are plenty of nodes to hide in.
    Reaching the nodes reserved for Olbax, he makes nano-wires and sends them spiralling out to connect. The node is like all representational objects in the Slip, a slightly hallucinogenic take on reality. Looks