It was hot, the night we went over the fence. Verjil was skipping his shoes against the cracked pavement as we walked—living, or miming it well. His jaw was tensed so I knew his stream was live, the fizz of halogen streetlamps reflected in iridium above his ear.

“You with me, Jacky-Boy?” The world sharpened as he slugged me hard.

“Big night,” he said. “They lovin’ it tonight, Jack.” He was already performing, swinging his arms, neural implant running hot enough to tenderize his flesh. Mouth open wide.

“Yea. Big night.” I lit a cigarette and puffed until the shakes lightened.

I’d let Verjil haul me out of bed. So I could help him save our hustle, I told myself. So I could watch. But I was there for you.

You never told me what you wanted.

Verjil grabbed my elbow, dragging me past couples tugging each other on their doorsteps, always one of them in their slippers and the other in their boots. Shouts and fumes swirled in the low canyon of 56th Street, drones with their lime LEDs flitting like fireflies above our heads. No Lake breeze to blow it all away. Someone had written SYNOVA SHUCKS THE DEAD on a packing insert and hoisted it up a streetlight.

We turned another corner and there it was: the warehouse. The fence. We stood in front of it letting the helium-high of withdrawal shudder up our backs.

“See that, my man? We all out here.” Verj was grinning.

There were only a few of us, then, the real angry or gone ones, lined up against the chain-link. Some wanted to burn it all down. Most were there to steal the shit: Synova’s little red and blue pills. We needed them to keep our neurons from poaching all the way to hard boiled. Immune suppressants, anti-psychotics—“aftercare,” they called it—shipped in flat foil packets direct from Mumbai alongside the stainless, thin oblongs of their neural implants. Miss too many doses and you’d rattle until you tore the metal from your skull yourself.

“We?” I asked. “Never would’ve pinned you as a nightcrawler out looking for a window to smash. Where’s your brick?”

“We don’t need to smash. They’ll do it,” he said.

I chuckled at that. Pills were no problem when they were coming in the mail. But we were off Synova’s list, jailbroken, our implants snipped. The old man had done it—cut the Feed but kept the hardware and the access. No more fees, no more filters. And no more pill packets tossed on our doorstep.

My skin crawled, the fever tightening it until it itched and prickled. You could’ve left me at the bottom. Left me to drown. Instead I pulled you down with me.

I didn’t know yet, Val. I only knew we needed pills.

So I doused the feeling with what might have been a memory.

We sat in Verjil’s apartment on the second floor of a walkup, in the other room, not the one where he slept. The one by the tiny kitchen. The walls were ornamented with little yellow curls of peeling wallpaper and a wisp of smoke rose from the cracked ceramic tray where we ashed our cigarettes.

“You feel anything?” I asked him. The implant was heavy on the side of my skull. I tapped it and felt a buzz.

The install was like that. Six months ago, at Synova’s “workforce revitalization clinic”—shoot ’em full of data until they perk up. A quick buzz with the razor, a prick and a tug. “Noninvasive,” they’d called it. Said it would “calibrate,” tune us in. Turn our brains into little wet antennas.

“Direct pay or payroll deduction?” they said.

We nodded.

“Sign here.”

Then they’d tossed us the pills—one in the morning, one at night—and we’d skipped down the clinic steps.

Verjil had his eyes clamped shut. “Yo, shut up, Jack. I’m focusing. You gotta ride this shit. Make it your bitch,” he said.

“I don’t feel anything,” I said.

“That’s cuz you’re running your mouth off, you crusty-ass hobo-lookin’ motherfucker,” he said.

I leaned back and the green and pink plastic weave of my chair creaked. It was the usual spot in front of the TV, except Verj didn’t have much furniture yet, so we sat in some old flaking lawn chairs that he’d grabbed off the street. I think I liked it better that way. Before the plastic crates stamped “Synova” started to pile up and before all my tools cluttered up the tables and greased them.

We looked like patients from a pediatric ward under the sickly white of the bulb in the ceiling fan. I grabbed another can from the thirty-case torn open on the floor and popped the tab, the aluminum slick and cold in my hand.

I think that’s when I felt it.

Cold beer trickled down my throat and mingled with the hot slash of cigarette smoke that always tasted so damn good when you were drinking and then it all seemed to turn to glass.

Data slid into me, smooth as ice. And I tumbled into that nonspace, my hands tensed into worthless claws as my synapses danced.

The whole expanse of the net washed over us and it was instant. No buffer sequence, no download, no tapping your fingers. It was lightspeed, or close to it. Frictionless, formless, and nontemporal, you didn’t learn things anymore, you knew things. You didn’t search, you found. Never mind who fed it to you. And when that got old you just sunk back and let the data tickle you just right until it all spilled over and left you quivering, the rictus of a smile cut across your face.

We used to look up at the stars, a long time ago, and wonder when we’d get there. Flesh has mass, data doesn’t. So they brought the stars to us.

We rode that fucking info-high into the next generation.

It could’ve lasted; forever, maybe. At least until the Feed had scooped out anything that might’ve mattered. You couldn’t leave me be, though. A month after bootup you fished me out of it.

I’d been mainlining for hours, cruising, my non-form pumped full of century-gone bootlegs and text files with titles like “Anarchist Implant Pranks #3” and “Cryptocurrency fraud made easy.” I was burned out then, so I hitched a ride on a really foul algorithm, one that tossed me right into the deep end of an audiovisual garbage patch that got me all cozy and wet and delighted to where I didn’t have to think about Verj and my rent money and all the stacks of flimsy white plastic packaging down at the warehouse.

Your smile bubbled up through the datafog.

Silhouettes shimmied around us as the other non-people danced, or writhed, or whatever it was, and your eyes laughed at me as I sunk deeper. Buoyancy was never my strong suit.

“You’re sinking,” you said.

A feeling like a word foamed inside me but I couldn’t spit it out, my tongue caught in a finely tuned paralysis.

“Here,” you said. And you reached into me with a hand made of glittering phosphenes.

I felt your shadow in my chest as you yanked me out so that we sat together—two beached seals, feet dangling into the ether.

“There. I’m Valentina,” you said, and you brushed away bone-colored bangs.

My paralysis snapped like a rubber band.

“I’m Jack,” I said. And I wanted nothing more than to be the reflection in your irises.

Data has no mass, but it can burn. And somewhere far away my skin was glowing red as you plucked and nibbled at me with each careful little question.

“I’m not from here,” you said.

“Where’s here?” I said.

“My uncle lives on 73rd St.” You swung your chunky sneakers back and forth and waited for me to say something. “You don’t feel it? It’s so… hollow. Everybody thinks they’re talking but they’re just open mouths, everything coming in and nothing going out,” you said. And when I didn’t move you said, “I suppose it doesn’t really matter.”

And I suppose it didn’t. You promised to swing by sometime and show me your old records, ones that would still play if you tilted them just right, although we didn’t have a turntable to try them on. So when you came I offered to stream the songs instead, told you we could sync. Feel the beat in our heads.

You looked at me like I’d offered to drown a kitten.

“What?” I said.

“I cannot believe you made it this far,” you said, and you smiled.

Then you shook your head and rubbed your thumbs across the vinyl grooves. I told you to stop because that might break them.

“This thing survived a hundred years, my uncle’s basement. And whatever happened before he moved up from Gary when my mom got sick.”

“Have you seen this apartment?” I said.

A laugh squeaked out of you before you hid it.

“I like how they feel. You can tell when the needle sits wrong. Everything still plays but the song comes out bent,” you said. You leaned your head on me. “You’re sinking again. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

You never said why you stopped for me. You only said that looking at me made you want to laugh and cry at the same time, but not in a childish way, more like that way when a good song ends and you hadn’t even noticed it was playing until it was done.

Something ending. I keep coming back to that.