The light was blinding, rushing past in an electric blue and white. Chay was falling, falling into an endless light-streaked hole, his stomach lifting up into his throat. Energy crackled around him, and he reached out his arms—no, not his arms, because he didn’t have arms here. He had a thought of arms, only, but he reached them out as he fell and grabbed for the lightning that crackled all around.
With a lurch that almost made him lose his lunch, he was no longer falling but was in a kind of stream. A stream of data, he realized, moving through the servers not just in Black Mesa but all around the world.
“You’ll probably find the internet port first.” Torrhanin’s voice came from far away. “They are at the highest levels of the interface because I felt that web surfing might be the easiest transition for you.”
Surfing...this truly was like surfing, jetting across tiny packets of information as he called them up from around the world. He decided to plunge into the DOD’s servers—always a challenge, even with his back doors, because it wasn’t one system but dozens, some archaic, some highly vulnerable, and some locked down like a digital Fort Knox. He stretched out and somehow the information sieved through him, and in an instant, his mind was launching across thousands of miles, skipping over oceans of darkness to the bright hubs of the major server farms until he found his objective: A virgin network, one he’d never attempted to enter before. It rose like a slippery, black wall before his mind.
He reached out another thought, and all his intrusion tools sprang into his control. Laughing, he launched them with a flick of a thought-hand. Then the flood of information truly came.
He found he could dance above it, somehow plucking the important bits from the flood as effortlessly as breathing. The strengths, the weaknesses...he began to understand not only the tools but the wall itself, its solid surface dissolving into a jagged landscape.
A landscape with holes. He put his hands into one of them, felt its edges and the fatal fault line that ran from its edge. He opened his mind more and more, getting drunk on the sea of data that floated all around him. Chay took hold of the edge of the hole and he pulled.
The wall collapsed around him, on top of him, buffeting into his wide-open mind and sending him rocketing back across the network until he slammed back into his own brain with enough force that it knocked the breath out of him.
Chay blinked and discovered that his eyes had been open the whole time and that he was standing exactly as he’d remembered in the middle of the spook shop in front of his battered favorite chair. The only difference was a throbbing headache that followed the line of the band around his head.
Tara’s eyes were wide with alarm. “Chay?” she asked.
“Wow,” he said. “I’m back.”
“I was saying that you should be careful with how wide you open your mind,” Dr. Torrhanin said, looking stern. “The recoil can be severe.”
“Yeah, I didn’t hear that,” Chay said, lifting the mind-net carefully from his head. Not only was his head pounding, but his stomach roiled in reaction to what he’d just been through.
“While any reactions are purely psychosomatic and temporary, they can be quite uncomfortable,” the elf continued.
“Yep. Got it,” Chay said tightly. Taking the damned contraption off hadn’t helped any.
“Cold water and a dark room often help. In a few hours, you should be able to try again.” The elf plucked the mind-net from Chay’s hands and set it back on the pillow.
“Looking forward to it,” Chay said in a strangled voice, and he staggered toward the sink in the kitchenette, where he jerked the water on.