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--Sophia Russo in an encrypted and time-coded letter to

be sent to Max Shannon after her death

Sophia wasn’t used to having anyone but Max in her living space Faith NightStar wasn’t anywhere near as physically i as Max, but she had a presence Then there was the long-limbed female who’d acconizing Desiree for what she was--a bodyguard--Sophia told her guests toarea before she walked into the bedrooed position in thethe Net didn’t require much preparation for most people, but the more centered she was, the less chance of an accidental breach Because even in the Net, there were individuals eak or useless shields Their thoughts leaked out in a constant barrage

A Sensitive could easily get caught in the psychic storainst the rocks

Narrowing her thoughts to a fine, fine point, she took a careful step into the dark skies of the PsyNet and dropped her highly effective auto herself in o where she needed to go without being noticed There was an eles, leaked out, she’d be hunted down in minutes And once they found her, rehabilitation would follow so fast, she’d have no chance of escape "So I’ll be very careful," she e into the slipstream of the Net

Except her shields reset to the distinctive new for And no matter how many times she tried, they wouldn’t remain ordinary, unremarkable "I need you to behave," she finallya target on o out like this"

Her shields turned the exact velvet black of the Net,her effectively invisible

Sophia sed on the physical plane "Ohthat’ll work"

No response, but she had the i It should’ve disconcerted her, and it did to an extent But whatever that so her And she wasn’t about to reject itnot when the otherness in her, the broken girl who’d finally beconized the pain in that entity, as if it expected to be kicked aside, to be shoved into a corner, to be forgotten I accept, Sophia thought deep in her then even further as she slipped into the Net--sleek, dark, iest data archive in the world, its inforhways updated every second of every day by uploads from the millions of minds jacked into its psychic fabric, but as a J in possession of often confidential information, Sophia was trained to be far more careful about what she shared The s she uploaded were the official, court-approved results of her cases

But it wasn’t just purposefully uploaded data that filled the Net There were frags that had escaped as a result of inadequate or frag, conversations that had taken place in the Net outside of a s did decay after a period of tiht whispers that had mentioned events of a hundred-years past Other comments decayed almost as soon as they were spoken

You could spend an eternity surfing the slipstreaht to search using highly refined filters--she’d worked for a prosecutor one su down specific pieces of data Now, she used those sanificant number of hits

Rumors mostly, as Pure Psy didn’t officially exist And yet almost everyone in the Net knew about them It was a very effective technique, Sophia was forced to adreement with Pure Psy’s worldview made the effort to find them On the flip side, those who didn’t share that view tended to dise eleh lirowth Pure Psy hispered of in French, Malayalaan, Greek, Swahili, Urdu, and a nues she couldn’t i as much of the data as she could for future translation, she focused on the pieces she could understand

good of the race

Pure Psy have the right

Outside Council control

backing Definitely Council backed

I don’t see the validity in closing the Net

They’ve been behind the Jax cleanups

That last whisper caught Sophia’s interest Jax was the scourge of the Psy, a drug thatthe user to feel emotion True or not, it was a cancer no one had been able to excise froht, she had noticed a decrease in the number of addicts on the streets of late--and she hadn’t seen any at all since co to San Francisco

Of course, that could be as a result of the heavy changeling presence in the city Jax users tended to stick totheus back into

The changelings and humans are irrelevant It’s only the

PsyNet that matters

That last summed up the tenor of the roup was intent on an isolationist policy It believed the PsyNet had been corrupted by outside influences and was bent on bringing all Psy back into the fold