Johnny "Crystals" was a young, startup 3rd rate data runner. Despite this he'd overcome a mean addiction to Eyedot and the loss of a limb in his brief 17 corporeal years. He's sitting on an old wet-modem, NeuroStream Model #SR-84 - one of the first to have post-optical feeds. Old stuff by modern standards really, fits in with the rest of the dilapidated scene around his abode. The door hangs off the hinges on his little technopile shanty in the scrapyards. A mocking wind howls outside in the desolate night fallen upon the mostly abandoned, dirt-paved streets with flickering lightpost. He checks his power supply, the green LEDs flickering on it and the modem indicate proper levels and signal to noise ratios for Cerebral-circuit synchronization. He throws a couple virtually emulated switches in master programs GUI. With violent immediacy, images stream directly into his synapse from some unknown, remote origin. Must be that new automated enhancement app he installed. It didn't seem to have any user-end settings open for configuration he recalls, losing himself in datastream. Immense packets of light-based downloads hit his solitron wires and seem to expand from their state of limitless compression. Fractal-zipped archives. Each drop of watery-light ripples against an infinite wind of consciousness, fracturing into ever-growing worlds and evolving microverses. Johnny's excited - his pulse is like a frantic message relayed in Morse code. He's sustained, in spite of this erratic heart rate, by a deep burning euphoria painted to a perfect fine tip.
On a remote sensor his bio-chemical frequencies are carefully gauged. "This one's ripe. Pull the plug." says the broken operator behind his cracked, green goggle lens, thick with misty condensation so as to blur the screen immediately in front of his face. "Deploy the Sub-etheric harvest droid network, please." They push a red button.