The descent into the void wasn't a fall; it was a transition. The roar of the mountain wind was replaced by a digital shriek the sound of raw data streaming past our senses at the speed of light. My skin felt like it was being peeled back, not by air, but by lines of scrolling green code. Beside me, Dax was a flickering silhouette, his leather jacket dissolving into a lattice of shimmering pixels.
"Hold on!" I screamed, but the sound didn't come from my throat. It was a packet of information broadcast directly into the darkness.
We weren't on a bike anymore. The Norton had transformed into a concentrated pulse of energy, a "Ghost" program navigating the sub-layers of the Aegis network. Around us, the architecture of the digital frontier began to solidify. We weren't in a lab or a forest;
