The Subterrain. 12:36am. This area here; abandoned subway tunnel, the tiled walls slick with damp, grey-green sludge oozing from the cracked mortar, graffiti - abandoned too. The long fluerescent lights ceased even flickering a decade past. Even the sewer rats don't run here much. Too close to the collapsed tunnel, it's a dead end. Everyone avoids deadends in the warren of the Subterrain. Everyone that wants to live, wants to get high, get wasted, get fucked. The drugs aren't sold in dead ends. Sex neither. Not even a tat parlour. Only the lowest of the low bother turning into a dead end. The shitters want to take a dump, or dump the body. The air is stifling. The sound is dead, like the end. The stench is stale urine and faeces and rotting body parts. All the Subterrain is dank and dark and dirty - but it's home to a third the city's population, but there's places even they won't go. Other than a toilet, a cemetery, a garbage tip, what's this place got to lure in a pretty little thing like Kali? Only the most private internet hub she's ever fucking found.
The computer interface long since liberated, screen stolen for a homemade tv, keypad sold for drugmoney. Still, the jacks are there, the wires stripped bare in places but still there. Kali only has to survive the stench long enough to get herself plugged in. The padded tip is missing here, that bit of metal - rusty. She knows she's risking an infection, but she wires up anyway. Addiction outways infection, every time. Without the interface there's no fine tuning, and the power's lying dormant and in need of a jump start. She crosses the wires expertly and feels the sudden rush of static. Bliss. The waves of static roll over her. Everything is oblivion. Her senses are swallowed by the ocean of abandoned space, the pathways lost, the empty bites in their trillions upon trillions, or maybe not empty, maybe only unreadable, jostling in the cyber space that no longer has reason. Hitchhiking the super-highway to nowhere. She feels herself emptied into the internet even as she herself is filled with the flood of information it gorges out at her that screams NOTHING. The static that fills her veins her neural pathways devoid of the beauty and meaning they were once intended for, now screaming NOTHING into her brain and lungs and heart. It swirls inside her as she wallows in the void that stretches to infitity in every direction including time, and yet is only a foyer, a waiting room, a station, with the timetables down and the train never coming, and the destinations long since forgotten. The closest to death she's ever been, the closest to the clouds where her father rose and abandoned her, his club tie around his neck, his smile broad and smug and unapologetic. But he's not in the clouds, her brain struggles to articulate above the rolling static, not in the sky but in the scrapers, towering over her and her mother just as he had when she was young, but now she was in the clouds, in the sky itself and higher so much higher than he would ever be. Her teacher's warned the empty net was like the deepening pits of hell, black and consuming, but to her tonight it was the sky endless and expanding, she rose and stretched and was filled with infinity and she was the universe. The universe was inside her and her bloated empty mind was bursting at the seams. Cracks appeared like lightning. Cracks in her mind that appeared before her eyes in the endless expanse that she had swallowed.

3:15am. Jack has entered the dead end for the only reason a sane man would. He slit his pants and slashed the wall with urine, strong with GutterGin. He staggered as he did his fly, and saw the slumped form of Kali below the pillaged internet hub. Behind her half-closed lids, her eyes were darting wildly. Saliva wet her chin. Her arm was discoloured, the veins bulging, where the damaged jack had caused the start of an infection.

"Ah shit." Jack muttered. He didn't need this. But he was a net junky himself. He saw the signs of a beginner going too far too fast. Not to mention the spreading infection. He knew it would hurt her, but without the interface, or a twin-jack to go in and retrieve her, he had no control but to rip her out of there by force. He grabbed the jacks and unplugged her, none too gentle in his drunken state. As the wires withdrew so too did the static, the empty signal getting sucked back out of her, draining a whole sea from her mind in a second - the gurgling plug hole so loud in her ears that the pain was unbearable. She scrunched up her body and tried to cover her ears. Jack held onto her, hoping she wouldn't hurt either of them before returning to proper consciousness. 

Ten minuted later she notices that she's no longer floating in outer space, that she has indeed a body of flesh and bone, and that it is sitting in a rundown subway, craddled in the arms of a stranger. She looked up at him, remembering that she was wired, but not remembering him at all, not remembering pulling the plug. "Who are you and what are you doing to me?" She asked, though all that was audible was "ha?". 

Jack interpretted it pretty closely, and answered, "You were in too far, I was afraid you were going to blow out, so I pulled you out. I'm sorry. That arm will need looking at." He pointed to the infection. Kali winced, recognising the sensation of pain now that her brain was coming back on line. "I'm Jack, by the way. I ought to get you home, if you trust me? Do you have someone to look after that?" Meaning the infection again.

Kali shook her head, or thought she did. The tiny movement to the left was signal enough for a fellow junky. "Right, well, I can take you home and recommend a guy for you, if you like? Where you live?"

"Fitzroy."

"Sure, I can get you there. I know a guy in that area can fix you up."

"No. Phoenix Towers. Level 5."

"No shit! You live in a scraper? Even level 5, that's high enough to know better. What on earth are you doing down here, surface dweller?"

"Junky."

"Yeah. I hear you."

"Mum." 

"Kill you?" She tried to shake her head again, her eyes got wet enough to suggest tears. Jack took another guess, "It'd kill her? Yeah, so you don't want to upset mummy. Look, if you're not opposed, I got a place on the surface myself, though not in any tower trunk, an original dwelling, I'm shacked up with this old guy and he knows more about the internet than God. He's an original Pirate." 

Kali half-heartedly agreed to go with Jack, still knocked about by the abrupt return to reality, she allowed him to half-carry her out of the dead end and eventually towards the ancient terrace house of one original Pirate.