Cold. Endless expanses of cold.

Walking the place like this, it's inevitable. It's not a unique feeling when you're patrolling the grid.

Fleeting images of happiness flickering by your soul, wrapping around you like an errant gust of wind...

The grid is imperfect. It leaks. Neural impulses seep from its intricate weavings.

Somebody's got to patrol the grid.

The sense of disconnection is almost overwhelming. Sometimes your optic nerves stimulate themselves for lack of stimulus - blinking images of neon brightness flash and linger as false afterimages of a light that never was.

The only touch is the chill - it beats against you, palpable, overwhelming the thin rustle of cloth and synthetic fabrics rubbing against skin, taut insulation trying to damp out all cold and feeling but only succeeding in one.

It wouldn't be so bad if the damned thing didn't leak.

Like a crack in the shroud of a sensory-deprivation chamber, it focused you, drew you forward, made you wait for each glimpse of light. Each leak focusing your entire comprehension towards it.

Scene - a bright hillside, a sunny day. A family dines around a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. Birds chirping in the distance fade to a ghostly wail as the figures become transparent. The optic nerves no longer feel the stimulation, and it disappears with the feeling of a memory suddenly gone, something that both stays with you always, and yet can never be known again.

The grid - is this the end of it?

I'm the only one left, I think. Masters and Cahill took the plunge a week ago, sat down and let the machine do its work. I'm the only one left, now... and the machines.

The ration bar clanks out three times a day, the exact same taste, no stimulation. Too much might mess up the grid.

But it's so lonely... I understand now why Masters and Cahill gave in. It's so easy, to be free from the constraints of this vessel, this temple of the self...

I can't let go, not yet. Can't succumb to it, to let my brain be uploaded. To establish myself as a piece rather that a whole. For while the grid gives power beyond imagining, it takes away the very core of human existence.

Masters' and Cahill's bodies lie limp, floating in the remains of the saline fluid. I stare at their bodies, hanging, rotting in this ethereal gloom. That's not the way for a person to go.

Masters and Cahill might as well be dead.

I look again at the massive, blank face of the grid. I can feel something twisting up inside me, tearing at my insides. I, too realise that I will eventually have to succumb. Someday the ration bars will run out...

Something snaps into place in my mind. Power, such power, and yet...

Emptiness. Hollowness. Power without directive - a body, a mind, without a soul.

The grid is a zombie. I know what I have to do, for myself... and for the others.

The laser welding torch only takes slightly longer than a second to burn through the control box, my mind focusing on its point of brightness.

Then my senses overload, as the grid shudders, convulsing, and finally explodes in a blaze of light, reality, and actinic blue sparks.

A wave of memory washes over me, the experiences of a billion lifetimes coursing through my brain in a split second.

And an almost imperceptible sigh, nearly lost in the haze of images... humanity is escaping its final constraint. I can almost feel the combined power evanescing, coalescing... and then it is gone, in an eyeblink, a sudden feel of omnipresence, of infinite speed.

Then the images fade, and the last few actinics die out, leaving the smell of scorched plastic and a flat black plain lit by the faint glimmer of light from distant stars.

I am alone.