The rowhouses were tight like a spreadsheet's columns someone forgot to total. Gaine tossed his dreads over his back, untangling the two thick cables that emerged from his scalp like ram's horns, and walked up the broken marble steps. While other homes' welcome mats displayed slideshows of happy family pictures, his mat ran ads nonstop in return for just enough funds to keep the debt collectors at bay, and in Catonis, they were the last people you wanted on your back. Enforcers looked the other way when they came knockin'.
       Stepping inside, he opened the stolen vending machine that doubled as a fridge to grab a beer and entered the living room, throwing a towel over the broken-off street lamp that lit the room to dim it. A shattered mirror divided his reflection, casting it in different angles until it seemed foreign. His middle-aged face was perforated with bullet holes of boredom.
       He fired a message into cyberspace looking for work; got a response within seconds from an anonymous source directing him to retrieve further details in Hype. He called a few guys for assistance, but no one wanted in, so he jumped into Hype on his own. His cognigraf implant let him render cyberspace however he wanted, feeding it through his artificial eyes. Though he was creative, his cybersea was quite literally a sea, quenching his thirst for knowledge and providing a reprieve from the flames of everyday life, whether it was the angry flames burning at his former employer, Oilcore, or the flames that lit his latest addictions.
       His virtual skipjack cruised the datawaves, drifting through nodes upon a pulsating purple grid that wove below the starry expanse like a snake writhing. Lattices of shimmering light etched Hype with interlocking code. Waterspouts spit advertisement bubbles that he swatted away. A school of fish leapt from the water in a spiral foray, binary code flashing in patterns off their scales as they spun above the glittering sea. Discarded datastreams merged and drained into a whirlpool archive.
       He wet his finger and held it to the night sky; the datatide was trending northward in rhythm with familiar routines. He was sent to find a mission briefing, but where was it? Information wanted to be free -- it called to him in splashes of code his implants deciphered. As the splashes became more vigorous, he slowed to cast a rod over the boat's edge. Nothing, nothing, then a bite. He reeled it under the lavender moon, some kind of cylindrical glass fish. No, a bottle containing a message, the hook caught in its cork. He shook the jar; it beeped with a message notification and popped open.
       The message read: A sensitive data packet has been dropped off in this sector awaiting pickup near an Oak on the shore. It contains an unpatented, nearly complete blueprint for a new gaming device that will revolutionize the industry. We need you to retrieve it. We wanted to hire only the best for this job, but couldn't afford it, so we figured your lame ass would do. Use this tag so we can trace you and make sure you don't defect with the blueprint: @$$h013_69.
       "The things I do to make a livin'," he scoffed, rolling his eyes at the tag, and then reasoned, "Always wanted to open my own bid'ness, go legit with the whole makin' a livin' thing. Little jobs playing courier are getting me nowhere though. Still, makes no sense they would conceal the blueprint in a public space, even if it is virtual. Probably concealing their tracks while avoiding a direct connection.
       Another file was appended, but it was created after the main file. The script was different as if someone had intercepted the message but was too afraid to steal the packet. Someone with the tag, N0-V@. The addendum, oddly spaced, read:
       Beware                 Julia Sete.
       Who the hell was that? Where to even start? First, he'd make landfall, then look for anything unusual, but that could take years, even with the clue. How do you find something hidden in a world that's constantly re-rendering?
       The scene vanished as he docked, slipping into and under itself while the next environment loaded. His avatar flickered in rhythm with the modulating streaks of light weaving data threads into mosaics. A waterfall of light fell from a cliff. Disembarking the boat, sand rendered beneath his feet building dunes grain by grain. Tidal pools of isolated data with limited access plotted the shoreline, each its own virtual instance, glimmering surfaces barely interfacing with the world, just like his life.
       A fractal texture replicated outward to provide variation to the virtual terrain, creating mountains, valleys, and river tributaries, in addition to tree branches and even his arms' veins. That gave him an idea. In geometry, fractals weren't stationary; they were moving, a formula for variation within constraints -- chaos within order. By applying customized fractal-based codes, he could sift where the irregularities were in the virtual world, the places where things were hidden. VR was always changing, but fractals could model this dynamic complexity and predict it, showing the least likely areas of variation. If variation occurred in those areas, it was an unnatural part of the VR world, meaning data had been hidden there.
       He spent the next two hours designing the search protocol. He routed it to his hands so he could wave them over the landscape, and they would scope the area for any unusual variations. He traveled like this, scoping, moving his hands like a mime, or a mine detector, but the abnormalities thus far were just glitches. Finally, standing atop a tall mound of grass he detected the packet buried beneath the largest rendered Oak.
       Glittering barbed wire blocked access to the plot of land, but his fingers analyzed each barb, twisting the bright shards of data within. He found a weak spot, stepped over a tripwire, and got close enough to the tree to see its etching: One person's lost is another person's Gaine. What the hell did that mean?
       He wove his hands over the unusual bump beneath the tree to confirm his find as the signal strengthened. Packet confirmed. The packet resisted being touched, his hand slipping off its datashell as it darted away, but he shot it with a tracer followed by an immobilizing honing shot. Unzipping it, the blueprint expanded, replicating and folding outward to re-model the environment with its scrawl. The data had been compressed with a fractal-based codec by someone who was as obsessed with them as he was.
       Julia Sete, a mathematical allusion. It was a name but also a warning. The addendum hadn't read Beware, signed Julia Sete, It had read Beware Julia Sete, but the spacing had been off. Must be someone's tag, but who was their employer? Another person's Gaine... someone who had lost him as he moved on in life. He solved it -- his former employer, Oilcore. Before he left, he had uncovered compromising intel regarding their environmental destruction and their exploitation of the poor, and he knew enough about poverty that he couldn't stomach it any longer. Gaine had burned all the bridges behind him, but those bridges didn't burn clean enough, and now they were dragging him back in with this trap to sever their ties for good, no doubt threatened by what he knew.
       "Well, well," a woman said, dressed in an ochre Victorian men's suit with a purple-laced vest and a wide-brimmed hat. "My models have already predicted how this turns out for you," she scoffed. "Shouldn't have turned on us. Let me introduce myself," she said with a swing of her hat.
       "You can cut it right there. I know who you are, who you represent."
       "Then let's get on with it."
       Koch snowflakes fell from the sky like shurikens, each one expanding. He dodged left, right, the blades striking deep into the soil. It went on like this for half a minute, but he couldn't get a shot in. At least the pattern was easy to predict, easy to avoid.
       Too easy. It was a distraction!
       He ejected from Hype by merging with the pulsating glow that bloomed into the landscape. A neon spiral encased him, and he vanished into the glittering air, leaving only an automated simulacrum in his stead, its icon dimmed and ghostly amidst all that brilliance.
       The real world hit him like a baseball bat. No, it was an actual baseball bat, two of them, and the slackjaws wielding them in his house had just busted his shoulder. The men twisted to prepare another swing. He took advantage of their off-balance position and charged one, pushing him aside. The guy fell, and Gaine fell with him, not by momentum but necessity as he ducked the second man's swing, which knocked chips out of the wall behind him. The guy tugged to get his bat unstuck from the wall.
       Vision glitched, random colors bleeding through in blotchy squares. His cognigraf was being hit in Hype, but he couldn't jack back in without losing his ability to defend himself in the real world. Yet, he couldn't allow his cognigraf to become damaged to the point he was comatose either. He right mind-clicked and jacked into Hype.
       Julia was firing viruses as tracers swarmed around his head. His firewall shield deflected the blows, but some infection had penetrated and weakened it. Soon, the floodgates would open into his mind for the corporation to download, or erase.
       He gained distance, shot the tracers down, and ghosted himself, his image translucent. He flickered back to meatspace to dodge a punch, then back to Hype to dodge a virus, and this flickering between the real and virtual kept on faster and faster until he could barely tell the worlds apart, his vision overlaying the virtual upon the real.
       This is how people lost their minds and became Forever Glitched, but the strobing of the worlds let him defend himself on both fronts simultaneously. He shot at Julia, sidestepped a snowflake shuriken, grabbed the baseball bat as the guy pulled it from the wall, leapt over the fallen man as he rose, and slammed his bat down on him. The fallen man blocked the blow with his own wooden bat, breaking both in half. He tossed the handle aside, shot at Julia in Hype, and backed into his kitchen where he found a steak knife, keeping an eye on both men while flickering in and out of the virtual.
       "We don't want no trouble," the first guy said.
       The other agreed, "Listen, we thought it was an easy job. Knock a man out while he's in Hype, get the message ‘cross. I'm outta here."
       The guys left, leaving only the threat in Hype.
       "Give it up, Julia. You know you can't win."
       "I have an insurance plan," she smirked.
       "Your assailants? They just left screaming like children in fear of me."
       "What? That's impossible."
       "You failed, back off. You were never one to put yourself at risk. Never got your own hands dirty while you ordered us to tarnish our souls."
       "This isn't the end, Gaine! As for the file, it really is worth a fortune, but I just infected it with a virus no software can beat. I have my own copy I'm patenting tomorrow morning. The virus is destroying your copy as we speak, and if you touch it, you'll be destroyed along with it. Enjoy!" she yelled, dissipating in a pixel array like a firework fizzling out.
       Infected or not, he had to have that file. He opened it, the virus running through his implants. It would shut down his cognitive processes in the real world soon, but that file was worth a fortune. As promised, the file was almost destroyed by the time he retrieved it. He drifted to a central node to fast travel to the shoreline, file in hand. Making it to the waterfall of data just in time, he cleansed himself of the viruses, the ones and zeros warping in and out of his system.
       A system notification sounded, and he ejected from Hype. He took some old pizza boxes and used them to prop up the broken leg of his computer desk. The blue glow of the monitor filled the room. Quarantining the file, he ensured it was clean before sending it to his desktop. This was the moment. He opened the file.
       It was all gone, all of it. Only a few small pieces of the blueprint remained.
       But a smile lit across his face followed by a cig. He had this. The file was compressed using a fractal algorithm as he had previously discovered, but the beauty in this type of compression is that any part of the file could reproduce a near similar construct of the entire file. This wasn't due to data duplication like a QR code, nor was it like a lizard's tail growing back -- it was due to the fundamental nature of self-similarity in fractals themselves. Running the file through a visualizer, he zoomed in on the remnants until the entire structure became visible again.
       The blueprint was his! It was legit, alright. Worth a fortune, but he didn't have the working capital or credit to produce the device so he would auction it on the underground market for someone else to patent before tomorrow morning. Now he could open a bid'ness selling mods and augs at reasonable prices to people who couldn't afford them otherwise, even if it meant he never became rich himself. The poor would once more be able to compete with the educational and occupational advantages of the well-to-do.
       Over time, the beautiful and elusive N0-V@ became good friends with him. The Mandelbrot Scheme became known in all the greatest circles,
       and Gaine as the legendary @$$h013_69.