マンコ・セイント

...Or at least that was his online handle, its foreignness complementing the man behind it.

Although he sat in his wheelchair nigh motionless, drool forming at his lips, it would be a disservice to call him apathetic. Only his body was lazing about; rather, it would be quite fair to call it unoccupied, like an empty closet or a vacant hotel room. It was a shell. His mind was everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere at the same time.

His desk was adorned with monitors, on the edge of , which blanketed the room in a dim, bluish-green glow. It was a Spartan room, with an air bed, an adjoining restroom, and the computer. It was actually composed of several independent machines, each fulfilling a unique, esoteric niche in this man's invisible, electric universe. The keyboard and the mouse had been cast aside from disuse. They were replaced by his visor, currently in use.

With a start he slurped up his drool, a small cracking through the atrophied muscles. His skinny, unkempt frame fought to chuckle, managing only a heightened exhale. It looks like the time was upon him.

Society may have largely gone post-scarcity, but the empowered simply did not care to share their fortunes with the rest of society. He couldn't really blame them. In the emerging unemployment and mass mechanization of the workforce, welfare had become a way of life for more than the down-trodden.; or rather, being down-trodden was the norm. There were no riots, no collapse of the state, no great reaction to this spiral of the workforce. Even if it was only a pittance, the welfare system, with emerging technology, allowed people to consume and remain entertained 24/7. And so they did.

He was different though. Plagued with a thin, weak constitution but an all-consuming imagination, he had sacrificed all the pleasantries of the welfare system to obtain new parts for his body. He had a million eyes, a few thousand arms, and a mind which was jacked straight into the mainframe.

It was highly illegal to perform a Noiagery, as the most self-enlightened netizens were wont to say, but more commonly called a "Brain Jack". Besides, the risk of retardation, infection, , and the threat of eventual loss of self deterred even the most interested candidates. Never mind it usually required a small team to perform working in an underground hospital, while the patient was conscious, which was harder and harder to execute undetected in the increasingly connected world. It seemed that humanity had collectively decline an intimate link with machinery, with only a handful of successful cases and a mountain of rumors to keep the dream alive.

He preferred it to be a dream. It would be awfully convenient if people woke up to their work. He sent his new, encrypted message into his mind, where it was decrypted and realized. Who needs words went the message goes from one head to another?

It was a simple message by their standards, but explaining it fully is impossible without a near complete understanding of context. The jist of it was: The subject had been primed, her mind partitioned, and they others were waiting for him to begin the maiden voyage.

Brilliant! He thought. In truth, he could not thank his compatriots enough. Although he and one colleague had long considered nerve generation to be a controllable process, it was through the groups their years collective studying and experiments that they had found a completely wireless method to control this process, and that an in vivo neural partitioning scheme was finally brought into existence. They ruined the mental well-being of a few unfortunates in the process, but the group was completely amoral. Coincidentally, they all each possessed a means to kill every other member in the group, or at least get them arrested if they so desired it. Its sounds a little MADdening, but its a good incentive nonetheless.

Connecting to their transient, clandestine network, he and the members had a short meeting, in the span of a few minutes, where they outlined every detail of the experiment. Thoroughly prepped, he took the biggest risk of his life thus far: he opened all the virtual ports in his brain to his fellow members.

If they had so wanted, they could have sent him into a seizure, sensory overload, or worse. But it was in their interest to patch him through, and so he felt his mind, little by little, slip into a nonexistent blur. Eventually, expectantly, he blacked out.

When he came to, he knew he was no longer he. His body was thousands of miles away, hopefully being maintained by the team; he wouldn't hold his breath on their word, though.

Pushing that though aside, he was surrounded by absolute nothingness: he was nothing. Most people would scream towards the heavens, thinking they were in hell. He knew better. Mentally probing the nothingness, he sent out a request, and received an immediate response.