Side tracked by computer geekery.

You quickly find all sorts of weapon dealers listed, but none that have anything impressive or automatic. For that apparently you need a fixer. You have the name of Max but don't know if you can use it given your current state. How do you explain that you aren't you anymore but that you are you. Not to mention do you really want to? You got captured fucked over as Lynx, not to mention there are all kind of people looking for Lynx. Finally you spot something promising, a software company that specializes in net applications. It doesn't look legal at all, but oddly enough it seemed like your past experience looking around on the net with the girl just sort of made their ad visible, or easier to notice anyway. You head there and find only a computer interface that you can log into next to what looks like a very old school change machine of all things.

Logging in you again find yourself the little blob of conscious energy and looking at a massive vending machine. There are millions of programs, or constructs, as many are called but you can look them over so fast it is amazing. Plus you seem able to do all kinds of searches for any manner of program as well. Remembering what the girl said you decide that you need a persona. There are literally thousands all written my any number of either anonymous or named programmers. “Guess some people want their name out there.” You say to yourself standing there, though only someone walking by your still immobile body would hear it. The second you see one, you know it is the right one, a cute cheerleader with flowing blonde hair pulled into a ponytail with a yellow and blue cheerleader uniform with long white socks and cute white shoes. She stands there rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet as you read over her statistics. Then while reading you find there are even other versions with other colored uniforms, hair, shoes, etc so you can customize it, with each substitution it seems to also strengthen the chip associated with it. You get a bit carried away tweaking this and that till you smile satisfied and click “Buy.” A glowing $25,000 appears and outside your body lets out a cough as you look at the price. But there it is, you stuff the $100 bills into the changer till it is satisfied and a little door opens and a chip falls out. Picking it up you slot it into your head as you don't have a deck, another thing you might want to invest in at some point, but looking at the adds for them here, you need to make some more money first. Sure enough you can access the chip, but the data nearly fills your memory so you dump it back onto the chip and pull it out, logging back in as you do. Clicking and looking around you find it seems you will need a chip jack so you can slot more than one chip at a time, or a deck to really use anything here. You do have a lot of memory in your head so you can use the persona, hell if you had just got a really cheap one you might have been better off, but aah well. That idea in your head you go ahead and pick the base model cheerleader and drop another $3000 on it. Sure enough slotting it, you load it into your memory and run a diagnostic. It only raises your used total from 12 to 15%. Getting now you want the basics, finding an add for a doc where you can get a 7 slot chip jack that is nearly undetectable for $9000. Not a bad idea. Quickly you drop another $20,000 on utilities, getting a bit carried away. You buy an attack program styled as a pair of sawed off double barrel shotguns that are then strapped to the persona's sexy thighs, a code breaker styled to be a little cell phone with two wires attached that slides invisibly into a belt that is added to the girl, another that is a distraction that you think is cute that looks like a tiny kitten that rides in a little backpack, an armor utility that looks like 2” silver wrist bands, next a device control utility that when you buy it, it just adds three more wires to the little cell phone utility. Finally you find one called a persona distraction that looks like a sexy woman dressed in a black leather micro mini skirt, matching bikini top, and sky high clear platform sandals. After depositing the money you take the 6 utility programs and slot them into memory, it raises your total to 43% which isn't all that bad, but with another quick swap the expensive persona and everything else raises your total to a whopping 90%. A quick scan indicates the little persona uses 3, the attack 5, the kitten 3, code breaker 5 with device control raising it to 7, the armor 2, the slut distraction 11, and finally the large persona uses a massive 50%. Carefully you take all the chips and put them in the handy little case that the machine also spits out once you click the “Done” button, and load all of the programs into memory other than the large persona.

While standing there finishing up the screen asks you a question, “Welcome fellow decker, what's your handle?”

You stare back taken aback by the question and realize you still need a name, and as you just dropped $48000 leaving you with only $21,000 left. So little considering you don't have a single weapon and you are most likely homeless. Well it is time to decide are you still Lynx? You are somehow absolutely sure if you give any other name here you can never go back. Thinking it over you decide...