___Lumen___
The young lad stared at you, making a point of not breaking eye contact.
He clearly knew who you were as he addressed you;
Clerkenwell, no trouble here. You no start trouble
The chinks and the japs were small fry in a big town, mainly too busy slotting one another to get involved in the wider city scene.
Something had this kid rattled though which raised an eyebrow.
Awright mate? you making friends already? Johnny laughed, patting you on the shoulder. Leave 'im alone mate, Chinks don't start trouble with us, they know their facking place. Cam on, lets gets some lunch, I'm bleeding starvin'.
The wiry lad stepped aside, watching the pair of you like a hawk as you headed down the busy main street of chinatown.
Mandarin AR signs and oldskool neon bulbs dominated the view above the heads of the crowd, beautiful aromatic smells of food mixed with aromatherapy and massage parlours, though thankfully you couldn't smell the brothels from the street.
A mixture of curious tourists, the asian immigrant community and a few hungry brits roamed the streets, ducking under strings of lanterns and winding through queues of people waiting on street vendors for noodles covered in god-knows-what. Any normal visitor wouldn't even have looked for the Triads and Yaks monitoring the goings-on from their corners, subtly chatting away into their microtransceivers built into their jackets.
You and Johnny knew better though and you couldn't help but feel that something was out of the norm. The place seemed on edge.
Swinging down a sidestreet the foot traffic lightened. A row of lanterns arranged vertically denoted you'd arrived at the restaurant and you both ducked your heads under the low hanging timbers at the entrance.
It smelled divine and a stunning young asian girl greeted you with a bow, asking Johnny if he'd made a reservation.
She smiled and led the two of you through the half-full restaurant and through a curtain divider off into a VIP area.
Bowing again, she invited you to sit and gave you two real leather bound menus. The VIP treatment came as a bit of a surprise and Johnny just smirked and carried on reading the menu as your eyes bored into the top of his skull.
____Zweiblumen____
It was all bit of a blur, but the portal to the resonance pool was as clear to you now as it was then.
Masked and concealed, something had piqued your attention, no, it was more like you were called to it. As a challenge, some kind of test maybe?
Defeating its concealment was no simple task, but your sprites were keen workers and helped you shake off it's veiling procedures.
What you saw stunned you, it was the most realistic rendering you'd ever witnessed in the matrix, even as some of it stood at as utterly alien, it beckoned you in to swim and you couldn't resist.
You'd no sooner dipped your toe into the pool than it began to seep up your leg in a globular, quivering mass. Panicking somewhat, your instinct had been to shake it off, to run.
This only excited the "pool", agitating it and energising it.
Your body felt cold, numb and you began to hallucinate vividly. Layers stripped off of the visions you saw, node rendering stripped down to its source code, beyond that into its naked machine code and further still into the machine processes that interpreted the light-speed binary streams. It tugged and poked at your consciousness, at your soul as if looking for something, as if it were judging you.
Your memory becomes fuzzy at this point, though the next thing you can be sure of was waking up in the office with a splitting headache. That headache took three days to subside but you've felt stronger every day since then.
The commlink pings and vibrates with an incoming message. Bex had forwarded on the collection code for you, marked up as **URGENT**
