[i][color=green][big][b]Let[/b][/big][/color] me tell you a story, kid. A story about deckers. Yeah, that's right, deckers. Back before everything and its mother was wireless. Back then, everything was... pretty much the same. Console cowboys went in, stole whatever, got their brains fried trying to crack the black shit; the works, really. Only big difference is you spent half your time digging for an adapter because God hates us all too much to let the jackpoint be the same brand as your deck.

[color=green][big][b]Now,[/b][/big][/color] fast forward to the year... Shit, don't even give me that. You're a wannabe skiddie if you're in this and don't know the year the [b]Crash[/b] happened. And that means you know all the stories about the poor bastards who were jacked in at the time, too. [color=green][b]"Ghosts in the machine,"[/b][/color] all that horseshit-- except it isn't. Friend of mine got caught in it. Pronounced dead as JFK, brain just as fucked up.

Only, he got back to me.[/i]

[color=green][collapse=The Geek][color=gray][i]God, he was a fucker. [color=green]Toshiro Ohtsuki. [/color]A Jap national, insofar as that means a damn thing nowadays. Two things you could never get him to shut up about: giant robots and anime bitches, both of them been around twice as long as him. Dude ran his own anime titty node, for fuck's sake, but it certainly explains how he got his handle. Said it was from some old Nipponese cartoon and that I'd never understand it. Then he called me a stupid fucking gaijin.

That was the last thing he said to me before I saw his name listed amongst those dead in the Crash.

You have no idea how fucking [color=green]bad[/color] I missed him doing that. [/i][/color][/collapse][/color]
[color=green][collapse=The Ghost][color=gray][i]Usually, when the singular operator of a node goes down, it winks out-- [color=green]especially[/color] when the op dies during the Crash. Whole swathes of the matrix got wiped out, never to be found again.

But he's always the exception, isn't he? The [color=green]Oppai-net,[/color] he called it, giving me that shit-eating grin. It came back, and it had [color=green]more[/color] inane bitches with eyes way too goddamn big-- not to mention their bustlines. It was like nothing had happened. Same old-school 2D images and video. Said someone had to keep it up or else massive troves of completely inane porn would be gone forever.

It took me months before I could force myself to open one of the updates. I thought it had to be some kind of script he'd set up. It was a fluke that it kept going after the Crash. That was how I explained it, steeling myself to see nothing but the usual bright colors and impossibly firm tits.

I got a message request as soon as I logged in. Same commcode as he always had.

He told me the whole story. Said it took him a week of reading news feeds just to figure out that, yeah, it was THAT Toshiro Ootsuki they were reporting dead. He had no idea; just figured the Crash had fucked up his deck, preventing him from jacking out. Said he tried not to think about not ever having meat to go back to. He always joked about how great it would be to live Matrix-only, and there he was, starting to question his own existence.[/i][/color][/collapse][/color]
[color=green][collapse=The Gigolo][color=gray][i]I couldn't let him stay like that. It took me half a month of legwork, but eventually I found it. No one made bots with support for offsite personasofts any more. Too risky. The only one I could find was a vintage sexbot, kept up inside of an old warehouse after recalls came in so fast they couldn't even get the first version out on the shelves.

That's how he reminds himself that he exists every once in a while. Goes out looking like a huss about every week or so and comes back to hit up the Matrix again.

I'm so glad to have him back. [/i][/color][/collapse][/color]