Damn it, I know I'm drifting, but this is my story and I'll tell it however the frag I want to.

I was born in the Denver free trade zone, on November 30th, 2030. According to Mom it was a bloody cold night, though there wasn't any snow yet. And being as contrary as always, "I" decided that two-thirty in the morning was a pretty good time to enter the world.

When I was a little kid, the free trade zone wasn't quite as "well ordered" as it is nowadays, the national zones were all pretty new and the boundaries fluxuated fast and furiously. If you were an anglo and one day your home just happened to be on the wrong side of the border, you were lucky to be able to get out with what you had on your backs... unless, like us, you were lucky enough to live in one of the corporate enclaves; the nationals didn't want to scare off all that tax revenue so they didn't mess with the corps too often. 'Course the other corps were plenty willing to mess around, from what I remember the city streets were pretty fraggin wild.

Grandma died back in '36... though sometimes I swear I still see her icon sometimes when I'm in the matrix... haha, ghost in the machine, who knows? But if you ever cruise the DFTZ matrix watch for a really ephemeral afreet... sigh... Ayee-Eff-Are-Eee-Eee-Tee, it's from Arabian mythology, a fire demon...it looks like a person made out of fire. Anyway she died shortly after my folks were transferred to the Seattle office of DNAtech. They were so caught up in the day-to-day stuff that they didn't even go back for the funeral; that really upset me, I barely understood that she was gone, but I knew that her death deserved more notice than my parents seemed to be able or willing spend on it.

They even had a baby matrix for the kiddies to play around in.

When I did see my folks mostly they fought... don't really know what about though Dad really hated Seattle. Hated the constant rain, the perpetual clouds, the whole place; I remember him saying to Mom on numerous occasions that he only planned to stay as long as it took him to get to a position where he could transfer us to someplace habitable.

I suppose that was scragged us...the way I eventually heard the story was that Dad had manuevered himself to one step below the directorship of the preventitive genetics division and supposedly he had something on the director or at least the director thought so. One day Dad was found with all sorts of incriminating data that said he had been leaking interferon research data to Aztecnology... Most corp's treat espionage as a capitol crime, ya know? And unlike this supposedly free country we live in, with a corp there's no trial, no jury of your peers, just an execution squad.

Nothing but what we had with us and what was in the car that Mom snagged out of the company garage; no clothes, no cred, zilch. At first she didn't think it'd be so bad, just a matter of lying low until she could get a line on another corp. Places were always looking for skilled lab managers, and her skills were certainly well above par. What she didn't count on was DNAtech continuing to hunt for us while putting out the word among the other corps in the area that Caitlin Donahue was a renegade troublemaker.

We sold off the car and made enough to be able to rent a tiny apartment in Renton. We were only able to stay there about eight months; Mom couldn't use her SIN to apply for welfare because DNAtech had a bounty out for her, and the odd jobs she was finally able to get working in convenience stores and stuffer shacks just didn't pull in enough cred to keep up the rent and feed us... and we went hungry alot. It's all kinda black to me now, I mean frag-it I was only seven years old... what the hell did I know about what was going on? All I knew was that Dad was gone, Mom was scared almost all the time, and I couldn't leave the apartment because the neighborhood was too dangerous.

I joined up with the Renegades when I was about nine. I was lucky, I looked older and was big for my age....one more crack like that chummer and you'll be breathing out of a slit in your neck. They used me as a lookout mostly, though sometimes I could crawl into places and open doors; which was nice because I could usually pinch something on the way that I could trade for food or other stuff later. You didn't think that us kid's got a share of the loot, did you? Hell no! We were in it because you didn't say no when one of the older Renegades told you what to do. You didn't get drek unless you did something on your own, or managed to fraggin claw your way into the gang's pecking order.

Kruger was the doc's name, he used to have a place he called the Nightmare Shop over on Spruce, or was it Pine? No matter, he checked out rather garishly back in '47. At any rate, he had a turtle in the office that he used for running down parts, supplies, info on his competitors, and what not; I used to mess around with it when I was waiting around for his operating room to clear. After I found a novel little virus that was daily sending the patient list and financial info to one of his competitors, Dr. Kruger was suddenly rather interested in more than my looks. Doing simple stuff like that for him was enough to get me a datajack and eye job.

A few rumors floated through the net about a major upper echelon change at DNAtech... I later figured out that this was when Renraku, unofficially of course, bought them out clean because they were planning a major new release of a interferon-derivative that would have fragged a rather large project that Renraku was heavily invested in. This really changed Mom's attitude, I guess she figured that with the top folks out and the rest of the management in chaos, the bounty on us would be lost in the mess. And I guess it was, Mom never went back to using her old SIN, but she did manage to eventually land a job as a temp secretary without major plastic surgery. That job spelled the end of life on the street for us...

...what the frag do you mean, on the net? Oh, the rumors...back in '44 during the riots, the Renegades made out rather well on the looting. I picked up a Sony CTY-300 in that little bit of mayhem...yes, it's a deck; geeze what rock have you been living under? By that point I'd already gotten a datajack from Kruger and was chafing at the slowness of the turtle that he had; having that deck was like being a little kid again. Oh sure it was a bottom-of-the-line-off-the- shelf-slower-than-shit deck, but compared to the turtle it was an Excaliber. Yep and it was like being a little kid living on the edge of the freeway, I was almost geeked a half dozen times before I figured out that it was as dangerous in there as it was on the street. Anyway, I managed to find an online establishment called Mary's Place, where a newbie like myself could hang out, keep quiet, and learn the ropes of matrix etiquette and survival.

That was where I heard the rumors of the shakeup at DNAtech; Mom made use of that info to get us off the street, and that was about the time I really realized the value of simple information as opposed to the value of stuff. Oh drek, I know what I was doing for Kruger was protecting his info and getting him more info, but that wasn't as detached as the info I got on DNAtech. No matter, I can tell you haven't got a clue... take my word for it, information and data are worth a lot.

I was also still learning in the Matrix, and those classes helped fill in a lot of the areas that I was weak in. Pixel? You don't know what a pixel is? You are a fraggin zoner, aren't you? Take a look at a vidscreen sometime, if you look really really close you can sometimes make out the little dots that make up the entire picture on the screen. Each one of those dots is a probably ten or a hundred pixels. So zoner, have you seen the Matrix? Maybe a picture even? Ok, now try to imagine how different a place as glorious as the Matrix is would look with one more or one less pixel... no difference at all, no? That was one of the reasons I picked up the name Pixel; I can get into or out of anywhere and noone will ever have a clue.... oh sure it was a bit pretentious, but what street name isn't? It's cheap advertising.

Out of curiousity I'd decked into DNAtech's system and found out what happened to our personal stuff after we ran. Most of it was picked over by the neighbors, but my figurine set was picked up by the then vice president of operations... as it turns out several of the figurines were originals and the set was worth rather a lot of cred. After the Renraku buy-out, this guy went to work for Genecraft Biodesigns and kept the set in a case in his office. It took me about two months of hunting around to lay down the groundwork for this; figuring out the security system, the practical assault routes, checking around for a hit team that I could afford and would feel comfortable hiring to put the snatch on a set of highly fragile crystal. In the end it cost me 30k nY, though I hired the team for 50k and that was 10k additional because I was going to do the decking and they weren't too thrilled with that.