He lives in the network. When the windowshades and eyelids fall, enclosing the light from within in an absorbent nullity, his fingers go to work with his own portals propped open with a river of coffee. Across an ocean he touches a school server, locates a few numbers, and drops onto a network where he rents time and connects through the far east to a series of increasingly abstract locations.

The dot beneath an image gives him access to a script he overdrives and commandeers, veering his course through a farm of corporate databases, borrowing data freely and plugging it into the profile of a corporate customer. Soon this unlocks his access to a network of networks, hidden inside the noise of everyday traffic but alive to those with the right keys and the software package in question. Like a city lighting up at night, the connections are before him.

Neurons fire and dendrites beckon as he retrieves memories and assembles the tokens into computer code, testing his own anticipations against the machine's reaction. Networks are not physical things, but switched pathways; with electricity, they are alive, computing directions in which to route information, but without power and users, they are dead, oblivious to the infinite possibilities of connection.