Minutes before she found the body, Vanessa lay with her nose pressed against the glass of their suite's glass-bottom balcony. She was on the 200th Floor penthouse suite in Diamond Pacific Tower, the highest residence in the city, 3,000 feet above the ground. She looked down at the network of air cars, skytrains, and walkways connecting the five Towers, twinkling and pulsing like radioactive tentacles. On the right side of her vision, her Integra Mod listed the city's vitals: 30 deg C, RealFeel 41 deg C, Humidity 87 percent, Cloud cover 99 percent.

A body weighing 110 pounds falling from this height would hit the ground in 13.67 pounds, at the speed of around 130 miles per second. The sudden drop would cause you to suffocate, make you unconscious before you even hit the ground. Thirteen seconds from here to there, slower than a turn of the head as you pass by someone in a corridor, faster than familiarity.

"Are you there?" she told the voice in her head.

Two weeks ago, she used a fake name to start using the Hopper's services. The Hopper didn't even give her a name. "Yes," the Hopper said.

Vanessa sat up, and she could almost feel the apartment's gleaming, beeping, blinking screens and Hover cameras adjusting their sightlines.

"May I ask," the Hopper said, "why you requested for this demo? You have been using the service for a couple of weeks now. Is there something wrong?"

She lay facedown on the balcony again and pinpointed the Towers like a child connecting the dots, or a teacher pointing out constellations, leaving blurred fingerprints all over the glass. Diamond Pacific to Emerald-Garcia-Tomás to Dimasalang-Washington Opal to Ruby Paragon to Sapphire Yu-Ang-Jimenez.

"I just want to know what it feels like to be Mod-Hopped," she replied, her eyes filling with tears.

"You are not supposed to feel anything," he said.

If only. "Tell me how it works," Vanessa said. "Let's say I'm a target."

"If you are new to the city, I can control your navigation system and direct you to where the clients want you to go."

"And if I know the city?" Vanessa asked. "If I don't use the navigation system?"

"I can give your location to the client so the client can approach you." He paused. "That's it. It's perfectly safe."

"Perfectly safe," Vanessa echoed.

"If you were truly Mod-Hopped you wouldn't even know that your Mod has been compromised." He paused. "Some Hoppers leave a signature."

"A signature?"

"A message when a Hop has concluded, like a signature. A feeling, a smell, a sound, a burst of memory."

Her eyesight narrowed to a pinpoint of white light, like a tabletop screen that had suddenly shut down. She almost screamed.

"Relax," the Hopper said. "This is still me."

The pinpoint widened to a window of bright sunlight, and Vanessa could see feathers, wings, something fluttering against a lace curtain, a small brown bird caught in the flimsy fabric.

Unable to tell now whether she was awake or dreaming, she took a step forward and pushed the curtain aside. The bird, ecstatic, flew around her, and Vanessa turning her head to follow the bird's flight, found that she was in a room with white walls, blue trim. She opened the window, not knowing what else to do, and she felt the breeze on her face and lace curtains on the skin of her arms, and the bird zoomed past her head into the white blaze beyond.

She felt—she didn't know what to name it. Comfort? Something she had not felt in a long, long while.

She blinked, and found herself in her room again.