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In the GLOWNET, Club's sites are a common place for social life. Many people run most of  their lives through the cyberspace and the only way they can meet other people is in these points. Some take these to the extreme and become hikikomoris, hermits in their own houses who live and work from there. Isolated from the real world, many die young from degenerative diseases without nobody to take them to a hospital. 

The Awesome Sauce site is very calm at this time of the day as most people are working. There is an almost puzzling lack of detail: cleaning software has been taking care of the residual data and graffiti walls from last night. Later on, virtual interior designers will rebuild the place for the crowds of sprites that invade GLOWNET every night. 

Right now a sprite with the shape of a waiter smiles behind a pixelated bar. In one corner, a cleaner programme works in a wall trying to remove a very rude word. Another sprite, this one looking like some Middle East guy, smokes in a table blowing clouds of white pixels. 

"How can I help you?"

- Hello. We want something to drink, please. Plus, I would like something to smoke, like this guy - says Janus, pointing at the smoking sprite.

- I think he's our man - he whisper to 2Blads - Come on, lets talk to him.

#2Blads does not like cyberclubs. They remind her of her old boring life-consuming job. She finds them boring and tasteless. A part of her, the wild side that drugs unleashed, prefers the close contact and smells of a fight to death for money.

She approaches the cleaning programme, a very simple software of the like she used to implement in drones: task, movement, data input, reactions. If you know how, you can manipulate them to retrieve those data. 

The sprite girl puts her tiny hands over the cleaner. 

"Here you are, pals" the waiter puts two pixelated beers in front of you and then, two long cigarettes in your mouths "These ones are on the house "

Of course they are. Most cyberclubs use free cyberbooze and cyberdrugs as advertising. When you consume these goods, your GLOWNET sprite gets an imprint that allows megacorps tracking potential clients and predict market tendencies. Of course those imprints can be added to sprites in more subtle ways but if you accumulate enough of these, you get discounts in the real versions of the clubs. 

The Middle Eastern sprite waves its hand and bends the head as a salute.

"Salam, stranger"

Janus looks over 2Blads shoulder and smiles.

He doesn't know what she's trying, but it's clear that it just doesn't work.

Instead of insist in hack the software, he prefers to talk with the stranger, so he responds to the hail:

- Salam. I'm Janus. How do you do?

"Greetings, Janus. It's been a while"

The sprite smiles and puts down the water pipe.

"Do you still deal with the Chromers?"

The Chromers used to be a group of anonymous hackers who made a lot of noise a few years ago. After they dissolution, many have claimed to have been part of the group but nobody knows for sure.

In fact, Janus actually never was a member of the Chromes - though he was in deals with some of them.

Janus doesn't have a reason to lie to Hassan, therefore he'll tell him the truth.

 - No. The Chromes don't exist anymore. And I never was part of them. I always prefered to work by myself, you know.

Janus' sprite blinks and exhales smoke.

 - But now, I'm involved in something different. I'm employed by somebody who wants to find a missing woman. Would you help me?

 Janus doesn't introduced 2Blads to Hassan200, which might be seen like somehow rude - but it's evident that he didn't do that on purpose - he's just a socially inept guy.

Cleaner programmes remove useless data imprints from another sprites to allow better move in crowded sites. In the end, that makes them accumulate loads of virtual footprints that, managed in the right way, can allow to track someone.

#2Blads makes her best to enter the programme but sadly it's a Japanese one and there's no way she can understand a word.

"​Damn it!"

​"There are several millions of women registered in Glow City and a few hundreds of thousands more that have no official identity. Anything more specific or any of them suits to you?"

​#Hassan200 opens a small screen from the air and a long flow of data starts running. The middle eastern sprite lifts his eye brows.

Bored of the cleaning programme, #2Blads joined the conversation.

​"Hello, #Hassan200. My name is #2Blads and I come with #Janus. The girl we are looking for is called Amanda Wilkinson. For all we know, she is with the Iron Maidens. #Janus, can you show the photo we were given?"

"That will make things easier, effendi" #Hassan200 smiles. The data flows really fast. "I might have something. Let me see... I have some recent activity in a private bank account under the name Aimee Wilkinson. Someone with that ID (it should be her but use of amputated limbs with the microchip it's not that rare) took out five thousand bits from a cash point not far away from The Awesome Sauce two days ago. The account was closed six hours after that by the main administrator."

The screen dissappears with a blip.

"Will that make a difference, #Janus?"

Blink.

"Five grand? That's a lot!" ​the pixelated girl jumps in surprise "​Maybe she has been kidnaped and they are squeezing her. Who is the main administrator? I am starting to think that the girl is more valuable than we first believed. There is something here that does not add up"

"For sure!" says Janus "Aimee's relatives are very worried about her".

Janus nods as his pal asks about the main administrator. "And why would he close her account?"

"The main administrator of the account is a guy called Adam Wilkinson, Subsecretary A-36 of Internal Affairs in the Second Section of I+D of Pineapple Corporation. I suppose he is one of those worried relatives you say. If he has lost her, he obviously does not want anyone squeezing his accounts"

"Thank you for the intelligence. You've been very useful"

Janus sprite smiles gratefully.

"2Blads: we should go with the others and continue investigating"

Blink. 

Blink.

"What do you think about this, #Janus?"

"I think that somebody at Pineapple wants Aimee missing" Janus says. "If that's the case, our mission will be much more dangerous that it seemed".

"So now I wonder why somebody at Pineapple would want her completely dissapeared" continues "And why somebody else wants us to find her. I think that the worried parents are just a red herring to guide us to her without caring for any hazard. A harmless asignment is always a cheap asignment".

​​You leave The Awesome Sauce Site after saying good bye to #Hassan200. Travel through the GLOWNET is so fast that seems almost instantaneous. Your journey ends as sudden as it started in the place where you first met.

The GLOWNET is huge and information travels equally fast. Nowadays, some of the main topics are the fall of several important sites due to some cyber pirates followed by huge robberies in the companies. They call themselves the Silicon Sharks and at the moment they haven't claimed anything, they seem to do their business just because yes. Another trending topic is the autopsies of the perpetrators of the infamous "Doppey Avenue Massacre". First attributed to a vendetta or collective cyber psychosis, the bodies show some mysterious transponders that seemed to control the killers. Megacorps denied all participation in the event and claim reparation for the calumnies.