Ulfric Sai-Burr was widely regarded as the best necropolis raider in the business. This was not because he had replaced his left eye with a cyberport, though the optic nerve was known to give the best neural-cyber interface link. It was not that he was some anti-corporate rebel fueled by a burning hatred for the socio-economic system of the twenty-second century, though many of his clients believed that to be the case. It was most certainly not because he had a heart, as that particular organ had been replaced by a far more effective and trustworthy mechanical pump several years ago. The real reason that Ulfric was the best necropolis raider in the business was because he was a true necropolitan man, in the sense that he felt far more comfortable in the company of the dead than he did with the living.

The necropoli of the corporate world were digital servers into which the collected memories and personalities of ‘expired’ employees were uploaded. Officially, these data ghosts existed for in-house training and market research purposes. Unofficially, rumours swirled through neon-soaked alleyways like discarded cigarette papers on the wind. Digital fight clubs. Cyber-brothels. Psychological torture development. Few people in this world were heartless enough to abandon their loved ones to such fates, even a copy made of ones and zeros. Those who had the money to do so hired necropolis raiders.

With the frenzied dance of electricity still searing along his optic nerve from plugging in, Ulfric swam through the cyberscape of chrome and viridian until he could see the tombline rising ahead of him. He pulled himself up and out of the data current, shaking off loose flecks of code as he went, and through force of habit ran his fingers over his left eyelid. In the real world, he was just mostly organic. In the cyberscape he was one hundred percent artificial but at least everything felt real.

The closer he got the more opaque the static architecture of the necropolis seemed to become, until at last the rigid bones of the firewall solidified into a barrier across his path. It pulsed and glowed, tongues of ember running along its surface. Ulfirc was not surprised. Corporations did not like raiders running amok in their assets. He wondered how much of the profit generated by the data ghosts was spent on paying for the design of this firewall. Were the dead really that valuable, or was it the principle of the thing?

Regardless, this was far from the first firewall Ulfric had ever dealt with. He paced back and forth in front of the lambent structure until he found what he was looking for. Coders were human and humanity was, by definition, flawed. An experienced raider could always find the chink in the armour. Ulfric pushed his hands into the flaw, being careful not to touch the functioning code, and slowly widened it until he could fit himself through. On his way out of the necropolis he would pinch the flaw back together, hopefully hiding it for the next time he needed to raid this server.

A high-pitched noise assailed his ears as he stepped through the firewall, like the screeching of unoiled gears grinding off each other. Two antivirus programs, roughly canine in appearance, approached him from either side. Strings of broken code dripped from their glaucous jaws. Ulfric knew how to deal with such safeguards, however. Focusing on the structure of the data that made up his cyberform, he stepped out of a digital shell of himself while his real form, as real as a form could be in the cyberscape, blended in with the code of the firewall behind him. The antivirus programs lunged toward the shell. They passed straight through the ghostly facsimile and collided, shattering into thousands of tiny green cubes that melted into the chrome floor.

With what was hopefully the last of the corporation’s protection measures dealt with, Ulfric strolled through the towering mausoleum blocks searching for the right name. He could hear the digital whispers escaping from their tomb cubicles. They spoke of lost opportunities, eternal regrets and futile wishes. The dead were open books, stripped of the sensibilities that contort and muddle the connections between the living. To converse with the deceased was a simple exchange of data, which suited Ulfric far better than the complications that plagued his interactions in the real world.

At last, he found the right name and plucked the tiny silver box from the tomb cubicle. Sylvia Sissefus had been an accounts manager, a grandmother, a lover of horror novels, an alcoholic, a casual follower of Buddhism, and an avid swimmer. She had loved her children and loved them more when they flew the nest and left her in peace. She had hated the brutality of the sports her husband insisted on watching every night, but had sat through them to make him happy. She had never had any strong feelings about her job and had never considered the fact that her consciousness would be tied to the corporation for eternity. Everything she ever was, was contained in that small silver cube.

It was her eldest son who had hired Ulfric, and holding Sylvia in his hand the raider could see why. The sweet grandmother might have been made of ones and zeros, but nobody should have to endure what Ulfric could see in her digital memories of the corporation’s cyber-brothel. He crushed her cube in his fist, erasing her ghost, and scattered the shattered code on the winds of the cyberscape. Sylvia’s digital ashes swirled through the labyrinth of the tomb server, and for a moment Ulfric wished he could join her. He was always beset by an overwhelming reluctance when the time came to plug out and re-join the real world. Like the data ghosts in their mausoleums, however, he was trapped. Entombed in reality. A necropolitan man tied by biological necessity to the land of the living.