The clock strikes midnight in the depths of the ocean of data. The never-sleeping neon of Titan City licks the one-way glass curtain wall of the "Neural Web" monitoring center, dyeing Laura's pale side face with a layer of flowing purple and blue. She was curled up in the floating operating chair, her eyelids were as heavy as lead, but her fingertips were unconsciously tapping ghost rhythms on a translucent holographic keyboard. In front of them, more than a dozen floating screens were slowly rotating like cold nebulae, flowing with symbols, waveforms and abstract topological diagrams that ordinary people could not understand - these were the real-time thought tracks left by the tens of millions of uploaded consciousnesses in Titan City in the digital cloud.
