He was lying, of course. He had been trapped by ice—once and only once. It was an experience that haunted his nightmares. But he didn’t need to fear a repeat of that experience. The artificial intelligence— if that’s what it really was—that controlled the deadly ice lived locked away in the Renraku Matrix, and he was never going to enter that terrible black pyramid again. No matter how slick these druids were, their deckers couldn’t be playing in the same league as the megacorp that controlled most of the world’s public data structures. He would be safe from anything he would encounter.