Dodger forced his perception out of cyberspace. Normally the consensual hallucination by which meat operators could deal with the intricacies and machine speeds of the Matrix was advantageous. But his investigations were anything but normal, and his usual working methods had become something of a liability. To make sense of the shifts in some of the icons he was perceiving would take seeing real numbers and machine code. He thought he knew what was causing the shifts, but wasn’t sure. He suspected that the shifts were signs that the AI was out there. Once, it had made the Renraku matrix shimmer with mirror planes of infinity and had ghosted icons to evanescent translucency. The shifts he was observing could be within its power.