Sam Kryzinski expected another boring, normal day at the office. Renraku had been paying him a comfortable salary as Coordinator of Matrix Security in their Chiba offices for four years. and that was as long as most good deckers lasted. Sam had stayed the course. It was a day just like any other; April 20, 2057, gray clouds and sixty-one degrees in the late afternoon, very comfortable for the time of year. There were no new wars of any significance on the globe, and no fool decker had tried anything more than flirt with the fortress-thick IC around the peripherals of the central Renraku system for weeks. It was also another day closer to his retirement and a good pension. Sam was thirty-four years old, already balding and slightly overweight, an American with the elevated coronary risk normal for someone of his age and profession. He divested himself of the jacket of his cut-price, Taiwanese rip-off Italian suit and dumped himself down on the titanium-chrome frame of the ergonomically designed chair in his office. Just another day.