A lot of the learning had been on my own, downloading texts, digital magazines, and even academic papers from the Matrix. When hypertext hadn't been enough, I'd sought out a couple of the eminences grises of Cheyenne's "virtual tribes"—aging deckers who didn't have the reflexes to shave ice anymore, but who kept up with the theory because it was all that was left for them. I guess some of my "professors" had seen some potential in me for the trade, because they'd tried to pressure me into going under the laser for a datajack. Okay, granted, I could see their point: Even for the kind of code-slinging I was doing tonight, a datajack would have made the job so much quicker. Fingers on a keyboard are no match for direct neural connections.