I wanted more than anything to learn more about magic, more than the trideo could teach me. So I let Chad’s boyfriend Tarien teach me how to access the vast databases of the Matrix. Some of them were public and easy to get into, even if you didn’t have a SIN. Others were only for people who paid for a subscription, but I learned there were ways to get around paying. I would spend hours sifting through datafiles, then going out on the Matrix and getting more files to download. By the time I was eleven, I was the only kid who knew the symbolism of the four hermetic elements, the primary divisions of elemental spirits, and the Norse runic alphabet. My friends would kid me when I corrected things we saw on TV and said it wasn’t the way magic was really supposed to work.