Ariel met the attack with her own blade, her deck’s systems fighting the invasion of the foreign code as the ice sought a weakness, a chink in her armor it could exploit to get at the woman behind the electron image. Ariel thrust back at the ice, and it countered, clashing blades ringing in the hallucinatory world of the Matrix, a metaphor for a very real conflict going on between her cyberdeck and the computer system.