Even now, even after having been "off-line" for more than five years, she still enjoyed listening to decker talk. Most of it was at the down-and-dirty, bits-under-the-fingernails level: techniques for dealing with the latest generations of ice, novel new hacks on old utilities, new ways to "juice" a cyberdeck to squeeze more performance out of it. The biz—in terms of both hardware and software, and with regard to the underlying theory—had advanced almost unbelievably. So much that a lot of the talk around her might as well have been in Elvish for all Sly could decipher of it.