And who wouldn’t be slotted up? she thought. Running into black ice—getting killed by it—was an ugly reality of the decker’s world. Every time a decker put his brain on the line and jacked into the worldwide computer Matrix, he risked running into some intrusion countermeasures program that was just too tough. Risked having his brain burned out—"slagged down," to use the argot currently in vogue among deckers—or getting flatlined by some kind of lethal biofeedback. That was just business as usual, no more remarkable than the risks a mage took when evoking a powerful elemental, or a street samurai playing bodyguard for a hot target. Among deckers, it was bad form to talk about ice, except in technical terms or when telling war stories, or bragging about a major score. It didn’t matter that Sly wasn’t a decker anymore. The protocol would never change. The fact that Louis had described the death of the silver child in such detail revealed just how much it had disturbed him.