It was a quiet night in the afterlife.   Shaper toned down his shades and glanced around the room.   Quietly immersed in a cloud of non-data she leaned back in her chair and swirled some iconic ice cubes into a vapor thin glass.

Somewhere at data central a data cluster organized itself and shifted to a shade of quiet gold as though it somehow sensed the anomaly in its midst.   The muted taste of shattered rfid sensors worked their way across the smart grid like the crackle of frost on an aged windowpane.

He carefully amplified the pulse meter, dialing it in until he could hear her heartbeat.  There were no real secrets anymore, none that couldn’t be pried out by those who knew where to look and knew which questions to ask.  The metric that displayed in the fadeout screen before his eyes measured the slightly fast pace and relayed the data through the bio-meter.   She was clearly advertising, her presence, the fastest way to hide was in a cloud of noise whipped into a frenzy with random bits of atmospheric feedback.   Even in the afterlife, if you were running in silent mode you were somehow even more tangible than if you were riding signal waves across three continents at full bandwidth.

Without turning his head or sending any of the traditional alerts he was taking detailed readings, her eyes seemed unnaturally dilated, a refractivity scan of her eyes confirmed the presence of contact lenses, probably some of the latest Reid-Nikada optics.    He thought about sending a tag out into the sensenet through the eversion field but decided against it.

The noise level in the afterlife abruptly skyrocketed.

A rapidly moving cyclone, three paces in brought new meat and metal into the space.  The bio-monitor picked up the increase of heart rate and registered a sway of artificial pheremones bursting into the room.   The scent was aggressive and hungry.

The cyclone moved towards the center of the space in a raucous mix of adrenaline, swirling chemicals and bright tipped chrome nails.

Data flashed through the room in a bright wave, for a moment Shaper was greatful that he’d turned down the opacity.  Instead of reeling with the unpleasant sensation of  a megawatt flash burst going off in a darkroom the digitized noise, the data surge illuminated the room a bit.

They called themselves angels, chromed out with override projectors and a fast pipeline which fanned around them like dust born from metal wings.   They had a message, that much was clear, and they were clearly in the afterlife with the intent of delivering it. 

The cyclone ramped itself up to a tornado frenzy and split into three forms and headed straight for the girl. 

Whether they had amped the signal to get through to her, or whether they had actually intended to flash blind the room with their entrance, their arrogance was clear.   Brash and messanic with the swagger of rockstars, it really didn’t matter what they had to say.   Their banners declared them as bringers of light, their actions were in full live broadcast and they were clearly selling trouble.  

Shaper preferred to think of them as a form of data pollution and he reacted accordingly.  They were so busy projecting they didn’t see him flip the console switch.

Somewhere in a parallel reality, the hive mind began twirling through the scenarios.  The tracker had come full distance to investigate the strange disruption in the flow and was startled into awareness as it contemplated the unprecedented.   The cryptograph shuddered under the intense display of probabilistic behaviors and settled on a solution.   The response team ascended the alert and a low level supervisory beacon began to assess the data.    A convergence had begun and time dilated to a reckless heartbeat of indecision.

The bio-meter pulsed registering the attenuation of the signal and began to flash in a sequential rhythm as the heartbeats accelerated in pace.

From the depths of the anomaly a reaction occurred and her lips moistened.