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My implant itched.

It didn't actually itch—Dr. Marchetti had explained the phantom sensations when I got it installed, something about the brain mapping unfamiliar hardware onto familiar feelings—but I scratched the back of my neck anyway.

"You're doing it again," said Kira, not looking up from her tablet.

"Because it itches."

"It doesn't itch. You're nervous."

"I'm not nervous. Why would I be nervous?"

"You're about to let a stranger ride your body like a rented car."

I threw a pillow at her. She caught it without looking—Kira's reflexes were augmented, which she claimed was for her security job but which I suspected was mostly for winning arguments. "It's not like that. He feels what I feel. That's it. People do it all the time."

"Weird people."

"Fun people. His name's Rex, since you're dying to know."

"That's not a name, that's a furry handle."

"It's what he goes by. He's an upload. They pick new names."

Kira's face did something complicated. We'd both grown up in the same neighborhood, and we both knew people who'd uploaded. The money was good, especially if you were young and healthy—the corps paid premium for clean neural maps—and once you were digital, you didn't need to eat, didn't need rent, didn't need anything. That was the pitch, anyway. The reality was that uploads lived in cut-rate server space and worked shit jobs for corps that owned their runtime. But they got paid upfront, and for a lot of people that was enough.

"I still don't get why you want to do this," Kira said.

"Because it's fucking interesting? Because I have this implant and it can do things and I want to know what they feel like?"

"You could also just not."

"I could also die never having done anything worth talking about. Pass."

Kira shook her head, but she was smiling. She knew me. I'd gotten the implant in the first place because my friends were getting them, and then kept it because of what it could do. Record experiences. Share them. Connect to systems that would've seemed like magic twenty years ago. And now I'd found this forum, and this new thing it could do, and of course I was going to try it.

I'd found the sense-sharing forum three months ago, late …