Fastjack felt old. He told himself it was just the UV host, dragging on his sore, non-existent muscles in a bare and twilit non-space. About a mile away, the serpent writhed and grew as he watched. It was about to make another pass.  Joints complaining all the way, FastJack stood up and shook strands of  red-and-grey hair from his face. Seven whole seconds left before the next cascade. At least he could still access the math sub-processor stapled to the inside of his skull. With a grunt, he lifted the hammer level with his shoulders. Damn host must have converted memory size to perceived mass. Three seconds. It wasn’t really the parched and leathery skin, matted beard, long dirty nails or blue-green eyes  he minded. FastJack wasn’t that vain about his icon, Hell he’d gone through enough of them. No, it was the crow’s feet, the bulging veins on his hands, the graying hair along his arms, the web of faded scars.  One second. That and the wrinkles. He wasn’t that old.
	The impact damn near rattled the teeth out of his receding gums, hefting the hammer in a terrific arc to contact with the beast’s incoming skull. Perfect timing, and the massive snout ground itself into the dirt. FastJack moved with an unnatural vitality, swinging the hammer to counter every assault of the wyrm’s massive talons. FastJack indulged in a mad cackle. They could shackle him in whatever damn icon they wanted, it didn’t matter. The serpent withdrew, licking its wounds, preparing to attack again. He stared it in the eye and spit on the ground.
	“I don’t care what Norse fairytale I’ve fallen into. I’m FastJack, the best decker in the Matrix, and I’ll be damned if I go down without a fight.”
	Even his scars felt old. Arthritic knuckles grasped the hammer tighter. Six seconds.

	Fastjack felt cold. Damn winter was reaching him even here. It’s too damn weird to wake up and parts of your body are colder than the rest. Probably weirder when you get used to it. Dammit, even his cyberware was feeling old. Tired eyes fell on a glossy rectangular ad. One of these days he should go up to that Transys facility in Scotland. Hibernate through the winter in one of those newfangled cryogenic tanks. “No cellular decay or your money back!” the ad promised.
	To Hell with that. Bad enough how the cold creeps into your bones without inviting it in. Oh well. Work to do. Strap on the bio-monitors, hook up the drip and the catheter, set the massage liners to focus on the joints and lower back cycle today, insert plug and
	*Click. Ahh. Nothing like jacking in. Quick, clean transition. Cut out the meat and put on your mask. No more tired old man. Just FastJack. Hell, in the old days you had time to go to the bathroom before you got on. Frames busied themselves about him, industrious on their tasks. A thought summoned an itemized report: the imminent stock offering by Novatech was definately stirring things up. Six hours until the opening. He checked his mail, but nothing too important, just a few job offers. No priority messages. Nothing from his daughter. 
	He had an appointment. Time to go.

	The next assault was harder and faster. It was getting harder to block its blows, and the stench tearing at him. A miasma of filth and decay that burned his mouth and lungs. It made it harder to concentrate as he aimed his blows, and a couple bounced off scales like iron without doing any damage. FastJack spared a glance at the girl hanging on the tree, and the wyrm took advantage of the momentary lapse. Suddenly it’s jaws were clamped around his hammer, the great black snout only inches from him. It was a game of tug, the serpent arching itself back, trying to tear the hammer from his grip. FastJack held on with all he had, his feet digging furrows in the gritty black earth as the wyrm dragged him away. It’s breath was even worse, this close. Fastjack could see the oily chrome venom dripping from its teeth, practically feel his body breaking apart under the corruption.
	With a final, vicious tug he wrenched the hammer to the right, then threw his weight with it to the left and it broke free from the beast’s maw. FastJack noticed it took a few teeth with it too. Spitting blood and venom and broken teeth, the beast roared and retreated…only to begin growing in size once more. It was cascading. Drek! With a wordless yell, he leapt after it, JackHammer raised high. Five seconds.

	Finishing his log-on to the Berlin grid, FastJack saw it was the usual mess.  Even in the Matrix, the Free City was a city divided between the clean, imposing icons of corporate IC and the motley shantytown of local systems from the anarchist part of town. It wasn’t good to dawdle in either section, corporate deckers patrolled their half regularly, and the other side of town was open to any madman with a deck. With impossible ease, FastJack slid into the fractal monolith of the University, skipping through classrooms and crowded hallways to the dorms. Just to be polite, he knocked and waited ten seconds before entering the node. He was greeted to the sight of his appointment hanging from a tree under an open sky.
	Analysis showed the tree was some sort of construct, type unknown, and it wasn’t attacking or actively acting on her icon. Probably doing an otaku thing with her daemon, then. Nothing to worry about.
	“Hello Perri. How‘s it hanging?” Her pink eyes flashed at him in annoyance. Very nice work on the icon, if you like the albino-fur-covered maiden look. You could even see the blue of the veins showing in the skin.
	“Jack. I told you last time, I’m the Skald now.” She was removing herself from the noose even while she was talking. Bloody kids. Six months ago, she’d been Michelleangelo. Six months before that, it was Ba’al. It had been eight years and a lifetime of innocence since she’d called herself Perri. He should have remembered that.
	“Sorry. Skald. I’ll remember next time.” he apologized. She snorted, then sat down. So he sat down across from her. Time for business. She straightened up in a perfect lotus-position, a Nordic bodhisattva staring into the middle distance.
	“You do not come to me for answers.” Her face was blank. FastJack don’t know if that was on purpose, or if she was concentrating too hard to adjust the icon. “You wish to know the question.”
	FastJack nodded. This is what he came here for, after all. Even in the beginning, when he‘d first found her, FastJack had known that Perri could do things he couldn’t. She was otaku.
	For a second, her icon froze, then shifted. That was unusual. What was happening?
	“Skald?” Her icon froze, shifted, and froze again. Suddenly, she was normal.
	“I cannot tell you the future this time, Jack. I have to show it to you.”

	The tail came out of nowhere and slammed him away in mid-leap. He heard, more than felt, the rib break. Fastjack performed a perfect kip-up, with hammer in both hands. He ran in close, evading sudden snaps of mouth and tail alike, and leapt upon the broad expanse of its back, ridged with jutting spires of bone.  The hammer came down like a pile driver, and the ominous crack of the serpent’s spine was sharp enough to hear through its roar. Fastjack drew back the hammer for another blow when the body shifted beneath him, that sickening mouth coming down, grabbing his hammer and wrenching it from his grasp, letting it fall to earth a hundred yards away. The decker felt his heart sink as the wyrm shook him off, and the broken vertebrae of its spine mended in a new spurt of growth.
	“Frag me.” Four seconds.

	They were skipping through the stars in the sky, bouncing from satellite to satellite. Skald led while FastJack followed. She was talking. He listened.
	“The future is coming, Jack. We’re running out of present. Something is going to change, or end. It’s the Novatech thing. All those people…drek, I’m glitching this all up by talking to fast. Letting my mouth wander while I play my channels. Some of the otaku, we can see the future. Except it’s not really the future, but we can intuitively construct very accurate models of what is happening and will happen, right? Or something like that. But we’ve hit a wall. There’s a date, a time, an event beyond which out Sight won’t reach. You could do economic models past it and all the rest, sure, but if you try to see past it by sorting the data, you just can’t. Nobody knows why, either. It’s really freaking us out.”
	He hated to interrupt, but he had to ask. “This event. What is it?”
	She stopped cold and stared at him. “The IPO. Critical mass. Ground zero. The Gunningagap .” Skald turned back and said “We’re almost there. This is our host.” She opened the connection and they stepped through.

	It was high time for FastJack to pull a trick. He had to get buy some time, get back his hammer. Its hard to concentrate on the code behind the world when all of your senses are being told they’re not in the Matrix, but he wasn’t called the best decker in the Matrix for nothing. And Perri was counting on him. All across the plain, skeletal warriors rose from the ground, grasping rusty swords and tattered shields. Yes! These were the defense systems of the host system, which had been de-activated so that they wouldn’t interfere with this little battle. FastJack didn’t allow himself a grin as he raced for his fallen hammer, smashing any skeleton that got in his way. The system wouldn’t be particular. It would go for Perri and Fastjack as well as the beast. Time was of the essence. Three seconds.

	They were on an open plain of gritty black earth. The sky above them was twilight, and contained eight massive planets.  FastJack felt the weight of years on him, all the ache of the meat brought back upon him. Or maybe that was just the big damn two-handed hammer hanging on his back. He could feel the head dig into his shoulder. A UV host. They’d just stepped into a UV host, on some private host somewhere in the North Sea. Skald was gone. He wasn’t alone.
	Half her face was perfect, pristine and beautiful. It was a face he knew. The other, the left, was twisted, deformed and rotting. She wore a grey linen shroud with black raven-wings poking out the back like a morbid angel.
	“Pax.” The dark otaku smiled, half her face becoming a rictus grin.
	“FastJack. Welcome to the future. Welcome to the end of the world as you know it. Welcome to Valaskjalf.”
	“Slag the drek, fader. Where the Hell is she?”
	That did it. Pax exploded into a hundred and two crows (thank you, math SPU) and flew off into the sky. A Graceful Log-Off. He’d heard otaku were sensitive to the Fading, but damn. Time to find Skald and get out of here.
	“I’m over here, Jack.” He spun around. She was hanging from a tree again, but this time her discomfort was obvious. A spear rested beside the tree. Immediately he reached for it to cut her down.
	“Jack, don’t! Listen to me!” Skald sounded frantic. FastJack stopped. A roar sounded behind him, and he looked over his shoulder to see something coming toward them. It roared again.
	“It’s called Jormungand, Jack. They want to destroy the Matrix, make it over. They’ve planted the eggs everywhere! They needed me, to get to you-they were afraid, they thought you could stop it. I’m special, Jack, I can hear them both. The Dissonance and the Resonance are in my head. Pax wanted me to join her, I did it to save you…bring you here so you could kill it. You’ve got to kill it, Jack! It’ll eat the world!” 
	Tears ran down her eyes, Ghost, what had Pax done to her head?
	 “The only way for you to log off is to kill me, Jack. Pax thinks it’s the only way to keep you here. You have to stab me in the side with the spear, you have to…oh. It’s coming. We’re going to die.”
	FastJack drew his hammer. It looked massive and ancient and deadly, with a simple twin-swirl of a rune engraved on the black iron head.
	“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

	“FastJack…” Perri was speaking to him, but the decker was a little busy keeping the skeletons from gutting them both. The hammer swung in a dead figure-of-eight pattern, crushing the systems IC. Jormungand was simply consuming them, and large chunks of the landscape as well. The whole system felt brittle, and the stink of it was everywhere. He hoped his repair program could handle the damage to his icon.
	“The Egg…you have to kill the Code Egg…” Even as she said it, Fastjack watched the wyrm consume the rest of the skeletons. It had grown huge. Jormungand encircled the dark plain, it’s coils crushing the distant mountains and it’s massive head overshadowing the planets moving in the sky.
	Jormungand came towards him. This would be it. The final battle. Either he destroyed the thing, or it would consume them both. FastJack squared himself up. The scratches from the skeleton had been taken care of, but whatever Jormungand was inflicted damage on the meat level. Even if he did walk away from this one, there was no telling what he’d be walking away to. Two seconds.
	He saw it then. Impossibly far away, a great black egg. Even if he made it there, Jormungand would consume Perri before he could destroy it. There was only one thing to do. One second.
	Hurling the hammer felt like ripping every tendon in his body at the same time. With the math SPU, he calculated the angle to perfection, all he needed was the strength to hurl it fast and hard enough. It flew straight and true, like a bolt of lighting, up into the sky…then back down at a killing speed to crush the code egg where it lay. Zero seconds.
	FastJack stared up into Jormungand’s maw. It couldn’t cascade anymore, but that wasn’t stopping it. One last effort, for both of them. They lunged for each other. FastJack dodged under the serpent and grabbed it. It rolled and twisted under him, but he gripped too of its venom-weeping spines and  heaved upward. It might have seemed impossible to anyone who saw it, but this was the Matrix. Even in a UV host, the rules could be bent or broken by a skilled decker. FastJack was better than skilled. He was the best damn decker that ever lived. Holding it above his head, FastJack slammed the serpent into the ground, hard. He did it again, trying to whip its head against the earth harder, but it coiled away from him. It recovered and came down, that great mouth extended to swallow him whole. He didn’t move as the serpent clamped its jaws around him, though the venom ate at his flesh. He planted his feet against the floor of its mouth and pushed. Slowly, the deathly jaws were pushed open. Jormungand writhed and tried harder to close its cavernous maw as the lanky, scarred frame of FastJack’s icon brought it to full extension…and beyond. The jawbone dislocated with a wet, crunchy sound and a burst of static. FastJack fell to the ground in a pool of venom and his icon’s blood as Jormungand roared, it’s mouth hanging open obscenely to reveal a whirlpool of pixels.
	FastJack had an idea, and grinned evilly. He stretched out one grizzled arm, the folds of flesh spattered with oily bile. The hammer flew back to its masters hand, and his swollen finger joints closed over its haft. He realized he was talking to himself “We’re still in the Matrix. JackHammer is still in my Active Memory.” Hammer clutched in one hand, FastJack grabbed onto Jormungand with the other and hauled himself astride its back. Half-running and half-climbing as the beast bucked, he worked his way up to it’s skull. It tried to wipe him off, grinding him against the earth with its crushing weight, but eventually he came to the crown of its skull, and sat astride it’s neck. 
	There was nothing to say, right then. He drew a mental ‘X’ from the spines that served as its ears to its eyes, and he took the hammer and brought it down right where the imaginary lines crossed. There was a single, monstrous crack as its skull split, then the roar of air as FastJack fell off and the crash as Jormungand collapsed. Then blessed silence.
	Fastjack felt broken inside. The chill was creeping into his bones, or maybe it was the venom. He thought he saw Perri come down off the tree, heard Perri yelling at him. The one thing she never called him.
	“Daddy.”