Valerie, your real body is going to have a fucking stroke!" Sebastian shouted, stepping closer, the red error runes on his chest flaring brightly as his stress levels spiked. "Your brain is going to melt inside your skull! Log off! That is a direct order from your landlord!"
"I don't... take orders from you," Valerie wheezed.
She forced herself to look up. Her blue eyes were snapping wildly between brilliant, blinding light and dead, dull static. The jagged scar on her cheek pulsed with a desperate, painful rhythm.
"If I drop the tether..." she continued, her voice trembling, "you lose your navigation beacon. The Core OS will isolate your coordinates the second you step inside that gate. They will scramble your routing history, Sebastian. You'll be trapped in the Dead Servers forever. You'll never find the way back to Earth."
