A girl befriends a pair of rambunctious kids at a test for their future placement in a cybernetic network, and goes on a quest to prevent them from being liquidated as unassimilable.
This story deftly balances a very dark and dystopian setting – people wired into a bio-engineered computer network and children euthanized if found to be out of step with the network’s needs – with some fun and playful cyberpunk imagery.