Jensen looked for the staircase amongst the near-deafening, conflicting distractions of bass-heavy dance music and the raised voices of tangibly multilingual but otherwise unidentifiable background chatter in the immensely crowded Hive nightclub. Were it not for his augmentations, he thought to himself, the noise of this busy Hengsha social scene may have caused some discomfort; although that had now been replaced by those sudden interruptions from colleagues coming in through the InfoLink embedded in his skull.

But that wasn’t the hardest thing to get used to. It was the knowledge that everything he could see would be instantly relayed back onto a voyeuristic screen in some cold, sanitised facility hidden away in shame and secrecy. By comparison, that constant threat of intrusion by – quite literally – a voice in his head, cutting short his own thoughts when he dared even to daydream for a mere moment, was somehow less invasive.