[center][h3]Cole[/h3][/center]
[hr]

The party was loud. Obnoxious. Noisy. Chaotic.

Nothing like he thought it would've been.

Cole was in a corner of the beachhead that served as party ground zero. There was a DJ playing obnoxious music (and he wasn't even doing anything he was just leaving his Macbook on autoplay while he [i]mimed[/i] fiddling with his things), people around dancing and drinking and having fun. And then there [i]he[/i] was, a glass of punch in his hands as he sat in one of the side chairs, alone, a plate of finger food resting on his lap.

The party itself, it wasn't his idea to attend. He'd been [i]convinced[/i] to go after he'd heard (read: grabbed information from Verthaven's data network) that some of his old classmates from the Academy were coming. A bunch of Chinese girls, couple of guys and girls, nothing more. He barely remembered their names, it'd been a while since he'd seen them last. Hopefully they'd remember him more than he remembered them. But here he was, twiddling his thumbs as he tried to ignore the ever-present streams of data that flowed from all the various cellphones up into the sky. He could see information jumping out at him; tweets about how "totally rad the party was", Facebook status updates, Youtube videos, text messages, even feeds from phone cameras! It was all driving him crazy.

Cole sighed and stood, taking his plate with him as he wandered to a railing to stand, trying to breathe in fresh air before some drunken lout with too much cologne on bumped into him again. As he rested, his eyes were drawn to the Verthaven sky. Thousands, if not millions of data streams intertwined and entangled with each other as they wound their way into the sky and around the city. Like little silver threads, they were the metaphysical representations of your text messages, tweets, Vines, bank transactions, forum posts and general riff raff that populated the world of cyberspace. Everything from the Internet to computerised traffic systems to the Verthaven power grid's networking glimmered and weaved patterns in the sky and space above the city. He couldn't access them from here though, no sir. He could only watch them and wonder what they contained.

Cole sighed again, blanking out as he leaned against the railing, not aware that just beside him were two of his former classmates from the Academy, conversing with an as yet unknown woman over a box of pizza.