Captain Niels Fringbird of the Starship Entrepreneur swore at the top of her voice.

Her Operator was missing.

"Calm down, ma'am." said the security guard, "It's only a small port. He can't have gone anywhere."

It was indeed a small port. It was in the middle of nowhere, in dire need of a paint job, a systems overhaul and its chefs yelled at by a hygiene inspector for several days on end. The food could probably only be classified as food in the opinion of three species in the galaxy and the drinks could mostly be safely classified as fuel. The guard looked a little seedy as well but Captain Fringbird was safe in the knowledge that she had a laser pistol and he didn't. She had only stopped here so the pilot could have a rest. The sooner she got off this rusty tin can, the better. Except that she wasn't going anywhere without an Operator.

It was a bad sign when any of your crew went missing but it was a particularly bad sign when it was your Operator. You could fly a starship without a security officer, say, or a chef. You would have great difficulty flying one without a pilot or a navigator. It was actually a deletory offense to fly without an Operator.

The Operator's job was to be permanently, directly plugged into the ship's computer. The interplanetary authorities knew that humans, who lived in a worldsystem where the consensus reality did not allow for the existence of other worldsystems, did not function properly in the outer Universe. They were unstable, liable to go insane. An Operator, however, who had an empathic link with a computer that was perfectly happy to accept the existence of the outer Universe if you programmed it to, was trained to receive signals from other worldsystems. They also registered the ship with the control computers of that world as they went past it, to let the computers know they weren't pirates or anything. In essence, the Operator was the only member of the crew that the interplanetary authorities trusted. Until the human race managed to fix their faulty consensus reality, the Operators were ambassadors, despite almost universally having the social skills of a turnip.

The guard's radio crackled. He picked it up. Captain Fringbird watched him nod his head and mutter into the radio a few times.

"They've found him." he explained.

"Where is he?"

"He's jacked into a netport. Looks pretty spaced. You know how Operators are."

Captain Fringbird did indeed know how Operators were. However, her Operator was a rookie, and she knew how rookies were as well.

"Show me." she ordered.

The guard led her into the atrophying bowels of the space port. They emerged on a balcony that overlooked the computer room, which was circular. There were a couple of terminals but mostly just a series of wires dangling from the walls. Most people had neural interfaces these days, or at least wi-fi and laptops of their own. There were even a few bio-sheaths. Scrimping on the food was one thing but if the Net connection wasn't first rate, someone was going to be murdered.

Captain Fringbird spotted her Operator on the floor, slumped against a wall, jacked in. She descended the stairs. They went 'clank clank' as her booted feet hit them.

As she inspected her Operator, the vaguely serene expression on his face, the way his eyes were clouded over, the wires in the back of his neck, she began swearing again.

The Internet, as you probably know, is big. Information-wise, it dwarfs the planet, one enormous, chaotic, insane hive mind of billions of tiny little computer-minds and human minds all blindly groping for porn, free stuff, online games, pictures of kittens and opportunities to swindle each other.

The Outernet, or Galactic Net, is several million times larger, because it comprises the Internets of several thousand Worldsystems, many of them more densely populated than Earth, or at least with more powerful computers.

To directly interface with even a planetary Internet would run the risk of having your brain fried with the sheer amount of information running through it at once. For an Operator, who can see the whole thing at once, the way the machines see it, exactly how it is, without the bias of human sanity and the chains of consensus reality that confine it, the risk is ten times worse. To directly interface with the Outernet, you need a neural firewall or you are dead the moment you connect.

The Interplanetary Net, the one that connects the Outernets to each other, is even larger, but nobody directly interfaces to it except for the control computers of the Universe, very unlucky Government officials who hadn't logged out of said computers in time and, according to rumour, people who've lost their last Continue, the split second before their irretrievable deletion.

Operator Ike Harsgalt had forgotten to put up his neural firewall.

It had probably been the length of the journey. His sleep had been interrupted. Operators did sleep, right? Captain Fringbird had seen him do that weird thing Operators do instead of sleeping, where they watched a screensaver for hours on end. His eyes were closed and he wasn't breathing as fast. The fact that he was still operating the computer was completely irrelevant. Or maybe he had grown overconfident. He never made mistakes as stupid as that in the Academy, because he checked every five seconds to make sure the firewall was still up, but he was a fully fledged Operator now and fully fledged Operators didn't have to worry that they had made such basic mistakes as letting their Firewall drop in an unfiltered public Outernet booth.

Except that he wasn't dead. Captain Fringbird had summoned the ship medic and mechanic immediately. The medic had reported that he had a pulse and was still breathing.

"I wouldn't move him." said the medic, "It might disconnect him. You don't know what'll happen to his mind if he gets disconnected without warning. Heck, we've no idea what's happening to him in there. By all rights, he should be so dead a resurrectioner wouldn't be able to pick up enough pieces of data to put back together."

"Can we track his signal?" asked Captain Fringbird, "Maybe we can figure out where he is, at least."

"If we've got another computer and we're very careful." said the mechanic. The Captain nodded. She helped the mechanic unplug one of the terminals in the room from the Net, then wire the Operator to it, taking care not to disrupt his existing connection too much. Like most professionals, the Operator had more than one cybernetic port, so this was an easy process. Then there was nothing to do but wait for something to happen.

The Captain sighed with relief. It was locked. Locked from them as well as the Net, but that wasn't unusual practice for an Operator. He was probably just doing something he didn't want them to see.

"Maybe he managed to put it up at the last second or something."

"Captain, that's not Ike's firewall! Have you seen the size of it?" said the mechanic.

"Holy Saint Kevorkian!" she swore, "What IS that? An interplanetary control computer?"

"No hacking those in my space port!" said the guard firmly.

"What are we going to do?" she asked the mechanic. He shook his head,.

"There's no way I'm going to be able to get in there without permission, and even if I could, we don't know what's happening to him. It might kill him." he said, "The only thing we can do is wait for him to finish doing whatever he's doing."

"But what if he's trapped in there?"

"He's the Operator. If he's trapped in the Net, he's got more of a chance of knowing how to escape than we do."

"He's a lousy Operator." said the Captain.

"For his own sake, he'd better not be."