The hangman was not alone. A cell of phreakers — one of many, scattered across England — had taken possession of an abandoned warehouse within sight of a great telecommunications tower. From its rafters they had run patch cords down to a maze of tangled wires, pulsating with glowing lines of code.
They were, Ainiri insisted, the earliest ancestors of the Flowerers. They had not met in gardens. They had met in warehouses, in pubs, in the shadow of the network their society was only beginning to depend on. But the instinct was the same: refuse to be part of it, and learn it better than those who ran it.