Y.T. pumps herself up out of the canyon so fast that when she flies out into traffic, she's going about as fast as it is. As soon as she gets a solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom.

"Mom, listen. No, Mom, never mind the roaring noise. Yes, I am riding my skateboard in traffic. But listen to me for a second, Mom -- "

She has to hang up on the old bitch. It's impossible to talk to her. Then she tries to make a voice linkup with Hiro. That takes a couple of minutes to go through.

"Hello! Hello! Hello!" she's shouting. Then she hears the honk of a car horn. Coming out of the telephone.

"Hello?"

"It's Y.T."

"How are you doing?" This guy always seems a little too laid back in his personal dealings. She doesn't really want to talk about how she's doing. She hears another honking horn in the background, behind Hiro's voice.

"Where the hell are you, Hiro?"

"Walking down a street in L.A."

"How can you be goggled in if you're walking down a street?" Then the terrible reality sinks in: "Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did you?"

"Well," Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred to him yet that this was what he was doing. "It's not exactly like being a gargoyle. Remember when you gave me shit about spending all my money on computer stuff?"

"Yeah."

"I decided I wasn't spending enough. So I got a beltpack machine. Smallest ever made, I'm walking down the street with this thing strapped to my belly. It's really cool."

"You're a gargoyle."

"Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped all over your body ... '

"You're a gargoyle. Listen, I talked to one of these wholesalers."

"Yeah?"

"She says she used to be a hacker. She saw something strange on her computer. Then she got sick for a while and joined this cult and ended up on the Raft."

"The Raft. Do tell," he says.

"On the Enterprise. They take their blood, Hiro. Suck it out of their bodies. They infect people by injecting them with the blood of sick hackers. And when their veins get all tracked out like a junkie's, they cut them loose and put them to ............