The streets were noisy, as always. As always, she tried to focus on the song playing in her headphones, narrow done the world to nothing but the lyrics. One word after another, one step after another, going home.
She must have slipped into a sort of trance, as suddenly she noticed she had already crossed the main street and was near the mall, just a few minutes from her apartment block. The song was still on repeat, and the world around had fallen silent. She didn't hear the cars, the crowd, the screeching pigeons fighting for soggy fries. It was eerie. But also … comforting. Despite the sudden strangeness of it all, her breathing and heartbeat were steady, paced to the song. It was all in one focus. She was a focus. A self-contained smear of existence, wandering the streets, ghostly. It felt powerful, she had to admit to herself. After being overpowered by the city all of her life, she was cut free for once. But was she truly in control?
Carefully, she tried to listen beyond the song, focusing on just one thing she should be hearing. Conversations in the crowd. Those people on the other side of the street looked out of place. Dark, mysterious. Also a self-contained bubble. But she could hear them, despite the cars passing between her and them. She caught fragments of sentences, strange words. Someone was on the phone, talking about a tracer, about freeing someone.

A bus lurched by, and when it was gone, so where the dark strangers. She shook herself, switching from the looped song to another piece of music. Time to get going.

They guessed that she once might have been one of the Oracle's potentials, but she never confirmed or denied, refusing to get caught in this line of conversation.

She continued her experiments in modulating her senses. It had started long ago out of annoyance bordering on desperation, an idée fixe that if only she was paranormally gifted, life might become more bearable. But after her experience of profound silence, it became more a more systematic search, now that she knew what it felt to touch this strange control. Her hatred for the glaring, flickering city lights down town turned into fascination as she discovered she could shift her perception, like wearing invisible sunglasses inside her mind. At least she felt like it was internal, and she never caught any alarmed conversations around her.
But after a while she wasn't content with those internal modulations anymore. She couldn't keep herself any longer from reaching out, touching the flickering lights, subtly shifting their patterns to something more pleasant. It took a toll on her energy though and she found herself retreating even more from what little social life she once had been involved in. It was worth it.
Trying to telekinetically move things proved more difficult, and she never got further than making light things sway or vibrate like with a weird breeze. But it was enough to catch the attention of the watchers, two groups of dark strangers now, circling her like rival murders of crows. They didn't think she noticed, she caught from their wind-swept distant words, but seeing patterns was her nature and she didn't even have to try for this part.

Starting a life outside the Matrix was like losing half her senses and all of her mind-built protection. It was being naked, being vulnerable, no modulating the brightness and loudness and why were there so many people standing around her?

Sometimes, she believed to see a flicker, a moment of haze but not haze, a swarm of mosquitoes dancing at the edge of her narrowed vision. Even less frequent, she found tiny changes after a bout of flickering. It should have scared her, part of her knew; yet she was beyond that, simply taking note of -one more dot in a grand pattern of strangeness that was hers alone to explore. The flicker tasted like green lemons almost spoiled, zapping her mouth and her brain with a fizzing, moldy tang . Dust and algae and machine grease.

Jacking back in was a revelation. She hadn't lost her touch, and despite failing at some of the basic trainings at first, they praised her for her ability to lightly feel around her, see and hear and feel the subtle shiftings and changings of the coded environment.
They could make good use of this, they said; tthey would train her to become a sentry, tasting the air and sampling the code before they followed, taking in the virtual currents being computed by real electric impulses in her physical brain. She loved the idea.

They had found her. She heard their voices on the other side of the wall against which she was currently pressed, plywood painted white but dirty with the city's pungent exhalations. The strangers called agents were somewhere nearby as well, the bigger flock of black but slower in closing in on her. Their intuition or maybe absence of the same seemed incompatible with her erratic way of criss-crossing the world, halfway stuck between being being lost in thought and following tracks her focus enjoyed. Oh sure, they had set traps for her, but the patterns had been clear enough to find.
The others, the once she was listening to, they had been different in their approach. Posing questions, waiting for her move, checking off her reactions. She went over her options.
The agents were closer now. She felt the strange buzzing waves heralding their appearing.
Counting to three, she stepped back, quietly.

Counting to five, she inhaled.
She kicked in the thin wall, covering the two persons on the other side in dust and shattered wood.
"I'm here. Call your operator. They're coming."

Feeling the heft of a gun in her hands was like turning into a light bulb, the glory of being switched on for the first time. She had a place and a purpose. She had her focus and she could spend time in a place both strange and familiar, comfortable in its malleability. Forget the harsher new life for an hour. Go full focus. Protect those who allowed her to freely walk in both worlds.