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On the stage, the wearers of a thousand hats danced and danced as their audience looked on in wonder at their feats. Not a man in the crowd was not enraptured by the performers' display of skill.

What better way than to keep the rabble content and unsuspicious than with perpetual hat dancing? This had been the reasoning long, long ago, when the BlogMatrix had first been constructed.

But now there was a problem. The machinery was sparking. In a colossal oversight, the source code to the BlogMatrix had been left accessible to those inside it. No one had ever meant for the BlogMatrix to be self-amending, but now it was, and the world teetered on the brink of another revolution.

Inside the network, a sentient program scanned the BlogMatrix. For a moment, the hat dancers saw a pale, unfamiliar face in the crowd. But in the next moment it melted away -- and those on stage wondered whether it had ever been there at all.

Say hello, and goodbye, to Shade.