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Fillydelphia, the city of lights.

Circuit Echo was hunted. Not physically, her feathers were safe from that chase for today. Even her usual 'friends' up in the guard weren't coming around for lunch until tomorrow. Her pursuer was somepony new, at least she assumed it was a pony. Arctech being what is was, they could be a manticore for all she could tell.

'Take a left.' The message flashed up in the corner of her vision, vanishing with a short command. A brief ping did reveal what she had assumed was a solid wall to hide a small tunnel, barely large enough for her to fit through. Her brushing against it was enough to disrupt the cover, freeing her to squeeze into the crack. Some lazy pony probably put that one there.

"You could at least tell me why you're chasing me!" It was slow going through the crack, but she finally made it through. Of course, she was immediately assaulted with nearly a dozen images and documents. It took her a moment to cut the transfers before she could freely move again, bounding through the room and taking brief control away from the other Operator. "Sorry about this, we'll return to your regularly scheduled crap once I'm done." A heavy hoofed series of commands attempted to cut her connection, freezing in confusion for the few seconds she needed. Another door ripped into existence, and she galloped through, closing the brief hole with the last of her admin rights before cutting the connection. It was a sloppy job and would leave a trail, but it was enough to buy her the time she needed.

'Keep running, right then left.' Her patience had started to run thin with the impersonal messages, and the fact that whoever it was had been able to send this many directly to her was infuriating, but she didn't have much choice but to obey. This had quickly turned from her favorite kind of Run into one of her worst in memory, but when you consider hopping into a bank's best kept secrets to be fun... Either way, she did slow for a moment to stare at the massive onyx spires spearing the skyline. Even from this far down in the city they could be seen easily, Echo still finding a strange fascination with the three towers. Hard to ignore them when they made Runs like this possible in the first place.

Her gallop brought her into one of the more populated sectors of the city, a rather massive shopping center going by the name Hoof Trade. Full of bugs and holes, but the service staff was pretty spot on in their work. The biggest problem was the first thing Echo tripped into, a hole made by the hundred or so interconnected systems. Glitchspace, as it was affectionately called by Runners, was the kind of mess that made your everything hurt until you were fished out. Hoof Trade's service bots proved to be more reliable than it's structural integrity, catching her before she even finished falling.

"We are sorry for the inconvenience valued shopper. Hoof Trade would like to offer a forma-" Was as far as the prerecorded message got before Echo cut it, starting to run again. It would take more than a 20% off coupon for a specific brand of hoofwarmers to slow her down, even if she couldn't hear that infernal buzzing closing in again.

'Stop.' Echo continued for a few steps before registering the message, skidding to a stop in the middle of a crowd. A few bots approached her, deviated toward another poor fool with a quick cancel command. Echo glanced around, seeing nothing but near endless kiosks and stores, thousands of Operators going about their own business. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though she rarely went here. 'Run.' She sighed before starting off again, darting between the crowd as best she could. Most Operators didn't pay her any attention, not even noticing her. Those that did were careful to hide it, conventional wisdom claiming it to be better to keep yourself hidden in the crowd.

Echo, proving her wisdom, burst out of said crowd to leave Hoof Trade behind. She skidded to a stop at a massive crossroads. There were too many systems connected to this place for her to just choose at random, most of them commercial from what she could see. When no message came she breathed a sigh of relief, checking herself over in the brief lull. She'd need to make a new tail, her current one was eight kinds of corrupted from whatever that thing had done to it. Besides that she was mostly unharmed, though her attempt to disconnect was once again intercepted by something. She didn't have the time to attempt to trace whoever sent the command, but she had to guess a bot of some sort to have that kind of precision. Worse than that though, it was heavily illegal to even attempt stopping a disconnect, so whoever was doing it had to have some serious beef with her. Thinking back, it wasn't hard to pick out a few who might want her taken down. The guard for one, though they weren't the type to resort to this kind of trick. There were a few underground Runners she could see attempting it, and she had drawn the attention of a few of the Princesses' personal servants over the years.

"Life of a celebrity, nopony will leave you alone. Hey, bot. You still there?" She didn't expect an answer, simply throwing the message back down the route her own had come. Needless to say she was very surprised when she got a response.

'Yes.' The message hovered in her corner vision, stubbornly refusing to vanish like the others. Echo sat down, more a formality than anything, and turned her gaze toward the Spires.

"Well then, what next?" This was starting to get tedious, and worse her biological warning alerts were starting to go off. She had about two hours left, give or take, before she'd be coming back dehydrated.

'Wait.' That was not the answer she was looking for. To kill time until something happened she drew up one of her older bots, tinkered with it's programing and tried to convince the darned thing to do more than catastrophically fail when it started up. The logic behind the things never appealed to her much, and it didn't seem to appeal to her ghostly watcher either. A hole opened up in front of her, and another message appeared above it in her vision. 'Jump.' She stared down into the pit into nothingness, ignoring the fact that there was at least twenty more layers directly below her.

"You have got to be kidding me." She cut her bot, saved her changes, and steadied herself. "You aren't kidding. Well, I've done stupider, I think." She dived muzzle first into the pit, spinning forward to watch the nothingness rush up at her.

'Thank you. Disconnecting...' Flashed in the center of her vision, and suddenly the world went dark.

Circuit Echo stretched, every joint in her body stiff from laying still for the past two days. Most of the rest of her was pretty sore too, and more than anything she was starving. She tapped the band on her left forehoof, her homemade conduit worked well enough to open the fridge across the room and levitate a bottle of water most of the way to her. Though as with most of her prototypes, especially one like this one build off of ten year old stolen blueprints, it failed just before completion. She grumbled to herself, flopped onto her side and grabbed the bottle's top between her teeth. After she finally got it off, and her throat stopped burning, she glanced back to her discarded terminal. The Runner's Spike was still connected to the port hidden under her mane; it's wire snaked to her hoof-built computer. A message, more a virtual sticky note than anything, flashed in the center of the screen over a dozen disconnect errors.

'Packet received. Compensation for lost Runner Avatar Style #186 deposited into ECB account #3894018452. Runner fees deposited into TFB account #1863052896. ~Ghost of the City of Night.'

"... Time to take a walk." She reached back, letting the Runner's Spike fall to the carpet with a heavy thunk. She grabbed a small bag of carrots, another bottle of water, and unlocked the door. Outside of her now relocked lower Fillydelphia apartment she looked up, smiling at the empty night sky. Not a spire in sight, and for once she was glad. She stretched out her wings, and was gone.