Next up, you visit Doc's home again. He's found out about your trip, of course, since Squid has been asking him plenty of questions regarding it.

"What're you getting out of this?"

"A lot, don't you worry. I wouldn't be trading my knowledge otherwise. She's a real whiz, that one. Cracking teleportation. Imagine that!"

He tinkers with something a little more, before handing it over to you. In exchange, you hand over some mapdata you've been gathering. The value is nowhere near equivalent, but he's been giving you plenty of discounts recently.

"What's this?"

"Well, you've gone ahead and made plans to dive into the network. Right after I warned you. So I thought I'd get you to test run this new product for me. I don't expect it to sell. Not a lot of damn fools going in there."

"Is this what you were using the terminal to work on?"

"Not the only thing, but yes. I've been looking into ways to prevent going DMIA. I can't do anything about your data spreading out. That's beyond me."

Human avatars are one of those higher functions that require heavy override perms to affect, and you assume that applies even if he's trying to save you. You open up the .app while he explains.

"Instead, this is a tether."

You examine the fiber optic cable that's popping out of the folder icon.

"You'll want to place this at the entrance, then plug it into yourself. There's an automatic and manual function. It'll monitor the data drift threshold, and if it thinks that your body is going to fall apart, it'll pull you through it."

"Oh, that's handy! What's the catch?"

"The catch is that being turned into a lower form of data and dragged through a narrow pipeline is going to damage you. All of you. You've taken a bad hit from a Virus already. It won't be quite as bad, but it'll still be a shock to your data."

That's a high cost. You don't know how severe the damage will be, or how long it'll take you to recover if you use this lifeline.

"It's just for the worst-case scenario."

"I assume I can't use it to get to my actual destination?"

"It's like a rope. You need to unravel it. I've done my best to make sure Digimon don't chew through it, but you'll need to bring it all the way from one endpoint to another."

"So that means we can use it once if infiltration goes wrong, and then again on the way out?"

"Exactly. Or, you could have it bring you back into the partition instead of the outside. Theoretically. You wouldn't want to do that."

"Definitely not. Thanks, Doc. I'll put this to good use."

"Whaddya call it?"

"Lifel1ne.app. If you end up using it, I'll want the diagnostics file too. Maybe that'll let me improve it for the next time."

You nod and stash it in your inventory. A little bit more small talk is made, before you head back to the sewer facility and finish up your preparations.

==