"What do you mean by right technology? And what does this have to do with the ghost girl?"

"To crawl into a lower level, a human needs to convert their entire data structure into a barely-compatible format. There are tools that can allow you to do this, but it's one of the riskiest things you can do. You'd be able to squeeze through these highways meant for trading data, and that Digimon can walk through. What do you think happens to your body if your connection fails at any point?"

"... I don't know. There's something separating higher-level data from the lower types, right? That's why you brought up models and messages."

"You'd become like the ghost." You conclude. "If you stop being separated from lower-level data."

"Excellent. Hence the name. DMIA. I'll spare you the mumbo jumbo, but that poor girl is no longer differentiated from the data that flows through our text windows. She must have crawled out of the open terminal, because I broke all the safeguards on it while it was running my own firmware. That's how I sent Kokuwamon out into the city."

"Is there any way to fix it?"

"Not that I know of. You'd need to gather every bit of her data scattered across this system. And it's zipping around lightning-fast. Then you'd need to run a conversion program, all while the problem of storing her data hasn't even been solved."

"Sounds like a no, then..."

"Why were you concerned I'd try to do this, though? I mean, it sounds crazy."

"Because going digital is the number one way to access restricted areas. Imagine if you didn't need to break into a partition from the outside. You could just ping it, trace the packet route, and then wander through the network until you reach it."

"Huh. Does sound like a good plan. Can't be that easy, can it?"

"Of course not. No robots hang around inside the delivery network. But there are wild Digimon in there. Digital defenders. Or predators. They'll be drawn to the volume of data traveling through the pipeline."

You wonder what was so important to that girl that she risked going into the network like that. If you can help it, you don't want to set foot in there and risk being turned into some kind of ghost in the machine. But you can see the temptation. Can you really say you'd never do it, if there was a situation where you couldn't travel over land?

"What's going to happen to her?"

"It's all already happened, sweetheart. She's not alive anymore. She can't go find a bot for the sweet mercy of being podded. Her only way out? To be gathered up and eaten by a Digimon. Maybe some scraps will survive, though, and they'll go on to haunt the network, with less and less of her visible each time."

You shudder.

"Don't mess with things beyond your control, Marnie. If you want to go in there one day, I'll do my best to make sure you don't go DMIA. But just make sure it's for something worthwhile."

==