Ghost Dive

A Ghost Dive sends a person's Ghost, the aware self that steers the body, straight into the internet so it can be explored like solid terrain rather than an abstract stream of information. During a dive the net presents itself as a physical, three-dimensional environment instead of a flat display.

The diver appears inside cyberspace as a marker called a Dive Counter, a small flat disc bearing a triangle that points where the user faces, with the person's name circling its rim. Divers that are not built from organic matter, such as the Tachikoma, skip this and keep their ordinary shapes even in the network. Whether an unmodified, fully organic human can dive at all stays murky, though a moment in the first season, where Togusa and Aramaki work a machine through a special neck brace rather than its keyboard, hints at the limits.

Beyond faster navigation, diving lets a user literally spot gaps in defenses like firewalls and reach into another mind by breaking into its cyberbrain. From there an intruder can read a target's memories, rewrite them, or briefly seize control of the person outright. All of that ranks as a grave crime, even if Section 9 seems to operate above the usual consequences.

The payoff comes with real peril. A virus that would ordinarily stay penned inside a system can threaten consciousness itself, as when a Jameson-type cyborg has its mind burned out by one during the opening mission of the PlayStation 2 Stand Alone Complex game. A diver can also be turned back on and hacked in return, flipping the intended attack, and prolonged exposure risks eroding the self, both from being cut off from one's shell and from consciousness bleeding together, sometimes by accident, with other people on the net.