Fiction

    Rog doesn't know why he bothers to ride to campus on days like this, when the lab assignment is dull road node programming he could have knocked out when he was 15 years old, and the lecture is another endless drone about standards bullcrap.

    Möbius is barely noticeable sitting on the gentle slope above the truck stop, his long dirty coat blending in to the brown prairie grass.

    It's just another Friday evening celebration at headquarters, the excuse this time being the acquisition of a mid-sized software development firm in Mumbai.

    The vtol is a carbon fiber dragonfly with ducted fans in place of wings.

    Gabriela Weston Figueroa is wholly satisfied. The meeting in Havana went well.

    Jester leads Mobius through the canyonlands of concrete and stone known as Brooklyn. Mobius feels oppressed in the urban superstructure. There are cams and mikes on every surface. The dense herds of noisy pedestrians are tiring to wade through. He can’t travel a block without another bot trying to pickpocket a micropayment, throwing another crumb in his data trail. “I can’t even pick my nose in this town,” he gripes. “A thousand eyeballs are watching me.”

    A nondescript man appears at Jim's door. He is a negative image against the grey gloom of early evening, dark mottled clothing, blurred profile, blue-shadowed expression on his face. He hands Jim a unmarked plastic box archaically wrapped in wrinkled brown duct tape. Arching his eyebrow, he pronounces asthmatically, “I've got a little piece of humanity here addressed to the Superintendent.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Jim says. “C'mon in. Don't have to drop hints about the Human Underground around here. We're all real live people.”