Meet With Your Secret Employer

You toss the unread note from Katherine onto the passenger seat of your car and engage the automatic pilot. With a comforting hum the vehicle lifts smoothly into the air and joins the Manhattan-bound express air lanes. A glance at the clock on your vehicle’s navigation display tells you that you’re already fifteen minutes late to your meeting with Mr. Tanaka at Club Inferno. You pop a gel tab of Bendazopin and take a deep breath, wishing you could go back to your apartment and fall asleep. You close your eyes and let the **** take hold of you, your heart hammering in your chest as the Bendazopin slashes away the fatigue.

“Aggressive Drive.” You instruct the car and it accelerates, weaving through traffic and overtaking any vehicles going slower than it.

When you open your eyes again the car is swooping down, in amongst the old towers of central New York City to the glittering neon of the night life below. Club Inferno is situated on the bottom three floors of an old Manhattan hotel, marked garishly by a lith display depicting topless women writhing against each other. Before you step out of your car you slide a tiny holdout pistol into your inside jacket pocket. Just a 5mm ghetto flechette gun, but enough to reassure you in case things go south or Mr. Tanaka is unduly disappointed with your late arrival.

The inside of Club Inferno is a tangled mass of tech-fetishists and hedonists of all descriptions, bathed in flickering red and yellow light and undulating as a single body to bass music loud enough to vibrate your eyes. Maybe it’s just the Bendazopin doing that. Tanaka is where he told you to meet him, in a soundproofed booth in the VIP section, chain smoking noxious Japanese cigarillos. He seems to be alone, but a high-roller like Tanaka is sure to have some muscle nearby. You duck into the booth and he smiles like a shark, his boney face splitting into perfectly even white teeth nature has fashioned to tear out throats.

“You have made me wait,” he says evenly, “I just hope that you will now make waiting worth it.”

You reach up into your scalp and peel back a strip of synthetic skin and hair an inch long. You hook the fingernail of your index finger into the top of the datapin residing there and pry it free with a soft mechanical pop. By the time you’ve got it extended to Tanaka between your finger and thumb he’s already laying a impulse rig over his head and hooking it into a playback unit. Wordlessly he takes the datapin and snaps it into the playback unit. He closes his eyes and in a burst the data is cold-loaded through his cerebral cortex. Every moment of your existence for the last three hours is now a crystal clear memory in Mr. Tanaka’s head. Maybe even straight data if the sinister Japanese man has his own cortical implants.

Tanaka pulls the rig off his head and nods.

“Good.” The cruel smile is gone. “Not great, but good. More than reaction and preplanned action, although they are obviously running it on rails. You are going back.”

He hands you a fresh datapin and a quarter sized disc of jelly-like substance inside a plastic case.

“Put this on it,” he taps the plastic case containing the disc of jelly. “Anywhere, it doesn’t matter.”

“What if they see it?” You protest.

“They won’t, it’s a nano-probe, and there will be no trace. You must stay with the automaton for one hour after applying it. The nanites will acquire their data and return to your body. You will develop a blister.”

“Great.”

“Now,” Mr. Tanaka continues, “as to the matter of your payment, it is already in your account. Since you have done good work I can offer you a little more money, girls, guns, ****; almost anything you want.”

You ponder his offer.