Tony edged his oversized body out of the ever-present Northwest drizzle onto a lift-bus more crowded than E. coli on an agar plate. He ran his sand-colored hands absently through his thick, shoulder-length black hair. Flicking his wrist, he broke The Rules as the dislodged dampness sprayed across several of his neighbors. The moistened commuters gave him a hard glare. Unwritten TriMet Transit laws included staying in one’s own space. He half-heartedly smiled an apology.
“Mondays,” Tony whispered through a hangover that bothered him only enough to know he’d once again been drinking too much—the tenth time in twelve weeks. And for the same number of weeks he thought about breaking his own personal commandment not to use any drugs, even over-the-counter hangover cures. Too many burns started out that simply. He wanted to keep his personality.
To take his mind off the pain, he stared out the partially fogged windows at the passing miasma of gray. Another exciting day of running tests for a product that won’t do much for anyone, for a company that cares only about the few credits it sells for, he thought grimly.
A departing commuter offered a diversion as Tony forced himself between several other passengers like they were two line-backers to capture the empty seat. Two other hopefuls gave him the angry looks often accompanying someone else’s victory. Ignoring them and the hushed but omnipresent sounds of 218 commuters crowded against him—not to mention the press of 2.3 billion in the Portland environs—Tony wiggled his hips enough to get fully seated between his neighbors.
As comfortable as one could be on the TriMet at rush hour, he reached for the news chips floating near the ceiling, missing his first two attempts. Working really hard to focus his eyes on the task, he finally snagged one. He snapped the seal as if breaking a cracker and waved his prize near the neural implant under his left arm.
As he dropped the chip’s now-useless, biodegradable cellulose capsule to the floor, the headline screamed “Unemployment Plummets to 27 Percent!” through his neural connection. Despite the newsman’s pleasant baritone, Tony winced and wiggled the muscle at the back of his ear, muting the audio. He then harrumphed at the headline’s very concept. Only a gullible fool would believe news that optimistic.
Tony absently flicked his eye to change the solido page, but nothing caught his attention until the sports news popped up in front of him. Attention, but no relief. “Spiders Trounced by Packers in a 41-14 Rout.” Tony read enough to realize the league would use his Aussie Spiders as a punching bag this season. The loss of their star quarterback to a neck injury three weeks ago had put the Aussies into a tailspin, and nobody, least of all Tony, expected them to recover.
He fondly remembered his football days in high school, but only in a child’s dreams could he play beyond that venue. Lacking the size or talent to play tight end professionally, he would’ve needed massive implants or genetic drug therapies just to compete—both against league rules at the time.
“BREAKING NEWS” flashed across his view. “Third Greenie Bomb This Week!”
Tony’s shoulders straightened. In lurid detail, the article explained how a small explosive device killed at least thirteen people and maimed scores of others when it detonated within the BioNetix home offices. Even before the first screams of the injured pierced the air, the Green Action Militia took responsibility for the act. “Violence will escalate until the world is no longer exploited by the megacorps!” ranted an unidentified GAM spokesperson.
In a sop to equal time, a midlevel VP at BioNetix denounced the act as nothing more than “the brutal ruthlessness of cannibals.” As a commentator interviewed eyewitnesses to the explosion, the article played some poor amateur solido footage of the bomb’s debris cloud engulfing a group of workers as they entered the building. The image didn’t interest Tony much and he flipped to the scrollbars that summed up the sixty-seven other acts of terrorism attributed to the GAM, including eighteen direct assassinations, multiple bombings, product tampering, and many more.
The newsies, Metros, and even the pundits painted the Greenies as a “black necrosis,” but the rabble considered them modern-day heroes. This dichotomy resonated on every gossip ring, coffee klatch, political mindshare, and bull session across Earth, not to mention most everyone in the solar system.
Tony absently wondered why anyone would fight order. His life balanced. It held order. It comforted him in a dismal and gray way. He knew from one