Everyone thinks the rain will stop after a cataclysm. That's not true at all. Rain happens, it's just not something you want to experience. You don't know what chemicals might linger in it. We run purifiers constantly before consuming water, air purifiers to ensure we aren't killing ourselves faster each breath, and rad shielding to help compensate for the ozone we lost. Rain is harsh now. It's dangerous, but it stirs up memories of previous eras.
I stood on the nJuku walking bridge. It sat atop the mag-lev yard, one of the massive rail yards to aggregate intra-sprawl travel. Aggregator station nJuku was massive. It followed in the pattern of stations before it. An amalgamation of shops, floors, tech advanced growing skyward and old cruft crushed underneath.
Harsh LEDs shine down from each building. Illuminated signs, plexi-holo displays refracted and hovering to maximize visibility. If I were to call up my AugR, out would have thousands of solicitations from everything in broadcast radius. And probably some ignoring spec and broadcasting further.
But for now, I tried to ignore the electric onslaught and see the night sky. It was deep grey clouds, reflecting the brilliance of the city, and heavy, hard rain pelting the unshielded surfaces. The atmosphere dispersal field above the bridge kept me mostly dry, creating a moist wind as rain was shunted to the sides or outright vaporized. My habwear filtered the air before I inhaled, but my skin got the mist. Some biomonitors were giving me reminders that the moisture content couldn't be verified, but if I had cared, I could have had a full habwear cover. Even in the cold night, it was nice to feel something like what old generations knew. Lovers in the rain. Broken hearts soaked, singing under umbrellas, clinging close to stay warm. Conspiracies played out in shadows with dead drops under benches. Memetics people knew as 3 second clips, summaries who lost most of their power, distilled into simple catchphrases.
I shut my eyes, wiped the moisture away before it stung, and sighed deeply, my breath condensing with the cold air and stirring up curling foggy eddies in the moisture. Usually I'd wear a face mask, but for this job, it would ruin the appearance.
Flexing my right hand, I summoned up my AugR. All those ads were suppressed, the lights dimmed as my overlay highlights the bridge, the structure, details about the dispersal layer. Important notifications were easily accessible, and I called up the latest intel. I guess waxing poetic about clandestine meetings in rain was ironic, considering that's exactly what I was here to do. In 119.27 seconds and counting, a supply train would pass under this bridge. The insides of it were inconsequential to me, the job didn't call for that. All the job called for was for me to affix a tracker to the right car. The details were sparse. They always were with these jobs. But I had a microtracker, an air-guide, and a decent vantage point of the rail yard.
You would think if it were sensitive, they may run additional security or lock down the bridge. But let's assess it: There's a dispersal field between me and the rain, a train traveling near the speed of sound which probably won't stop at this station, and its own likely host of dispersals to mitigate rain affecting the operation of the train.
So why, with all of these factors, would I be here? Well, I'm glad you asked, internal narrative. The reason is that our microtracker implant is about the size of crystallized salt. Or, under heavy rain, the particulate size of rain passing through a dispersal field. Now the complicated part, which my expertise was called for, was the rain trajectory and the location. Dispersal fields cover the railways as they approach stations. And either fully walled protective sections or active defenses covered the rest. But this little path was a short bump that was accessible by people and not subject to the active defenses. And when the train passed underneath, a falling object embedded in liquid tumbling out of a carelessly knocked over cup on a pedestrian footbridge while someone fumbled through pulling on a jacket in the rain was not an interesting event. One that wouldn't even register on the transit notes any more than stray debris on the platforms would.
And that is why the little second counter told me when to set my open glass of beer on the handrail, after taking a swig. A swig that transferred some backwash with the tracking device into it. And gave me a timer for struggling to pull a folding jacket from my pack, then turn idly in a wide arc as other pedestrians made sure to hug the other side. Any cameras just watching the drunk would be no more interested in me later than they would the brooding figure on the other side of the bridge. In some ways, he's probably more interesting than me. On the second spin, I fished my first hand out of the sleeve, and tried to throw my second arm in. The off-balance arc of the coat tipped the glass, and my slowed reactions made me knock the glass off instead. The slow fall downward looked like it would nail the magnetic center line, if uninhibited.
A rippling motion started away from the station, growing closer than was easy to follow with the naked eye. I only had some warning of it from the countdown, and a vague estimate the AugR tried to overlay. The matte gray train roared under the bridge, the sound hitting just as it crossed underneath, and was gone. It was only a few cars long. The cup was nowhere to be found. I sighed again, mumbling about the beer, and stumbled off down the path.
Replaying the fall, in slow motion, I watched the cup fall right into the path of the train, intercepting the roof of the first car. Eagerly, I waited for the chime from the buyer after uploading the vid. A few seconds later, the sound came, with a single word: “Online.” I smiled, and that smile grew when I saw the bank account reflect a successful mission.
My smile waned a bit when I heard a second chime in my AugR. The same account from which "online" came responded with "new job for Karlos" and a location tag. That wiped my smile away completely.
In the 12 years I'd been running jobs like these for less than upstanding individuals, neither asking questions nor giving answers, once the credits went through, the job was done. The Anon who tasked me disappeared, the accounts all burned, I'd know nothing of who they were or how to contact them, and I may get their next job without ever knowing I did the last one. That was the deal. It protected them, and in some ways, it protected us. I should have been just as opaque to the buyer. An obscure identifier, with some notes of expertise, and nothing more. The Anons would contact Gateway, make a request for what they wanted, Gateway would assign some of us the job, establish the terms, all that contract stuff except it was all technically illegal inside the federates, but unlikely a corp would ever care. If we actually crossed them, then their internal teams would clean us out.
So in all this wonderful anonymous, discrete task world, it was terrifying in a way to receive a request for a follow-up task, but more so that they used my sprawl name. I had no idea how they found it out, but it was clear they used it to tell me I needed to be there, or there would be consequences. This was not how it was suppose to go.
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