Those the Future Left Behind by Patrick Meisch

Author:Patrick Meisch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SparkPress
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

2355 – The Friend

I was walking under the tracks of a mag train on my way to the factory when I was accosted by some slummies who were surprisingly bold in their approach of a Collector. It turns out they were looking for an audience as opposed to trouble. They fancied themselves performers, and they were wondering if I would be willing to pay to hear a few songs. I asked them why they didn’t upload if they thought they were good enough to make money and they shook their wrists to show they didn’t possess data pads, which was not surprising given the rest of their ratty attire. One of them had decided shorts and just the hood and tassels of a hoodie was an outfit worth wearing. They boasted that they could beatbox any song I could request, and they would dance too, even though one of their crew had clearly been hobbling along as they hounded me on my way. Despite my telling them I didn’t have any cash on me and they didn’t have any CFOBs, given the lack of data pads, they still wanted to sing for me so that maybe I would spread their name where I go and more people would come and see them. They followed me most of the way, belting their raps as I filtered through the crowds of Joburg in the early morning. After their maimed buddy hollered in pain as a suit pushed him to the ground and out of his way without so much as a blink, I turned around and tossed them a few bags of enriched candies I had pulled out of my pack after telling them to call it quits for the day and they seemed appreciative. They had little, but they had each other.

I walked past the chipped sign standing in a courtyard out in front of my target building, the face of which had been tagged with graffiti too many times to fulfill its purpose anymore, and I rapped on the reinforced rolling door after verifying that the biometric entry methods had been vandalized as well. After three minutes passed with no answer, I stepped back out in front of the decrepit building and began surveying for an alternate mode of ingress. Some of the windows closer to the roof had been shattered, so I flicked up the controls to one of my sniper drones on my data pad and steered it in through the breach, down to the factory floor, to the other side of the door, and directed it to slam the barrel of its rifle into the manual release for the door security a few times until I heard a buzz and a clunk. I rolled the door open slightly, shimmied in, closed the door and relocked it, calling my other sniper drone to me via a follow command executed on its twin’s line before releasing them both to roam within the dank confines of the premises.

This factory was

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