Boots

  * * *

  Once my access was detected or, rather, suspected, I had to ditch one false identity immediately and move on to another — to another name and another location. Onwards, onwards, ever onwards. I have lived this peripatetic life for almost fifteen years, freelancing in over a hundred work cells under a hundred different names.

  I have seen much of the City. And I have come to a most startling conclusion: the City is dying. The highways, motorways and the interdistricts are still very busy, but while the roads are full, the work cells frenetic, and the entertainment centres bustling, the City’s core is hollow.

  Let me explain. In the company of indigents I have travelled around the hexagonal suburbs that surround the work cells. The indigents scavenge in local suburbs and know where the security camera blind spots can be found. The criminals’ life is surprisingly easy, since only they walk the streets; and were it not for their crippling addiction to pleasure drugs, few would ever get caught.

  All eyes are peering into the Network, the virtual abyss; and the City, which seems so full, is actually quite empty. It is only a membrane — wafer-thin and bodiless.

  The indigents and I would simply climb over crumbling walls, past weedy, uncared-for gardens, and peer through grimy windows.

  Most rooms were empty, and even in the ones that were occupied I always saw the same scene. No-one ever noticed the face at the window gazing in. The occupants were all plugged into the Network — generally the pleasure portals — and there they would sit, completely immobile, for as long as I cared to look at them. Like zombies in stasis.