You walk alone through the city, desperately trying to split your attention between your surroundings and the map projected in your heads-up display. The light of one-thousand billboards refracts in the steam lifting from the street. It’s been months since you ventured beyond the exchange district on foot. You can almost taste the gutter smell, like road soot and sweat. You’re about 15 city blocks from the conference centre where you’re supposed to be staying. The last five of those blocks will safely be smothered in corporate security. You just need to make it the ten in-between.
You’re a sitting duck. 15 Blocks to go.
Head down as you anxiously fiddle with the volume on the HUD. You can’t stop the advertising because you don’t know which ad-blockers work best in this neighbourhood. You haven’t a hope of keeping my wits about you in the cacophony of noise, so you’re desperate for any respite. The products are useless, half the time you can’t even tell what they’re selling. The companies don’t care. If you follow the link they’ll throw more ads at you, they get paid whether you buy the product or not. Confusing and overwhelming the customer is a benefit in this market, the clever ones all have ad-block anyway, leaving just the most impressionable and well… you.
The street criminals know this. They leave their headsets on too, so they can pounce on tourists in their most disoriented moments. You can feel their presence, but can’t pick out exactly which staring pedestrians to fear. It would be easier if you didn’t look so damn expensive.
10 Blocks to go.
120 decibels of a child screaming about god-knows-what explode into your eyes and ears like a technicolour scream. You’re frozen for two critical seconds before you snap back to reality. You claw the headpiece off and whip your head around. The 14 year old looks equally shocked. He’s uncomfortably close to you. Close enough that you’re certain you were less than a second from being robbed. You see the knife slide back into his pocket. The corporate gear saved your ass this time, he knows that you’re a hair’s breadth away from 911, and aware enough now to use it. You watch him try desperately to blend nonchalantly into the crowd. He’s too inexperienced to succeed. You’re too scared to put your headset back on as you rush back into the foot traffic.
A woman shrieks directly behind you, she must have appeared the second most vulnerable. She’s begging, but that kid won’t eat today unless this mugging works out for him. You can’t hear his replies, but you hear her protests become appeasements. You consider calling for help, you want to call for help… but if you call you have to stay on scene. That or eat the false report fine and lose one of the pitifully few help calls included in your healthcare plan. You get five annually, and have already used three. It’s only April, you need to make them last. You tell myself it’s ok, she forked over her valuables, she’ll be fine. They usually are if they comply. You keep walking.
5 blocks to go.
