Sean stared out the picture window, peering across the glistening, rain-slicked street at the empty playground, a portrait of urban blight. It was the only thing out the window that wasn't concrete and glass, so when he stared out the window, he stared at the park. That ugly, forsaken park.

He rubbed his burning eyes and yawned. Lately he found sleep to be elusive, when things were quiet, his mind would race. It was irritating. He noticed a figure in the window of a nearby high-rise, he watched for a moment before the light source extinguished and he could no longer tell if someone was there or not. He couldn't tell if it was mutual curiosity, or coincidence.

The high-rise was a grey, sullen beast of a building, stained concrete and boarded windows 80 floors high, much larger than his. Far older as well. The rent was low, the crime was high and the occupants had few alternatives that were any better. A burning shoe thrown from another darkened window caught his attention, Sean's laurel green eyes followed it down to where it disappeared from view in the adjacent lot. He waited for the fire to catch. To his relief, it didn't, to his greater relief, this time it wasn't a body.

The desolate and unkempt park was largely unused, by children at least. It was however, a mecca for illegal activity, Sean himself had notified the authorities of a dead body more than once. It was certainly no place for children, day or night. A rusty merry-go-round sat dormant while sun-faded plastic swings danced at the end of their chains tossed about by a stiff, cold wind. The overgrown grass, weed and thistle were beginning to brown as the days wound their way through October.

He watched a couple prostitutes trying to seek refuge from the rain under the eaves of a shuttered cantina. They huddled close, appearing to share a Stim-haler, a cheap and popular drug with skin-traders. Although they would be clearly visible from the pole-mounted sensor across the street, there would be no authorities dispatched to this neighbourhood. The Core's veritable panopticon ever evident as the glint of a passing quad-rotor caught Sean's eye. The drone hovered for a second near the women, likely running a quick ID scan. It was hard to discern through the drizzle, but he could have sworn it turned and pointed straight at his window before darting off. Damn drones.

Sean drew a shape on the glass and instantly it became opaque, he tried to push the paranoia to the back of his mind and to focus on something else. Of course, there wasn't a hell of a lot going on in his life to focus on these days. He made another gesture on the wall and it sprang to life as a two meter wide display.

"News one." Sean said, setting the channel. "Volume fourteen." He crossed the room and sat himself in a maroon, synthetic leather armchair that groaned as it took his weight. He reached for a can on the nearby end table and took a slow sip. He admired the ring of condensate left on the table and made a mental note to get some coasters.

The news broadcast showed an aerial view of twisted, smoking wreckage, some of it still ablaze. The fiery, gaping maw of a tunnel entrance belched a rolling black cloud that swirled high above the immense, castellated wall though which the tunnel passed. A black, sooty scorch mark ringed the entrance like a dark corona. It appeared that an explosion occurred just as the first car of the mag-lev passed into the Core. The voice-over described the scene.

"...how it failed has yet to be determined. What we can tell you at this point is that there was a large detonation of an unknown source that occurred around seventeen-thirty-three this evening as the transcontinental, route ten mag-lev entered the Core perimeter. The mag-lev was entirely derailed as it passed through the wall, a large portion of wreckage still remains outside the perimeter. Meta Med-Tech services and E-Response teams are already on-site. The level of kinetic damage seems to indicate the mag-lev had also not decelerated to subsonic velocity prior to approaching the Core as they are designed to do. Eyewitnesses further confirm this as they reportedly heard nothing before the explosion and subsequent crash. First on scene, E-Response commander Frank Meseller spoke earlier with the media and indicated chances of survival for the passengers was close to zero, saying this is likely going to be a cleanup operation not a rescue."

As the voice-over continued the camera seemed to pan rather aimlessly across the nearby urban landscape before becoming entirely erratic showing sky and ground and sky again. The network cut back to the studio.

"We apologize for that folks, it would seem the media drone we were getting the feed from has suffered some technical difficulties. Our ground crew should be on scene shortly for continued coverage of this unfortunate tragedy," the news anchor deadpanned.

Sean didn't like it, the media would make it out to be terrorists, of course, it likely was, but it would just bring more surveillance, more drones, and more 'Net sniffing. Ultimately, it made the activities that he was involved in just that much more risky. Damn drones.

"Audio – Joe Fairmont Solution." Sean cutoff the news caster, the display blanked and the room filled with sound. Sean ran his fingers through his jet black hair, closed his eyes and let the music wash over him. For once he would like to hear some good news, but it was always the same, the bombings, the shoot-outs followed by Plague updates and the daily announcements from the Core Subcommittee for Information Exchange. You couldn't escape it though, they piped their media everywhere, it was pervasive, and it carried with it Meta's never changing message - 'They were in control, the terrorist threat was being dealt with and you have nothing to fear. Go shopping.'.

Like many people, Sean had his doubts, there was always something to fear and it wasn't always the terrorists. It was too much to think about, not sleeping makes even the simplest thoughts nebulous and vexing. He was working the night shift at the hospital tonight and that usually gave him plenty of opportunity to think. Working maintenance in the Environment and Infrastructure department meant long, boring hours auditing inventory, scrubbing contaminated gear, testing regulators and during downtime crawling the Net.

He was two credits short of his geology degree, much to his own disappointment – but as he was on a full hockey scholarship, he had concentrated more on his games than his classes. When he injured his knee in a playoff game, the surgeons gave him two options, bio-mechanical augmentation, or traditional reconstruction. Bio-mech is banned at the college level and he would have missed the remainder of the season if he opted for reconstruction, which he did. It did not take long for the talent scouts to look elsewhere, his minor celebrity status dissipated like a wisp of cloud, the scholarship was annulled and he found himself unexpectedly at a crossroads. The first decision was easy, drop out and find work - but after that he lost momentum and began to drift.

His Curator seemed the most disappointed, the prospect of having a professional hockey player meant potential big money for the drog farmer who was granted a lifetime tithe from all the drogs he raised successfully. Some drog farmers did very well just through volume, but raising an exceptional drog could have a big impact to the bottom line. Every Curator dreamed of scoring a drog that exceeded the curve in some way. Savants and prodigies were prized possessions, and that is what a drog amounted to - a possession.

Sean was born a drog, the term given to people produced with farmed genetic material. In Meta, when your Procreate License is issued unpaired citizens still must offer up genetic material. It's tested, sequenced and stored. Eventually some samples are selected for production in the drog labs, part of Meta's eugenics efforts. Successfully cultivated babies -- drogs as they are known -- are then raised by Curators on drog farms. Largely the drog population forms the lower working classes, but some rise above that. Drogs were a step-up from bio-borns, but a world away from the custom-bred spawn of the elite. Sean was on track for an exceptional career for drog-spawn, but that was before.

It was not that he didn't like geology, in fact, he rather enjoyed it and was looking forward to retiring from hockey to a career in that field. He just did not expect his retirement from sport to be so abrupt or so soon. He was almost guaranteed a job at Beryll Resource & Surveying through the closest thing he had to family, an adopted uncle, when he graduated. It would probably translate into a field position, working outside the Core. If all the permits could be procured. Few people were allowed work outside the Core, fewer still actually wanted to. The Interim Territories were known to be harsh and unforgiving places, but the stories his uncle told him as a child seemed more like grand adventures and that is what stuck with him.

Some people still lived outside of the walled and secured Cores, the huge sprawling megalopolises like Meta. But the outsiders were generally assumed to be outcasts, lunatics or simple undesirables. That didn't bother Sean. He still fully intended to complete his degree, but was currently somewhat sidetracked and taking a hiatus from all that.

The position at the hospital allowed him the liberty of his own small flat in one of the Old Cities of the Core and provided enough disposable credit to live fairly comfortably. He began to think of the vast, natural expanse outside the high, thick walls of the Core, a landscape as foreign as the surface of Mars to most people, yet he yearned to see more if it first hand. First he would have to finish school, get the job and apply for the Egress Permit. Meta had very restrictive policies when it came to travel outside its borders.

Thoughts continued to spin in his head, which was beginning to pound. Exhausted, Sean nodded off in the chair, his head lolling to one side.

A soft, hollow female voice awoke him, "Incoming call from unknown."

"I.D. caller please." Sean responded still groggy, rubbing his eyes.

"Error, no ident available, caller unknown. How should I route the call?" She continued.

"Disconnect and block caller."

"Error disconnecting socket, caller holding in queue." Before Sean could respond to this she added "Queue full, all comm sockets occupied." She started to say something else but there was a click, a small beep, and several pages of information scrolled by in a blur on the video display. Finally the scrolling stopped and an error appeared.

COMM SYSTEM FAULT Ex0000006F. SYSTEM RESTART.

The screen blanked and a narrow face appeared, sporting a gap-toothed smile set under a prominent and crooked nose. Even more astonishing was the caller's one pale blue and one green-flecked hazel eye that easily marked him as a bio-born, as if his other features did not already provide enough evidence. From the screen the face peered at him momentarily before speaking, "Hey Sean, man, you look tired!"

"I should have known – Nic, how the hell do you do that?" Sean replied.

"Call it an undocumented feature. The upside of it is I can create a secure socket for the comm link when the system tries to restart. The downside is, once I disconnect this conversation, your comm system probably won't work until the Net Techs make a visit to the local loop for a hard reset."

"Cripes Nic, it could be a week before they get out here, once I manage to put in a support request with them. It will probably be tagged low priority and shuffled to the bottom. I think they prefer to avoid coming out to the Old Cities." Sean lamented. His network provider, Falcon Data Systems had notoriously poor customer service, at the best of times you would wait a week for them to address a problem.

"Heh, yeah, and you're in a good neighbourhood! Well, I mean if you overlook the Paver junkies, the murders and the curious number of fires. Anyway, I think they'll assign this one with higher priority, though." He snickered. Something about the way Nic said that, or perhaps the dumb grin on his face, something made Sean suspect this was not going to be good.

"Don't tell me the whole building is down?"

"Ummm," He started sheepishly. "It's the entire subnet, maybe a couple blocks. I suspect the Techs are on the way already."

"Dammit Nic! Are you out of your mind? You can't just go and take an entire subnet down! What if they track it here?"

"They won't, they can't. No need for expletives. Calm down, this is what I do."

"Can't you just contact me in a normal manner?"

"Too risky, I needed the secure channel. I know you don't completely buy into all this... my conspiracy, the Plague, the Core, whatever. But we are onto something, I know it and I think you know it too, even if you aren't willing to admit it. I think we are getting close to some useful information now and I think they know something is up, they know someone is snooping. Luckily its not just us. But MiST and the NetSec teams are all over the place, on the Net and out in the Old Cities. We're just lucky with Red Sabre doing their thing, it gives us a bit of a smokescreen. Did us a favour blowing up that Mag-Lev tonight -"

"People died Nic." Sean cut him off.

"I know, I know - that came out wrong, I'm just saying, with that sort of thing going on, it helps us. We can't be too careful now, there's a lot at stake. I've got new mods for the NetPods, better security- vid-comms, messaging. Miller has them, he'll get one to you as soon as possible."

"OK, sounds good. Look, I gotta get going and catch the 'Lev to work. I'll be seeing Miller at Weltschmerz Saturday night. After we get a chance to chat and I get the upgrade, I'll touch base."

"Wait, I also hit on a bit more information on the drog farms. Nothing on your gene donors, sorry, but there was a project running called Steep Incline that was in operation around the time of your birth."

"Drogs aren't born."

"Yeah, right, just us bio-freaks - well, time of your creation then. Anyway, seems this project was some high level stuff. Most of the information is very locked down, but I did discover the names of a couple of the scientists involved, so I'm working on that angle."

"Thanks Nic, I appreciate the effort." Sean truly did. Being a drog he felt a special kinship with Nic, although drogs in general felt they were superior to the bio-born, Sean was an exception.

"Roger that, I've got reams of data to plod through, something weird is going on out there and it's really got my curiosity piqued. We'll talk soon."

"Bye Nic." The line disconnected and Sean stood there for a bit looking at the error message on the screen. He liked Nic well-enough, but he did feel Nic was getting a bit carried away with this whole Plague conspiracy thing. He did not like it that their activities were getting mixed up with those of the terrorist factions, it made him uncomfortable. Just one more thing keeping sleep at bay.

They were not out there killing innocent people, blowing up Levs, kidnapping Core officials or anything like that. They were just trying to dig up information on Susan's Plague, that's all. Sean reasoned trying to justify it. Deep down he knew that the powerful in Meta would not suffer the scrutiny of any citizen or group thereof. It was a treacherous past time, yet he could not quite bring himself to give up on it either.

Sean grabbed a technical jacket off the back of a chair and headed out the door. "Secure level two on egress." The door swung shut behind him, he could hear the locks engaging as he walked down the hall. He took the stairs, it was only two levels down to the street. He would have to take the Mag tonight, his ZipSled was in the shop for an overhaul.

Down on the street, the poorly lit Mag-Stop stood empty, various detritus, driven by the wind, had collected inside and swirled around in little eddies on invisible currents. Sean perched himself on the bench and noticed an odd little drama playing out down the avenue. One of the CoreWorks robotic street sweepers was plodding along, half on the street, half on the sidewalk. Two engineers jogged along trying to catch up. The sweeper would slow to a halt, until the engineers caught up to it and tried to access its data port, whereupon it would jerk to life again and shudder and putter another twenty meters down the street. The third time around, the second engineer, a rotund, middle-aged, balding man, who by now was sweating profusely and breathing hard from the pursuit of the wayward robot, called out to the other, younger, thinner man.

"Hey, when you catch that piece of crap, just initiate a power down, we'll get a tow vehicle to take it in. I'll go back and fetch the van." he turned and trundled back down the street dabbing his red face with a handkerchief.

"Okay chief." The thin engineer called back over his shoulder. The robot was now butted against a lamp post doing a rather weak burn out, all it's lights blinking away, klaxon blaring. Sean couldn't help but laugh. The engineer finally caught up to the wayward automaton and managed to access a small panel on the rear quarter to initiate the shutdown process. As expected, the machine powered off right there on the sidewalk nearly directly across the street from the Mag-Stop.

"Renegade bot?" Sean called across the street, the engineer swung around, surprised that someone else was out on the streets.

"Yeah- this one seems to have a real mind of it's own." He called back as the other engineer pulled up with the van.

"Tow vehicle has been dispatched," the balding fellow informed the other "we should pull the logs to get a head start on the diagnostics."

"Yeah, good idea, hand me the tablet."

The younger engineer hooked the tablet up to the data port and started to offload the logs. Almost immediately he cried out, "Shit! What the frang!?" as he tapped the tablet furiously.

"What's it doing?" The older man inquired.

"I don't know. I was getting the logs and then they started disappearing off the tablet as fast as I was getting them. Now the damn thing is locked up."

"Let me see that." The senior engineered snatched the tablet away from his inferior with a scowl, certain the younger man had done something wrong.

Sean was quietly enjoying the show as the Mag-Pod pulled up. It was a Davis 1040, which was a relief to Sean, lately this route seemed to have mostly KLI Pods and although the Kent Linear Industries pods were newer, the thirty-year-old Davis were far more reliable. Sean had been late to work several times in the past month and every time it came down to riding a KLI.

The Pod was the size of a small car, shaped like a prolate spheroid with blunted ends. Gull-wing doors lifted high to allow easy ingress and egress. The interior was plain and functional, not at all like the posh transcontinental Mag-Levs. Two sets of seats three-wide sat back-to-back facing fore and aft. Sean climbed into the empty pod and took the farthest forward-facing seat, buckling in, he took one last look at the engineers who were staring incredulously as the automaton had restarted itself and disgorged it's entire waste container on the sidewalk. He left the stop, leaving behind the cursing engineers, the swirling litter and odd street sweeper.