Rain spilt down the walls, dripping off of window sills and onto the heads of the ragged people pressed up to the brick as I moved through the tightly packed crowd, skimming over their faces with my goggles down. Their skin shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow through the lenses of my thermoptic lenses, pulsing and shifting in the cold of the evening. All except for one. It was a Prasad; somebody had been flooding the streets with them in the recent months, using them to sell shoddily-copied andie porn and knockoff electronics.

I shoved a couple of greasy plebes to the side and snapped my fingers in front of the Prasad’s face. “Hey, wirehead, over here,” I shouted over the din of the crowd. It turned and looked at my face with that trademark andie stare. “Let me see your license.” Pain. It had punched me and ran. That didn’t happen very often in my line of work. I stood carefully, pulled out my .38, and put a hole in the Prasad’s fleeing back. It went down, its sparks glittering in the rain.