Carpet, where can you get carpet? Your apartment came furnished, and you have no idea from where. You search online, but those prices! Way too much for your meager budget. You try to find the nearest physical store, but can't find one that you are certain actually sells carpet, isn't beyond a red zone, or has better prices than online.
That just leaves one option. The local grey market. You take the elevator down. Past your usual tram stop and down some more into the pits of the city. Then you take a bridge over the swirling muck. Even through your breathing mask you can smell it and you try to breathe through your mouth. There's more people down here than you would expect, but of course there are. They're here for the same thing you are after all.
The teeming throng of market goers filters through a set of thrown open loading doors. Guards on either side keep their rifles at the ready. Their smart visors scan everything. They take in your heat signature, clothes, facial features, and lack of transponder signal. In a nanosecond they communicated with the grey market's security system and delivered a verdict. Just another normal citizen of the city. A non threat. A non entity. You pass through the doors without even getting a second glance.
Inside is a vast cavernous space. Once it was a receiving warehouse for countless logistics routes. Now it is taken over by the Grey Market. Individual vendors crowd the space with their wares on tables and tarps. There is scarcely enough room to pass between them, and definitely no sort of order. The air hums with shouted advertisements and the chatter of bargaining.
You let the flow of humanity sweep you down a random aisle. You see a lot of interesting things though it's all jumbled together. Cutting edge cyberware and kitchen dishes stacked side by side. You'd love to browse, but you don't have any money to spare, or time for that matter. Finally you spot a rug vendor and you slow down. But as you look at the products on display you quickly realize a key issue. They are all very big and there's no way you're carrying them through this crowd, much less all the way back to your apartment.
You merge back into the masses with a new target, some kind of trolley or cart. It takes a while but eventually you manage to convince a merchant that's just about out of stock to sell you their pallet mover. You pick up a bit of wire at another stall and with a bit of jury rigging manage to build a sort of trolley that will keep the rug rolls you saw before from falling out.
Then it's back through the aisles searching for your original target. You can't actually get back to the first stall you saw, but you do find another merchant selling a nice plush rug. It's soft, large, cheap, and you're willing to ignore the red stains on it. You also purchase some additional fabric. You plan to use it to make wall hangings to conceal the door. Useful if you want to have guests over ever again.
With some difficulty you maneuver you're now heavily loaded trolley out of the grey market. Pushing out of the exit doors you find yourself at an angle from where you need to be to get home. You're also carrying goods that can be stolen. That sends a spike of worry through you and you hurriedly push your prizes back over two more bridges and through an alleyway whose every shadow makes your nerves tenser.
By the time you make it back to your building elevator you are a jittery mess, but no one tries to assault. On the ride back up it occurs to you that big rolled up carpets and fabric might not exactly be the target of choice for most thieves. Still you sigh in relief once you can lock your apartment door behind you at last.
You spend the next few days setting things up. Wrestling the carpet into the white void and setting it down is simple enough. But hanging wall drapes in a way that hides the door without making it obvious that you are hiding something is a lot harder than you thought it would be. You need to watch a lot of sewing and interior decorating videos, and by the time you are done you have to admit that your apartment looks a lot nicer than it ever has before. Maybe you should have done this earlier?
Through all this life continues. You ride the train to work every day, and suffer through the mundanity of existence while you work on your new hobby at night. Everything continues as it always has, until one day it doesn't. As your train approaches your station you automatically get ready to get off, when the train suddenly accelerates again.
The siren sounds and the armored shutters come down. The PA asks everyone to remain calm, but absolutely no one is. This isn't just a random red zone. That's the siren for an imminent Beta Hostile Event. You might all die no matter what the safety ads said and everyone in the train car knows. Random strangers are shouting and parents hold their children tightly as the train accelerates faster and faster. It rocks back and forth alarmingly as something hits it hard several times. Then the entire train is sailing through the air and everyone inside is sent tumbling.
The next part is a blur. You hear loud crunches that you aren't sure are coming from outside. You hit your head on something hard and your arm goes into someone's face. While someone else's knee knocks the wind out of you. Eventually the train comes to a halt and then lurches upward as the emergency maneuverability legs engage. Internal foam deploys to lock everyone in place and you and all the other passengers can only wait as the train laboriously climbs through and around buildings to finally reach another track.
You can tell when it does because of the sharp locking sound followed by the ride smoothing out considerably. An hour later you pull into a bunker station and emergency personnel cut away foam and tend to everyone's injuries. You were lucky. You only ended up with two broken ribs, a broken arm, and a slight concussion. The paramedics wrap your ribs and arm in a quick heal cast and tell you to take the next few days off work before calling a transport pod to get you home.
In a daze you let the pod carry you home and deposit you right on your apartment doorstep before you stumble inside. Lying on your bed you finally have a chance to take stock. Checking the news you see that the entire building you worked at was destroyed in a fight between the Sunbreaker and the Crimson Crusader. You start laughing hysterically as you realize this means you won't have any problems taking time off work. At some point you fall asleep.
The next day you wake up groggy and in grime and foam encrusted clothes. You feel filthy, but the struggle to get yourself cleaned and clothed with one arm in a cast and wrap of healing nanites around your chest brings it all back to you. Your company was erased from existence. You nearly died. You would have died if you had been five minutes earlier to work. And the banks do not care.
Near death experience or not you owe the banks a lot of money for your student, apartment rental, and print pass loans. You groan from frustration, and then from pain as your lungs expand still healing ribs. What are you going to do? Leaning against the mirror and staring at your haggard face you realize you can't deal with this yourself.
You have to call a friend. You just have one problem. You glance at the drapes covering the white door. An Alpha class anomaly in an Eta class apartment.
[ ] The Network Analyst
She's smart, educated, and a rising star in her company. She's easily the most put together. She's also sharp as a razor and keen on sniffing out anything that might be bothering you. Such as an illegal spatial anomaly. You don't know if that would be a good or bad thing. She's a good friend, but very ambitious.
[ ] The Enhancile Junkie
He could be working in a lab somewhere, but he's got a job loading pallets in a warehouse. Everyone in your friend group keeps trying to get him to apply himself, but he just puts all his free time and money into tracking every enhancile in the city. He's got a collection of Paragon memorabilia second to none, and you know he'd jump at the chance to be one himself.
[ ] Your Government Appointed Friendbot
Ever since the Friendship Act of 2180 it has been legally mandated for each citizen to get a certain amount of social interaction each week. Still the assembly at the time realized that might be more difficult for some people than others. So they also contracted with Paragon Industries to develop Friendship Bots. Personalized to fit your personality it loves all the same things you do, is a great listener, and offers helpful advice. And probably also reports everything back to the government.
