Chandra, head and body cloaked in second-hand smart cloth, walks slowly down one of the dingy streets. It's gang territory here, one of those places where the law doesn't care about as long as they can wall it off and keep the violence spilling out into places where actual people would be concerned. Things like this, this blatant discrimination, made Indrajit sick. It made him take action, and it set off the whole set of affairs that led to this day. Chandra, like his friend, could never stand it. Why, solely for luck of birth, were they isolated to these areas?
But today, it comes in useful. He ignores the dingy LEDs advertising drugs, black-market cyberware, fences (some of whom know him), illegal weapons, and more. He ignores the echoing sound of distant gunfire as two street gangs get into a turf war, probably over some dick-waving contest of zero import. He sees the packed crowds of slumdwellers thin as he starts approaching restricted gang territory, the home turf of the Geng Eights. A split from the main Geng gang, these guys were infamous for their brutality in protecting their own 'turf' from intruders. Their psychopathic tendencies and blatant disregard for collateral damage made them feared, and few challenged them. It also meant that if he stole something of theirs, nobody else would care.
Chandra picks the lock on the fire exit of a high-rise building and carefully makes his way up, noting that a good jump will get him past the compound wall. He scopes out the nearest gang parking lot with the military-grade contacts he bought with the earnings from a successful heist a year ago. The guards look high on something. What he's doing is more high-profile than he'd like. But he doesn't have the time to waste. He takes a step towards the edge of the roof. He touches the smartphone at his wrist to activate two apps. And he leaps, fading into the background. It's not true active camouflage. There's no way he'd afford that sort of military-grade black ops equipment, reserved for guys with armor suits that cost more than everything he owned. The cloth flickers-hacked smart cloth has a terrible habit of crashing if you move too fast, or if the background changes too quickly, or for no reason at all. But in concert with the drug-addled perceptions of the guards, it is more than enough. They do not notice his approach, and when he hits the ground roughly (but safely) from the electrogravitic descent harness and the camo crashes his phone, he is already behind one of their vehicles.
He reboots the phone, restarts the app, and sneaks quietly to one of the small, sleek skycycles the gang has parked there. The Corona imports weren't just fast, but their small size meant they started up quietly. And with a silent purr of impassors, the garishly-painted gang vehicle zooms off into the sky, the guards still oblivious.
