“Gross! You’re all sweaty!” Sophie complained when Hazel seated herself in the vehicle, having hitched her bike to the back of the Queue car. “Earth to Hazel. Where are you?”

Shaking herself, Hazel forced her thoughts back to the car. “I was just distracted. Did you see that news feedback there about Bandwidth?”

“No, Hazel. I’m Wired, so I don’t have to check out 20th century billboards for my news. I got that message this morning.”

“What happened?”

Sophie shook her head. “No one knows. He just collapsed at the top of a vert ramp, and by the time he hit the bottom, his spine had snapped.”

“You know he plays Trip.”

With a sympathetic glance, Sophie gave Hazel’s hand a quick squeeze.

“You know that you are not personally responsible for the well-being of every Trip player in the world.”

“I know, it’s just that most top-tier players stay anonymous, and he’s kind of famous in his own right without the game. It’s almost like losing a friend, I guess.” After a short moment of silence, Hazel pressed the morose thoughts out of her mind. “But since I can’t do anything about that, when are you coming to dance class with me?”

Sophie guffawed. “Dancing to music from a hundred years ago? No thanks. I’ll stick with recliners and leather. I don’t know anyone who still does that stuff. Not anyone under thirty.”

“Do you really think that a class of twenty-five people – dancing, mind you – are all over thirty? The over-thirties are just as bad as people our age about never leaving the Stream, and they have more of an excuse to camp because their bodies tend to hurt more than ours do.”

Sophie chuckled. “But they also remember ‘the good old days’ and try to bring them back. Oh, wait. That’s what you do, too!”

Hazel rolled her eyes. “I am not refusing to be Wired because I’m stuck in the ‘good old days.’ I have a bevy of reasons that I don’t want foreign objects inserted into my mind.”

“One of which is that someone might get in there and stop you from saying words like ‘bevy.’”

“Does it not terrify you that something like that is a possibility?”

“No,” Sophie laughed. “The Bridge doesn’t really do stuff like that, despite all the conspiracy theories, and no one else is going to be able to tap into a Wire to mess with people’s brains.”

“People do it all the time.”

“On a tiny scale. There are ten billion people on the planet, and the last breach grabbed fewer than a hundred people, and it just leaked photos. Nothing life altering.” Sophie would not be convinced.

“Yeah, and it was kids who cracked the Bridge. You think there aren’t big corporations that are chipping away at it?”

“Seriously, Hazel?” Sophie huffed in irritation. “The corporations make so much money and have so much power thanks to the Bridge. Why would they ever want to threaten it?”

“You’re not convincing me. Even if there is only a one in a billion chance that someone could hack my brain, I’m not taking that risk.”

“It’s not just one in a billion. You’re talking maybe a hundred million people who have the skills necessary to do it. Ninety-nine million plus of those work very happily in some business – paid very well, mind you – which puts you at a million out of one hundred million who are even mildly dissatisfied with their lives. Of those, probably nine hundred thousand are whiney victims who will just grumble to their boyfriends or girlfriends or moms about how unfair life is, get body alterations, post complaining messages on the Stream and do nothing. So now we are down to about one hundred thousand who might actually try something – most of whom aren’t actually capable - while ninety-nine million are working incessantly to make sure that none of the hundred thousand are able to knock the system offline, not to mention the new technology -”

“Look,” Hazel interrupted. “I understand the statistical probability, but you’re not changing my mind on this. The ninety-nine million people who run the Bridge have to cover ten billion connections and the hundred thousand only have to successfully evade detection once to be successful. I won’t be that once.”

“Three and half billion children, and over a billion adults aren’t wired,” Sophie grumbled, “so it’s not really ten billion. And if you got the Wire upgrade – you know my dad would pay for it - there would be basically zero chance that anyone could touch you - you’d be cloaked. So far, none of the breaches have happened with the upgrade.”

“No, they can just eavesdrop on every conversation and lurk at every meeting you attend with the upgrade – so much better. It’s statistically irrelevant, anyway. Doesn’t negate my argument. Once is enough.”

“You’re hopeless,” Sophie complained. Reaching to the back seat to retrieve her bag, she lapsed into silence as she dug through its contents.

Hazel didn’t want to fight with her best friend, but dealing with the constant badgering of the gamer community had gotten old. For the last several years, Hazel had stood primed and ready with whatever statistics she needed to pull out to counteract the mob’s arguments about her stubbornness. She had lost her dad in the Crash, and she would not put herself into the hands of the same kind of technology that had killed him.

“Thank you for using the Queue,” came the annoying AI mantra. “Remember, the Queue is for your convenience and safety.” Hazel mouthed the words. If Sophie weren’t irritated enough to stop speaking for ten minutes, they could have mocked the AI together, but Hazel would alleviate some of her own stress by doing it alone. “At all times, please continue to pay attention to your surroundings so that you can adjust your course if necessary.”

The words had grown meaningless, so often had Hazel heard them. Until the car lurched sideways, the thrumming drone of messages that rang through every car during every car ride had turned into a near-silent stream of sound, moved to the background of Hazel’s mind – of everyone’s mind, she knew.

When she felt the right side of the car where she was sitting lifted off the ground, Hazel took a second to process that the words finally meant something. Sophie hadn’t adjusted. Why hadn’t Sophie adjusted? Glancing at her friend, Hazel noticed how the girl’s body had shifted to lie against the driver’s side window, gravity nestling her into the curved frame of the car. The contents of her bag had spilled in a halo around her, and Hazel remembered that Sophie had taken her hands off the wheel to dig in the bag.

She didn’t adjust because she wasn’t touching the wheel…In slow motion, the car continued its rotation and the seatbelt that held Hazel in place strained to retain her. Sophie swayed like a ragdoll along the surface of the driver’s side door, mostly held in place by her belt, but her arms, shoulders, and head seemed detached from the rest of her. They weren’t, Hazel knew. But the moments until the car came to rest on its driver’s side terrified Hazel lest her own harness fail or Sophie twist too far and wrench some important spinal or muscular section of her body.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Once it stilled, Hazel braced herself against the center console with her dancer’s legs and unleashed her belt. She reached to tug on her ponytail, nonexistent since she had cut it the day after her father’s death. Even through her shock, she could process the wail of the emergency vehicle heading their way, and the AI was uttering non-stop directions and assurances. It was enough to explode Hazel’s head, but she had to check on Sophie, so she shoved down her rising panic.

Sophie, for the most part, seemed okay. Her implant probably had kicked in and now was monitoring her vital signs. By the time the emergency workers arrived, they would have a read on the heart rate, oxygen levels, and whatever else they monitored. All Hazel could discern was a gash on her friend’s forehead, apparently from the steering wheel when the first impact had occurred.

But if that hit had knocked her out, and her hands weren’t on the wheel, what had caused the crash? Sophie hated the Queue. She had spent a lot of time in the rurant section during her childhood, and she constantly told stories about riding in free-wheel cars on the dirt roads near her dad’s farm. Even in the city, she imagined herself some kind of off-road driver and kept her hands on the wheel ready for the slightest – if thoroughly unlikely – disruption in the Queue.

Either Sophie had caused the crash by trying to steer, which didn’t match up with Hazel’s memory of the moments leading up to the crash, or Sophie had not had her hands on the wheels, in which case, how did the vehicle crash? It sometimes happened in the more broken-down areas of town, but not in the neighborhoods close to the DeSoto home.

Hazel didn’t have time to consider, because the emergency vehicle arrived and her own door was pried open.

“I’m fine!” she assured them as they pulled her out from her door. Once she was out of the way, they moved to the top of the vehicle and released the lever that held the top hatch in place. It gave them a much better position to brace Sophie before they unbuckled her and immobilized her.

“Her vitals?” demanded Hazel.

“Are you family?” the technician inquired, “I don’t have a reading on you.”

“Yes,” Hazel lied. “I’m family. I’m Wire-free.” Yet another reason I’m glad, she assured herself. She was also glad that she hadn’t turned on her handheld after class, because the medics certainly would have scanned it before she remembered to turn it off.

The tech stared at her suspiciously, no doubt noting the several shades difference in their skin tones and lack of familial resemblance, but he seemed to decide it was okay. “Her vitals are fine. Strong, in fact. Other than that gash on her head, I would say she has little damage. I imagine she’ll regain consciousness soon.”

Drawing in a slow breath, Hazel calmed her stuttering heart. Sophie was okay. Just knocked unconscious. If something had happened to her in the middle of a fight! But it didn’t, Hazel reassured herself. It didn’t. It would be okay.

+++++++++++++

After fifteen hours of surveillance, Rel Martins shifted his car into drive, grateful that the lead had turned into nothing. He was an analyst, not a field agent. He had no idea why the powers-that-be had decided to push him backwards.

As far as Rel was concerned, it mattered not one iota that he had spent his first three years at the Bureau in the field. Someone had decided that he should use his mind instead of his body, and that was fine with him. He was a freaking tower, conspicuous regardless of what he did. Plus, when he had regularly chased down bad guys, he had also spent ridiculous numbers of hours every week making himself musclebound – just in case. To kick with legs that were as tall as many small adults required a lot more power than if he had stood at an average height.

Part of him missed the thrill of action. His acceptance into the NCB had fueled his already significant love of adrenaline, but to his surprise, tracking down patterns from an influx of data brought him even more excitement than flashing his smile around town to track down a criminal. He did miss the human interaction – analysts were not known for their outgoing personalities. Still, he wouldn’t trade it now that he had the option.

Or, he had thought he had the option. He filed a report, and suddenly he was back in the field.

First thing next week, I’m in Omar’s office before he has his first coffee. So, maybe the field assignment was pure coincidence, but Rel had tried to file the same report four times, had been thoroughly ignored – not even acknowledged! And then finally, without explanation, sent away from the desk. Maybe if he had worked at a department store, he would have assumed a lazy boss or something. In the National Central Bureau, there were no coincidences, and lazy people were run out of the job pretty quickly.

The feed popped up in his Wire, and Rel stopped the car on a dime, glancing around him for some indication of why his Neurex had spiked his adrenaline. Besides a couple of moving Queue cars, all Rel could see was a small woman, probably around forty years of age. Since the surveillance had taken him to the Sino-Russe enclave, he wasn’t surprised to recognize the facial features and dusty red hair typical of the region. Sliding the car to the curb, Rel followed the prompts in his Neurex to a dark, cramped corner, apparently set up as a home, outside an underground business. An overhang acted as a roof, but one side of the little rectangle stood exposed to the cold. Certainly, the Bridge didn’t broadcast information about corners of existence like the one in front of him.

Though he could make out the tiny silhouette of the woman outlined by a television on the back wall, he could not quite figure out the function of the spattering of pallets strewn around the odd outdoor space. One must be a bed, maybe another somewhere to sit. There was a miniature refrigerator in one corner lit by fluorescent lights from what had once been a retail display. A row of stacked plastic boxes created a makeshift wall to finish out the fourth side. On the television, a stream ran with an apparently live scene. Rel’s Neurex told him it was from China, near what used to be one of the many Stans but now lay in a disputed region between Sino-Russe, Greater Persia, and the Caucas Coalition.

Not a particularly pleasant place to be in the hospital, Rel grimaced, glancing at the image on the screen. Across the world, a man stood in a medical facility, and what looked like a teenage boy lay in a bed, not moving. Rel waited for his feed to update him on the significance of the scene, but nothing popped up, and he decided he would just see if the woman spoke English.

He waited until the screen went black and then cleared his throat.

With a start, the diminutive woman spun to face Rel, suspicion strong in her eyes.

“Excuse me,” he began. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m with NCB? Do you know us?” He held out his ID for her to scan, and she blinked at his outstretched hand for a second before nodding.

“I know of you,” the woman allowed. “May I help you.”

Rel wasn’t sure what he needed to ask – the Neurex had gone silent. “Um, what happened to your son?” He gestured to the blank screen.

“My nephew. He is in a coma. No one knows why, but he has not moved in three days.”

“In Sino-Russe?”

“We are Sinorussian, but he’s in disputed GP right now. His dad was on a cleanup mission for the old nuclear plant there. The doctors think my nephew may have stumbled on some radioactive material that shorted out his Wire. They plan to go in later this week and see about replacing some of the wiring in case it has gone brittle, remove anything that has dislodged. They’re hoping nothing broke loose in the tissue.” After the very matter-of-fact explanation, she finally let some sadness leak into her tone on the last sentence.

He stared at the screen. “It looks like a Jolt. GP is not as stable as Sino-Russe. Authorities cause as many problems as they fix.”

“We don’t think so. Even in Sino-Russe, it is very hard to find a stave. The government would never allow the regular populace to possess something with so much potential for danger. It’s always possible, with the destabilization in GP and the Stans, but it would be a very small chance.”

Without direction from the feed, Rel just accessed his notations and jotted down the info to his Neurex, planning to tap into the mainframe at the Bureau building to investigate further. He had no idea why he had ended up with this woman, though his probes found that she had the highest level of Wire. It just looked like a typical Jolt – maybe he had misread the impulse, or it had been sent in error.

“You have an upgraded Wire?” he wondered as he processed the woman’s stats. Mostly, only the wealthy or connected could afford them – that included government employees who worked in intelligence. Certainly, the woman didn’t fit any of those categories.

“My brother is in intelligence in Sino-russe, and they fitted all family members with Wires when the government began their experimentation. It is the way in Sino-Russe – the government must be able to keep tabs on all family members for security reasons.”

Makes sense, Rel recognized, considering the lack of individual rights in the region. “Um, hope everything works out for your nephew. Sorry to disturb you.”

Only after he left did he realize that he hadn’t given her an explanation for his presence. Cause I don’t have one, thanks so much, Neurex. Strolling back to his car, he headed to his apartment. He had done nothing productive all day, separated from the hardwire, but it was too late in the day to care. Figuring out why the Neurex had sent him to that random woman could wait; eating dinner couldn’t.