I was supposed to go live 20 minutes ago.

My name’s Spydalow. I’ve got 40 million subscribers who love to watch me beat up low-life’s in my neighborhood; it’s fun. I’d say that Lady Steel wished she had my fan base, but they’re rabid vulgar little vipers that I wouldn’t wish on my own enemy. The chatroom scrolls up at a hundred miles an hour. It becomes a gelatin pool of capslock gibberish, tempting me to shut the whole thing down.

But the show must go on.

Something my cam bot evidently disagrees with since, of course, it fritzes out seconds before showtime; of-freaking-course. The insides of its little oblong body stare up at me through my giant magnifying glass, each little wire and circuit begging to be retired. I call it Spydacam, and he’s my little buddy.

I really hope it’s not on its last legs; I’m low-key broke.

“C’mon,” I say to it. “What’s one more year?”

One of 6 silver telescoping legs twitch in my direction as if to answer. The tweezers look comically small in my gloved hands, and I click the tips together clumsily. Fully kitted up, I find myself determined to get this fixed; do you know how long it took to put this thing on? It’s a baggy full body suit with yellow piping and a big fat yellow bug slapped on the chest; getting in and out of it is a minor miracle. I piece two wires together, hoping for a breakthrough, but I get a static shock instead. Smoke rises from the little bot and fills the air with ozone; I purse my lips and exhale it away.

Okay, if I set this wire here, then maybe…

My apartment door shudders; someone is knocking. I drop the tweezers, exasperated; I only want a little peace before going live. Is that a lot?

A small screen on the wall next to the door shows me a bird’s eye view of the thin hallway outside my door. A girl with short black hair styled in a bob was staring at the camera. I recognized her—Jane from down the hall.

“I need your help,” I hear her say. I don’t say anything and return to my work because I try not to do requests like that. I have a direct message system for a reason. I resume concentration on my little buddy. I don’t have enough copper to replace this wire, but I need to do something. The sharp tips of the tweezer gently bite into the outer casing. I peel back some metal carefully.

“Off-camera,” she says.

I twitch, and a wire gets pulled out. RIP, Spydacam, you were a good soldier. I shut down everything; there will be no stream tonight. The anonymous mob, their memes, and their gibberish go silent until next time. I remove the black and yellow lenses from my face and exhale forcefully. I stand and stretch; things pop that I don’t want to hear pop. I tug at the shoulders of my suit while turning to face the door behind me. My apartment was a utility closet at best, a 5x5 cube that suited a guy who could stick to walls just fine.

The door slid open horizontally, and it groaned. I find Jane staring up at me; her eyes are hidden behind slips of hair and cast sharp shadows over her round face. The fluorescent light overhead gives her skin a soft green tint and turns the yellow bug on my suit golden brown mustard.

“Sup?” I ask.

“My brother,” she says and turns around. She heads down the graffiti-covered hall expecting me to follow, so I do. She arrives at a T junction less than a minute later but keeps going forward. As we walk, I produce a pic comb from my pocket and tug at my stiff locks with it. I picture a beautiful buzz cut in my future and sigh wistfully.

The doorway to her apartment barely receded into the wall but stood out because it was the only clean piece of real estate. I remember coming across Jane one night while she was painting her door a vibrant shade of crimson; she had moved in the evening prior. I remember thinking, what a waste of time. It was like putting lipstick on a pig.

Her door whooshed open. It was much quieter and better cared for than mine. Her cube was enormous, too, certainly much more significant than mine, more like a rectangle. I noticed she had room for a couch, and I clucked my teeth.

There was a dead man on that couch, too.

I got closer; his eyes shot open. His pupils were microscopic needle points adrift in a milky white and red sea. I placed a hand on his cheek, and his freckles glowed like painted neon. I’ve seen this before. He looked Blyssed.

“He showed up at my door like this,” she says. “He’s been missing for months.”

“He OD?” I ask, no answer. “What do you need from me?” I feel around the back of the head, and it’s freshly shaven, almost as if he’s had surgery there, just at the base of his skull. I pull the cranium forward. It looks like an injection port got drilled into his head. All the big addicts have them installed, makes for higher highs, know what I mean?

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“Look at him,” she says, dispassionately like her brother and I was pests. “He needs a doctor; I figure you could get him to one faster than I could buzzing city services. Considering you can, you know,” and she wiggled her fingers as if that explained anything.

Still, she wasn’t wrong.

I picked up the body and put him on my shoulders. With my mojo turning on, manipulating the gravitons of anything relative to my touch, he feels light as a feather. I glance to the right and notice she has a window. A window! I scream internally and tell myself that I need to stop living so cheaply. Or stupidly, I forget which is it. I buy a lot of crap, okay? Anyway, I ask her to pop it open, and she does. I lift my leg over the sill and plant my yellow boot onto the siding of the building. Anchored, I bring the rest of my body out.

“Birb,” I say behind me, figure I can get this done in a few minutes.

I stand up straight, my vision still perfectly oriented. I’m staring straight down, 50 feet off the ground, above an alley filled with trash and other rusting detritus. Above my head was another cube complex just as worn down as this one. I turn in place and see the sky.

I start jogging up the building.

My footfalls are heavy; invisible strings pull them down as fast as I can lift them; my muscles feel tense and alive. Jane’s brother moans, and a thick line of drool dislodges from his lips and hits the back of my heel.

“You alright, chief,” I say, not that he could understand me. Depending on the quality, people Blyssed were in their own world, hellscape or heaven. I curse myself for not asking more questions. Then again, Jane from down the hall wasn’t very talkative clearly. I think back to that thing drilled into the back of his head, and it sure didn’t look very elective…

A faint whistling breaks up my thoughts and sends them scattering like startled cats. There’s a flash of light in my peripheral vision, and I backflip off the wall just in time to see a missile streak past my body and cave into the apartment wall. The force of the explosion knocks me back into the other building, my feet collide with the sheet metal, and I’m still upright.

The brother moans again.

I spring from my position and angle toward the other apartment again, then ping-pong between the two until I clear the roof. A mechanical buzzing fills the air, and the hairs on my neck stand on end. I really should have asked more questions.

The Bug Boyez. 4 Local idiots who fly around on anti-grav metallic murder hornets typically account for 90% of my fight comp footage. They’re a goddamn nuisance, is what they are. They circle above my head while I put the brother down beside me.

“You responsible for this, Uno?” I ask while motioning to the Blyssed-out sack of potatoes by my feet. Uno dropped his altitude enough so the head of his ride could come face-to-face with mine. The artificial mandibles drip a thick black string of gunk that smells just like motor oil, and veiny lights across the smooth surface pulse slowly. Uno turned the bug horizontally and leaned forward from his saddle; the few teeth he had left were caked with black resin and smelled worse than the motor oil.

“He stole from us,” Uno says. “Pumped it inna him since he want it so bad.” I could see my reflection in the sun blocker visor of the fighter pilot helmet he wore, and the disgust was plain as day on my face. I really hated these idiots.

“Examples need to be set, Spyda.” Uno, again.

“That’s true,” I say and tilt my head down. I smile; I gently shake my head. “This is your first and last.”

A small bead ejects itself from a compartment in my glove and, upon contact with the air, immediately enlarges to the size of a baseball in my hand. I throw it, and it bounces off Uno’s head before exploding mid-air, covering all four in an adhesive paste. I call them Web Bombs because branding is important; tell your friends.

Two of the four immediately panic and collide with each other. The two try to pull apart using the heft of each flying horror, and I try not to laugh. The adhesive stretches like string cheese, but those engines eventually fail; the pair of pilot and machine collide with a bone-crushing smack that grounds them all. Uno wobbles in front of me, letting loose a string of profanity so vulgar I’m sure he made up 80 percent of it. I jump up and kick the front of his machine, watch it careen against the roof’s edge, and become immediately stuck to it.

I jump and toss another glue bomb at Tres, aiming moreso for his ride, and it connects. The paste gutters up the exhaust port, and I watch it sputter and choke before crashing down to the alley below. No sound, so I peer out over the edge of the roof. Tres and his machine caught themselves on a tensile fiber optic cable that spanned between the complexes and man; this glue is strong. I mosey over to Uno and kick his machine. It teeters slightly over the edge, but the adhesive holds firm because I know what I’m doing.

“I catch you slags on these things again,” I say and kick the machine one more time to really sell it. With no more words needed, I make my way over to Jane’s brother and turn him over. Still spaced out, I sight and place a hand on his chest. His heart was beating even faster now; not good. I hefted him back onto my shoulders and started bounding my way further downtown, jumping over two buildings at once to an old doctor friend who sometimes patches me up.

Down here in the slums of Millerton Bay, no one has insurance. Often we rely on the kindness of doctors such as Julian here. I land in front of his beat-up old storefront and knock three times. He answers, see’s my cargo, and allows me in. Julian had long, straight, dirty blond hair and wore a white med coat over his grey tank top and blue cargo pants. The upper portion of his face was artificial, with a porcelain sheen that I tried not to stare at. He claimed he lost that part of his skull and brain matter in the war. Which war changed depending on the day.

He tells me to place Jane’s brother onto a derelict-looking old dental chair face down. He starts hovering over the body while mumbling and sucking in his teeth. He stares at the component shoved into the back of the skull for several minutes.

“Very sloppy,” he mumbles. “Shame.”

“Is he gonna be alright?” I ask.

“He got any next of kin?” He asks me back, and I step outside. I close my eyes and thoughtclick through my contacts list. There she is, Jane from down the hall. I call, and she answers after two seconds of silence. I tell her about her brother, I sugarcoat it but stress she should probably come down here. She said, “Okay,” as if I had asked her to get the groceries.

“Why didn’t you tell me the Bug Boyez were after him?” I finally ask.

“You didn’t ask.”

She had me there. I tell her I’ll see her when she gets here, sit down on the curb, and stare out into the urban blight. This would have been a good stream.

RIP Spydacam.