There's blood on the concrete floor outside Zef's apartment.

It's fresh. Scarlet. Hasn't had time to go rusty brown. Not a lot—just a round splat of it, and a smear beneath that. Like a semicolon.

A nice bit of punctuation to his day. Super considerate of someone to have a fist fight outside his apartment on his second day in Neorleans. His excitement is already fever-cold, sweat slicking his palms. He'd layered on the anti-perspirant, but under a binder, two tops and the baking sun he'll have pit stains in seconds. Should have put maxi pads in his shirt.

What are the chances his interview for this frankly life-changing job gets cut short before they ask him a single question? This guy. Can't even handle a mild summer's day. He'll be crispy BBQ after one day at Bionic Capital.

Now, there's blood outside his apartment, too.

Puts him on edge. Most things in this city do. He needs to be careful. Cautious. The interview is in forty minutes, and he needs to arrive early. That way, he can sweat in the receptionist's office instead of sweating over the fear of being late. He pulls up the navigator app on his HUD, his cybernetics overlaying his vision with a blinking red line leading the way to the subway station. He follows that line to the elevator of his apartment tower—a city in its own right. As the grated doors of the lift rattle shut and it skyrockets the sixty floors upward, Zef looks out the smog-stained glass to the sub-city beyond.

He moved to Neorleans two days ago. Used to live here in his uni days. Still never got used to the claustrophobic crowd of buildings hunkered over each other or the noise, everything draped in oxidised copper and neon miasma. When the elevator emerges above ground, the light filters in slats. So many buildings sprawl up and overhead with rare gaps. Squares of acid yellow sky quilted into the city's belly.

It gives him a thrill of excitement and nerves. Here, he can start fresh. Build himself. Build his life. The city buzzes with risky promises, but Zef won't listen to the pushers of performance enhancing drugs or pyramid schemes. He's gonna earn his way up the old-fashioned way. Hard work.

You're smart, his dad had told him. If anyone can make it, you can. Just stay safe.

The lift stops. Zef gets out, following his navigator to the monorail station. He knows the way. Charted it yesterday. But the navigator settles his jitters a little.

On the train car, a man wearing a cardboard sign begs for cash. Says he needs it to subvert the heat death of the universe. The other passengers stare into their HUDs, visible only to them, stolidly ignoring the man as if he's one of the talking adverts for anti-aging implants.

They ignore each other too. No one says hello. Or makes eye contact. Zef passes thousands of people on the street and, okay, so none of them stare at the shape of his chest or raise eyebrows when his voice breaks like he's a teenager at twenty-nine, but that's 'cause nearly every time he speaks at all it's to a computer. The automated turnstile takes his rail fare with a falsely chipper, Thanks for riding Neorleans Transit Commission.

Zef gets out at his stop and follows the red line into the open air of the capital district. Unlike the sub-city he crawled out from under, the buildings here don't hunch horizontally to block out the sky. They reach for that sky and nearly touch it. Tall, glass daggers cutting up the clouds. Green things grow. Palm trees, elephant ears and birds of paradise. Not a speck of anything close to verdant in the sub-city, but that's how it goes in a place without sunlight.

At the centre of the ring road stretches a tightly winding building like a DNA strand. Zef crosses the street towards it, the pavement glowing like coals under the shoes he scrimped to buy. Men and women, glossy as magazine models, march through those doors. All cartographically tailored suits and mercury shine. Implants wink silver and gold from temples, bared wrists, the back of a neck.

Zef's own home-brewed implant gives readouts for makes and models, but he recognizes most without it. He doesn't know this city, but he knows gild. Most of the implants worn by the caps of the capital district are mental performance enhancers, multi-tasking partitions, tracers for the data flowing from their comms to their corporate overlords.

It's here he first gets the sense he's being watched. Which is nuts, because the pavement is a sea of commuter foot-traffic, and there's security and traffic cameras at every intersection, so of course he's probably got someone's eyes on him. But...

He looks over his shoulder anyway. The passers-by are all vacant stares, glued to their HUD's. No eye contact.

Can't shake the feeling, so he goes inside.

The atrium of the building goes all the way up, a skylight at the top. The cavernous space makes the click of heels sound over-loud. A few conversations are intelligibly audible in the eerie quiet. Zef checks in with the desk clerk.

"I have an interview with Rylan Archer."

Her gaze snaps up and down, making an instant judgement. "Please place your hand on the biometric scanner."

Zef stifles the urge to run. He places his hand on the tablet scanner. A red light slides up and down his palm. He holds his breath for it, even though he knows it should work. He double-checked everything. Took a lot of night classes at community college for those qualifications, gave his hands-on experience a corporate polish.

But his pedigree?

Zef is a nobody. Worse. He's the son of a tax dodging MIA war veteran.

So he'd had to lie. Took a lot of shady dealings with dark net folks to falsify his records. No longer the son of a solar farmer who couldn't afford the tax on the land his panels occupied, forced to sell it for a pittance, but an orphan adopted by a programmer and a Net technician—impressive enough to make him seem qualified. Modest enough to seem plausible.

What if those dark net folks scammed him, though? What if the reader spits out that he's the son of a criminal? It killed him to lie at all.

The scanner runs twice more. It turns green and gives a cheerful beep.

"Top floor," says the clerk.

Zef only lets his breath out when he reaches the elevator and steps inside. Now he just has to maintain this falsehood through the interview. Once he has the job, it won't matter. His skills can speak for themselves. He can stay on the straight and narrow after that.

The elevator rockets up so quickly his ears pop, opening onto a quiet reception, empty except for the clerk swiping through documents on his holoscreen. He looks young for the job. Smooth-faced. But then, Zef still awaits the appearance of a single, solitary beard hair. Perhaps the receptionist is trans too, or maybe he's eighty and bought a whole new face. Cybernetics like that cost more than a receptionist's salary, but on the sub-city market?

Who knows?

Zef steps forward and clears his throat. The receptionist doesn't look up.

In a bored drawl, "Rylan won't see anyone without an appointment."

"I'm here for an interview?"

The receptionist still doesn't look up. His eyes flick, reading something on his HUD. "Zeffir Kovac? Your interview's not for another half hour."

"I'm early."

"There's a cafe on the first floor."

Well, fuck you too, buddy. Zef contemplates parking his ass on the empty seats, but obedience and the desire to look like an appealing employee win out. He goes to the cafe and drinks an over-priced, syrupy macchiato while marinating in his nervous sweats.

He needs this job.

Not needs as in need-a-treat-after-a-long-day. Not needs as in need-a-holiday-to-the-Nordics, or need-that-sexy-pair-of-Doc-Martens-with-the-flower-embroidery-on-the-sides-to-match-my-gay-aesthetic.

Needs as in, he can't afford his next month of testosterone if he doesn't get the job. Needs as in, can't make rent on his shitty apartment, which smells of a dead body and has the size and cleanliness of a back-alley food cart. Furnished, the ad said. Sure, if you count an inch-thick, musty bedroll from which the dead body smell emanates.

He busies himself reviewing the requirements for the job. Degrees he went terminally in debt for. Experience that won't count if they discover where he acquired it. There had been a practical test, four online interviews, screening his network history—he had to thoroughly scrub it of the underground engineering forums where he'd learned half of the things that got him through those other interview stages—a psych evaluation, criminal background checks. At each step, he'd grappled with how terrible it would feel if it was all a waste of time.

Yet, somehow, here he is. At his final interview.

Zef returns to the receptionist just as he answers a call, saying, "I'll send him through." He hangs up and doesn't look at Zef. "Rylan will see you now." He points to the door with an officious and offensively large bronze placard engraved with Rylan Archer's name.

Zef lets himself through into the most horrifying office of his adult life.

The walls are windows. The ceiling is also windows. The floor is, you guessed it, windows. Seventy-six floors up, Zef's calves cramp with the instinct to back-pedal to safety. With the exception of the wall and door he walked through, the office is a transparent personal hell for acrophobics. The city street below buzzes like television static. Then Zef realises those moving particles are people.

He focuses instead on the desk and Rylan Archer sitting behind it.

If possible, this is worse.