The father sat smoking a fat hand-rolled cigarillo. He puffed foul smoke into the windowless subbasement unit his family occupied. Three children in dirty undershirts stood around him. One held a charging datapad with a cord running to the wall, another a holo-game controller getting no signal, and the littlest hugged a hand-me-down stuffed unicorn. The toddlers spoke to Samantha in Mandarin and she replied in English. They didn’t understand but their dad did. He eyed her as she worked.
“Your router needs to be replaced,” said Sam.
“It still works,” said the dad.
“This thing is twenty years old if it’s a day and not strong enough to get a signal down here.”
He looked away and smoked. Sam already knew he was piggybacking off their upper neighbor’s signal. He stared at an old laptop that was useless without a network connection.
“How much for a new one?”
“At least $1800.” She knew he couldn’t afford it and he looked away again. “I could splice your unit and suck a little speed from the three hundred other protected connections in the building, but it’s technically illegal.”
“Would we have free net again?” asked the dad.
“Yeah, and I’ll do it better than before so no one will find you and kick you off.”
The dad got up pulling a wad of crumpled hundreds out of his pocket and the children cheered.
Back on the surface, Sam grabbed a water taxi at Canal Street and headed up Broadway to the parts of town that still had sidewalks. She jumped off at Washington Square and stopped at a bank machine to digitize the $700 she just got. Only one was a fake.
She took the skyrail uptown to her next job. When she finished she grabbed a slice of pizza and ate it on the platform scanning the classifieds on her wrist-o-phone for another job. The air always felt more breathable above the twentieth-floor level.
A message popped up on her private channel.
PERSON TO PERSON
Excel Tug 9732 to Earth, NYC Subnet 2
Sammy,
Old 97 is doing a layover on the Moon’s orbital repair station. We’ll be docked for three days. Our splicer jumped ship six months ago and…
