You’ve got about a minute before you need to shower if you want to catch the tube to work, one of the last remaining vestiges of public service the city still offers.  Her shift doesn’t start for another couple hours so you’ll be riding alone today, hoping nobody on the platform has a grudge they’d like to take out on a replaceable Skaianet Subdirector of Stenography, relying on the pistol you barely know how to use if they do.  Of course today, as every day, you’re more worried about someone getting in your head than in your purse.

You ungracefully slide out from under your fuck buddy/lover/please don’t ask me about this at 6:00 in the morning/lover and bring yourself groggily to a sitting position.  According to the guy who installed the latest iteration, your neurals are supposed to simulate Delta waves and make a late night feel like eight full hours of sleep.  As you grope for your phone in the dark you reflect on what a monumental load of horseshit this feels like.  The first thing that comes up on your feed is a post on TransAm.  Someone’s claiming there’s a new rootkit, installs itself in anyone with the M.78 Skaianet Processor or later.  It’s probably a lie but if it’s not you’re going to blow through the rest of your savings updating your firmware to deal with it.  You at least know not to touch the “user created patch” someone linked a couple pages into the thread.  At least, not until several other users have gone over it, installed it, and verified it doesn’t contain anything labeled “fryHyksosneurals.dll”  A notification at the edge of your vision informs you that your minute’s up and you’d better get moving unless you plan on skipping the shower altogether.  Given the layer of drool on your face and the faint odors of sweat and booze, you opt for the former.

You stumble into the bathroom, the lights come on less than a second before you would have hit the shower door.  The damn thing always makes you wait a second before sliding open, like the ones at the grocery stores when you were a kid, you’d walk slower and slower until you could get through without stopping all together.  You lurch into the shower and mash the controls, the spray of hot water stuns you for a moment while you flick through your music selection, eventually settling on something close to white noise to accompany your absent scrubbing.  You absolutely hate showers, something you thought an apartment without a tub would have cured you of by now.  Lori promised she’d take you to a bathhouse some day, Not that kinda bathhouse Hyk, get your mind outa the gutter, a request you’ll never take seriously coming from her.

You want to go to the aquarium with her.  You don’t really understand why but you want to scare yourself out of your mind watching the two headed shark whipping back and forth in its tank and kiss her breathless under the neon glow of the GFP jellyfish.  It’s not going to happen today, you’re going in for a ten hour shift and she’s in for twelve, but the thought upsets and confuses you enough that you stop lathering your hair and just stand with the water going.  This is supposed to be someone you meet for drinks after work, have sex with and fall asleep underneath.  This is the intelligent way to handle it, it’s smart and manageable and doesn’t require you to share all your favorite places or worry about her when she blows off your concerns about whether her cybernetic rig’s really secure.  Trust me Hyk, I know better than I hope you ever will she keeps telling you, and if you have to wonder all the time what awful things she’s talking about there you’re not going to be able to focus on what’s important anymore.  Things like staying above the poverty line, and keeping your boss and her boss and his bosses’ boss out of your head, no matter how expensive that gets.  

At this point you’ve been in the shower far too long, you smack the “dry” function on the pad and fidget for the whole seven seconds it takes to whisk the water away.  You squeeze through the door before it can open completely, residual suds still clinging to your hair as you hurry to your dresser.  You were a little preoccupied last night and didn’t set aside anything to wear, whatever’s at the top of your drawer’s going to have to suffice.  A ping at the edge of your consciousness tells you to check your phone again.  As you attempt to hook your bra one handed you scroll through your alerts, it turns out the rootkit’s been confirmed by not one but several sources inside the company.  This at least is a form of anxiety you can understand.  This is a problem you’ve dealt with before in some iteration, and not a pretty lady sleeping in your bed who’s going to wake up in an hour and fifty seven minutes to sneak into your cubicle and smooch you during her break.  The last thing you need is something else to worry about, someone else.