Howard narrowed his eyes. The flickering neon lights hurt the longer he lingered around the city centre. He turned his left wrist -- twenty past eleven. He'd been on the job for several days by now and he was aching, bleeding inside to be done with it.
The music, the scent, the noise. Tinny, acrid, nauseating. All around overstimulating. These were the signs of a hungry, hungry caterpillar, and Howard knows he was in trouble. The sooner he dropped this datadisk off and earned his bounty for it, the sooner he could get his meal, and this gods-damned headache might just end.
He turned to the left into a narrow alleyway, past bar crawlers reeking of alcohol and vomit, joytoys whispering into his feed for a good time, and vendors shouting ads at the edge of his digital periphery. This was an assault of a kind Howard never thought he could endure, but endure he must.
The noise began to peter out the higher up the building he went, towards the rendezvous point. His contact had already been there, five minutes early.
Towering above the slums below, the view of the city from up here was breathtaking. Ugly, but breathtaking. It was a welcome respite to have the cool night air billow past him. The rooftop was lit only by one or two LEDs; while bright for their size, it was nothing as vicious. In fact, as he closed in on the stranger's location, they merely cast a dim glow against the concrete and rusting pipes around them.
"Password." He asked. If this was the man he was supposed to rendezvous with, he would have known it to be Howard's birth date.
