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company, taking care of our largest client, and you want to begrudge them a nice car for their commute?
    No, I needed a Bank Destroyer. A foundation crumbling bunker busting violation they couldn’t justify.
    Delta MedWorks had to be the key. Its convolutions and intricacies would have stymied me in the past, but now I was jacked in.
    Jacked up.
    Fucked up.
    Thirsty all the time.
    Talking to Deckard in three hour shifts at night, running down theories while he slept under a flickering heat lamp.
    Upon waking, Deckard would blink slowly with heavy lids, just like a human. He was a good friend. A great friend! I bought him extra feeder fish to let him know I loved him.
    Mom called every Sunday. I didn’t pick up. She’d know —every conversation on Hex is a series of shouted interruptions, followed by an apology, followed by an interruption, ad infinitum. She had enough to worry about. I’d call soon, once the Delta MedWorks Scandal had been packaged and sold to a rival bank. I’d tell her about the new job, promotions, but not exactly what I was doing. Couldn’t put her at risk.
    Deckard knew my grand plans. I told him one night, after singing him a song about whales which I remembered from attending Science Camp Kiwanilong when I was eight.
    “So, what do you think, Deck?”
    And I looked in his enclosure and he had shed a single, milky tear. Was it the beauty of my song? The brilliance of my plan?
    I discovered later that it was a defense mechanism—his body shedding excess salt from all the extra feeder fish I was giving him—but at the time it felt very important.
    Everything was important.
    Everything was silver. I started stacking Hex, lighting the next high off the still burning butt end of the last.
    Pick up runs to Port and Egbert hit every three days, no matter how much I’d previously acquired. Demand kept exceeding supply. Purchase protocols were back in place. Old patterns returned to sense memory.
    No one saw me as Kirby anymore. I’d appropriated the right look. A sheen of sweat, the smell of accidental neglect and starvation on my breath.
    Egbert nicknamed me. “What up, Crooked D?”
    Port laughed from the shadows. He stayed back there, though—I picked up new nerves from him, imagined he kept his hand on his pistol when I approached.
    “Same ol’ same, Egs, plus two more packets.”
    “Shit. You setting up your own shop? You know it doesn’t work that way with Hex…”
    “No. No. No. These are all for me. I’m right on the verge of something important. I don’t want the tank running low.”
    And I knew then that he would ask Port to follow me. Trust was an idea not permitted here. The rumors regarding the Hex trade were never just rumors. I’d seen the documentary Hexposé : Folks who tried to deal Hex without the right contacts and suppliers in place lost their eyelids and lived forever fearful lives in mist-goggles.
    Blood rituals to show loyalty? I could see it. The missing fingers on both Hungarian and Egbert? Maybe the trade was tied into the Yakuza (or just a big fan of their marketing).
    I rushed home that night with nary a swerve or glance which could be perceived as me reselling Egbert’s merch. Hoped Port was satisfied with what he saw.
    Home safe, seeing the invisible.
    They saw everything. The infrared eyes of the surveillance state created a constricting red web across my skin.
    Picturing it as One Large Eye would be a mistake. One Large Eye could be deceived. You could hide outside of its view or hope to blind it. Instead I imagined the air as a silver ocean filled with bioluminescent krill, each tiny organism trained to receive one type of data. The motion of a hand sent out purple ripples modeling the likely cause and purpose of the movement. The eye twitch of REM slumber triggered tiny green waves resulting in Common Sleep Patterns of Subject. Yellow waves followed sexual activity, determining possible needs for future hospital care or progeny-based loans. And the