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against the glass, but it resists blows harder than mine every day and my fist only bounces off with a dull thud.
    I want to just curl up in a ball on the sidewalk and start crying when a swarthy man comes running out the door of the shop. He has rough skin and tusks coming out of his mouth, like Weizack’s dead partner Riley back at the charnel house, except he’s a bit shorter and his skin is darker. I realize that neither his looks nor Riley’s surprise me the way the ghoul’s did. They seem almost normal to me. I stand there staring at him through blurry eyes for what seems like a very long time before I realize he’s yelling at me.
    "Fraggin’ chiphead! I said what the frag are you doin’ to my fraggin’ window, drekwit! Have you burned out too much of your fraggin’ brain? You deaf?" He hefts a dull silver club with a black rubber handle, and I back away a step from him.
    "Maybe you’ll listen to this, you worthless piece of drek," he says as he lifts the club, from whose tip bright blue sparks leap and crackle.
    I suddenly become very angry at being threatened by this ... thing. What the frag does he know? I’m having a very bad day and I’m in no mood to be threatened by some street scum kawaruhito . I pull Weizack’s gun from the waistband of my jeans and level it at the club-wielding shop owner. His jaw drops a bit and I can see in his eyes that he expects to die. I saw the same look from Riley the split-second before I shot him.
    I stare at the ork over the barrel of the gun for what seems like a very long time, thinking about how Riley’s face disappeared in a spray of red as his body fell to the floor. The ork starts to slowly back away from me and my hands begin to shake a bit.
    "Buzz," I hiss out in a low tone, and the ork suddenly bolts back into the store yelling something that I can’t hear.
    I turn and run away from the shop, bolting across the street. Cars screech on their brakes and honk their horns at me as I run past, still holding the pistol, tears of frustration and anger blurring my vision. One of the drivers yells something at me, an offer of help or a curse or something else I don’t know. I don’t hear him. I just keep running, wanting to get away from there and down through darkened streets and alleys, far from the lights and sounds of the strip.
    I don’t know how long I run for or where I’m going, I just need to get away, to run away from the terrible feeling of emptiness inside me. Away from the looming black holes in my mind and all the questions that cluster around them. My name, what the frag is my name? Someone told me, but I just can’t remember. My head feels so full I can’t find anything in it. Too cluttered, too many things going on at once. I just need to sort it all out, make sense of the jumble of thoughts.
    I stop running in an alley somewhere and huddle against the cold brick wall as a wave of exhaustion sweeps over me. I shiver in the growing chill of the night air and grip the pistol tighter as I wrap my arms around my knees and lay my head back against the wall to look up at the cold, gray sky lit by the distant lights of the city. The tears streaming down my cheeks make the reflections of the city lights into multicolored blurs against the darkness. I can almost imagine for a moment that I’m in that perfect, safe world I saw on the trideo. The world where everything makes sense and I know who I am and what my purpose is.
    I’m so tired, so very tired. I have to rest, just for a little while, close my eyes for a second and rest...

5
    The megacorporations, beyond the reach of any national or international law, are capable of dictating terms to any government in the world, so tight is their hold on the world’s economy . However, the same economic system also binds the megacorporations as surely as it does any of their customers . Corporations exist solely to generate profit, so they depend on the ability to continually gain market share and produce new