Except mine, of course, on my second last morning in the Sprawl, when the floodtide abated and the rooftops peeked, like a billion kids in straw hats, from the syrupy dawned surface of the City. An hour later the water had disappeared altogether, and I was able to clamber down into the Street. AC had…

Of course, Yogi wasn’t the only one beginning to have battery problems. Me and AC rode in one of the huge cigarette shaped carriages in Sally’s light speed train, strapping in for the lift-off, and taking the opportunity to rev ourselves up a bit via the on-board jacker. Energy levels rose, in small increments, orange…

The Sprawl roams erratically through space, tracking stray electrons packed with micro-information – refugees from a computer age, when bits were free. For the moment, in this aftermath, the City survives on its landlines alone. Obeying a tendency to cluster itself according to subtle shifts in information balances, the City metamorphoses its rhizomic tangential growth…

was why they’d built Palmerston Sprawl so far away from the pad in the first place, a syntax error so freaking massive that only the driver of the new mega freaked corporation train ever saw the funny side of it, and even then, not often. Sally was her name, though she probably wouldn’t tell you.…

The thought struck me that the thought had struck me before. The brilliant idea, I mean. Then it came again, like an atom into being. My life as a daydream. Once they realised even robots get stunted, they started switching us off. We, the ivy wastes of yersterday’s rain, remaindered, survive due to pity only.…

My soft kit waited there, filled with crisp, lemon-scented clothes Ñ or so I hoped. As did Tyrone and a couple of the other shift-bitters, I guess. Together they represented my top-end-of-tech laundromat worm of choice – Bubblas. A franchise that had recently expanded, now boasting an accelerator in Palmerston Sprawl, even. You’ll always run…

“Six hundred will buy you a box and a screen. Maybe a Scancil sharpener thrown in, you know, steak-knives type deal.” He tapped the linoleum counter with his Scancil unit and pretended to be interested in his own store’s catalogue, propped up against the beated terminal they used to jack credit approvals, download payments and…