the desk of my boss, Mike Vegas, and it lands with a satisfying thud. Frankly, I'm glad to be rid of the evidence, if only until tomorrow.

"Because it's your job." Mike slides the bag under his desk without even glancing at its contents, then finally looks up to meet my gaze. His facial expression looks as blank as usual to me, but a piece of software I installed on my eyes starts flashing up a translucent yellow warning sign, pointing out that he's making tiny involuntary movements—a momentary flicker of the cheek here, a curl of the lip there. Nothing a human could consciously spot, but my eyes have a sufficient refresh rate and resolution to pick up that sort of thing. The bottom line is that he's uncharacteristically uncomfortable, for whatever reason.

"You know what I mean," I continue. "He was hardly violent. Don't you think that actually having him taken out was kind of overkill on Godin's part?"

"It's not our job to question our clients' motives, only their ability to pay. Besides, he was a liability. Copyright violation is one of the most serious crimes there is these days, given the structure of our fragile economy." He gets up and makes his way to a shelf filled with various photos and figurines, where he pours himself a shot of whiskey from an expensive looking decanter.

As he glances back at me, I decline his offer of the same with a subtle shake of my head. Call me paranoid, but in my line of work, I never could feel comfortable if I was anything less than a hundred percent sober.

"They couldn't just have him running around pirating their intellectual property," Mike continues.

"But it's food," I protest. "It's not like it's a rich kid's luxury like music or films. There are homeless people I've seen eating decent meals thanks to him."

"There are plenty of public domain staple foods. The homeless can eat the same handouts as the starving children in Africa: rice, grains, vegetables, pulses. No one's trying to stop people from eating. They have more than enough to live on." He takes a sip of his drink. "All Godin want to do is ensure the uniqueness of the very specific dishes served in their chain of five-star restaurants, so don't give me any of that melodramatic bollocks about starving homeless people just because they have to eat boiled rice and steamed vegetables instead of foie gras en brioche."

"It still doesn't feel right."

"Which brings me to my next point. Have you given any more thought to my offer? Most people would kill for another free synaptic implant."

"That all depends on the implant. The uplink to the Mesh and the map are all well and good, but I'm still not sure about suppressing my emotions. It just seems so... inhuman."

"As opposed to all the drugs you take to calm you down as you make the hit?"

"At least they wear off after a few minutes." I walk past the shelf and look out the window at the scenic view of the city, taking a moment to watch the clouds drift along in the summer breeze. The trees are such a vibrant green this time of year, they look somehow unreal, set against the pale grey concrete blocks that people waste their lives in. I quickly inspect all the nearby rooftops, making sure nobody's on any of them. Old habits. "You know, I've been thinking a lot lately, and between the implants and the drugs, I'm beginning to feel less and less like a real woman and more and more like some kind of machine, just efficiently fulfilling her job role and nothing else."

"Efficiently?" I hear Mike practically choking on his drink.

I turn back around to face him. "Is there something wrong with my performance?"

"I've been running over the encrypted video feed of the hit that your eyes sent me."

It wasn't exactly a secret he kept from me that when I was on the job, my eyes sent an encrypted live broadcast straight to the office, hidden in the Mesh's entropy. Talk about your body betraying you. I had to take Vegas's word for it that he couldn't spy on me when I was off