Max: Life At Low G, part 4

"Home sweet home," the ever original Andy said as he unlocked the door to our apartment.

"At least there's gravity and no one strapped to the wall."

"Maybe I should strap you to the wall."

"That's so gay."

My amusement turned immediately to irritation as Andy grabbed my ass. This was not unusual or normally unwelcome behavior, but I swatted his hand away.

"Okay," Andy said after a few minutes.

"I'm just tired. Let's just get unpacked and, I dunno, I'll lay down or take an amp or something."

I didn't feel tired until I said it. Suddenly it felt like gravity was making up for lost time.

We unpacked and I laid down in the bedroom by myself. After 20 minutes I realized that I was not going to be getting any sleep anytime soon. I grabbed my comp and hooked up. I didn't have anything in particular in mind. I loaded a book shop and picked out some interesting looking books. I captured the transaction and changed the price for the books to 0 before bouncing it back. I put down my comp and let it handle loading the books while I stared at the ceiling for a while.

It was dead silent in the bedroom. I heard Andy in the next room. It sounded like he already had a new job lined up for us. I fell asleep listening to his voice.

I was woken up by the sound of a pill bottle hitting the bed.

"Take some amp," Andy said as I tried to focus my eyes. "We have a job."

"Already?" I sounded more whiny that I cared to, but I was still in a daze. "It's not like we are short on cred."

"We have been engaging in good, honest labor too long. Word on the net is we have dropped out. That's not good for business."

"Fuck business."

"Okay, Cracker McCrank. You're the one who got me into this business. I was an honest, white dress virgin before you corrupted me."

"I could tell from Andy's unusually playful tone that he did not get that I was not kidding around.

"We have a ton of cred. Let's just go somewhere or do something."

"That sounds like a plan. We just spent three months away."

"We spent three months working"

"And banging a rich chick. And some of us engaged in Olympic level vomiting."

"Just fuck off."

Andy crawled into bed next to me and put his arm around me.

"Look, we need to take work where we can get it. So how about you stop acting like an idiot before I brain you?"

The annoying thing was, he probably would knock me upside of my head. And then I would hit him back and by then Andy would think it was foreplay and I could forget about sleeping.

"What's the job?" I sighed.

"Penetration and retrieval. We just need to get some data from one of our client's competitors."

"When?"

"ASAP."

"Delightful. Can I at least get some sleep."

"Sure. As soon as we are done."

The next thing I knew Andy was cramming two amps into my mouth. I swallowed before they made my tongue go completely numb. I felt my pulse speed up as any sense of fatigue drained out of me. I was on the hunt. It was time to ride.

"Let's go find a hookup." I said and we headed out of the door.

One does no pick just any link for a pen. Aside from the obvious desire to use a connection that can in no way be traced back to us, we needed a hookup with piss poor security and that was the challenge. Sometimes it was a gamble trying to tell the traps from the real poorly managed connections. We could spend hours on the train, or wandering around, spoofing our way on to and taking quick peeks at connections before moving on, the coming back for another peek. It was the single most tedious part of any job.