It all seemed like a great idea when I was young. You know the story. Our whole futures were laid out in an endless stream of adventure and why wouldn't we? Back then, it was the dawn of a new era and we were the bleeding edge of human evolution. Or so we thought.

“You're no cyber!”, shouted the irrate heckler from the front row.

Lucky for Neon Traxxon, the stage in Terminal Vibes was low. She lifted her treasured guitar slightly. A blur of motion was all the warning anyone got. A plasteel boot slammed into the young man's lower jaw with head-whipping force. At least three teeth flew from his open mouth as he fell back. He tried to get up, but he just wobbled and fell back to the floor. Security found him in seconds, grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him from the place. Neon did not relish him his fate.

In less than a second, the wailing sonics from Neon's modded antique guitar resumed. The remaining crowd filled the empty space and took up their jumping, high impact dance, thundering the floor with their heavy boots. For some of them, boots and feet were one and the same.

Some would say it had been a long year, but Evelyn felt it the sludgy drag of multiple lifetimes. From her place in the bowels of the Pit, deep under the affluence of NeoTokyo, everything seemed mired in its own existence. Nothing and no one had a vision beyond themselves. Sitting on her chair, between shows, Evelyn wondered what she was doing there. She wondered what she had ever been doing there.

Taking a drag on a tobacco smoke, one of the most illegal substances in the sprawling metropolis, it all came crashing down on her. The voices and noise in the club receded as her mind rushed out of itself. She felt like reality was being sucked out of her through a vortex in the centre of her being. She almost dropped the expensive smoke she was enjoying up to that moment. Reaching out a long-fingered hand, she steadied herself on the bar.

Bruce was enjoying the cold touch of the beer bottle on his forehead after a hard day in the bowels of Yumikon Tower. He never went there because of some interest in what happens there. It was just the job. Monitoring power generation levels from the myriad renewable resources the tower used to generate the electricity its citizens needed. He was charged with keeping things at a reasonable level without overloading the generators or the distribution networks the electricity flowed through.

For the most part, the job was mundane; even boring. Last night was neither. Bruce's boss, an overweight fascist called Dwight, spent all night riding him to run the generators a little hotter. That was one thing Bruce would have liked about AI being still on the planet. He was sure an AI would tell Dwight to get stuffed. For some reason, Dwight felt the rules could be broken because Bruce happened to be a human being.