Caldwell heard the familiar sound of his screams from deep within his nightmare. Long before it jolted him awake, he saw interlaced between the horrific images, fragments of the decision he had made. The fragments coalesced, fusing into something cold, dark and chillingly absolute. He opened his eyes, allowing his contacts and irises the milliseconds they needed to adjust to the semi-darkness. He grunted and turned over on the memory foam futon. It was quiet in his enclosed capsule, quiet, except for the discordant sounds of men in various states of sleep.

Caldwell had long learned to block out the obligatory rumbling snores of the other occupants, the rasping sounds of heavy breathing underscored by the distant noise of traffic outside. In his mind, the sonic summary of recurring nightmares still echoed back from deep within the plastic walls of his capsule.

Screams were nothing new at the Angel Capsule Hotel. They came, in all their harrowing variety, in the middle of the night or in broad daylight. The occupants had learned to read meaning in the discordant sounds and to block them out. Over the course of his unintentionally prolonged stay, Caldwell had heard them all. The cries of desperation, howls of pain, heart-rending sounds of grown men crying in their sleep and the depraved shrieking of deranged men brought to the end of their tether. Sometimes the onslaught was relentless, the decibels seeping through the pores of the plastic walls. He had lain awake listening to the nonsensical mutterings of men talking in their sleep, the grunts and exhalations of alcoholics relieving themselves within the stifling cocoons of their own capsules. He found it hard to decipher the meaning of his own screams amidst all the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Today, Caldwell felt a strange hypersensitivity. He was acutely aware of the sweat-soaked sheets clinging to his naked perspiring torso like a shroud, the minute movements of the thermo-regulating fabric systematically adjusting its weave. Caldwell wondered whether this sensitivity to external stimuli was a side effect of him having made the most cowardly of personal choices. He still hadn’t brought himself to contemplate the finality of his decision but the conclusion was inevitable. Eventually, in a matter of minutes, he thought, he was going to kill himself.

Soon, the end would be in sight for his heavily punctuated sleep patterns. The nightmares that stretched into infinity, ghostly apparitions of fear reaching deep into his psyche. He was trapped in a living hell and there was only one way out. Soon, he would have that which he craved more than anything else, a sleep that stretched undisturbed into infinity. He would have peace.

Caldwell glanced at the time projected in pale green pixels by the cheap Taiwanese clock built into the ceiling. Through burned out eyes, tormented mind moribund in that fuzzy area between sleep and wakefulness, he watched the pulsating digits of the clock ticking over. It was that hour of dawn. Outside, the shadows of the night had started to recede, exposing the gray wet reality of a winter morning. He lay inert on the memory foam futon and watched the time spin on its invisible axis, sweeping through its three hundred and sixty-degree arc in precisely sixty seconds. It was 5.30AM.

Time had become a meaningless concept to Caldwell, reduced to a simple biological counting down, the unstoppable approach of an impending expiry date. He found sleep elusive, his existence reduced to untold hours of wakefulness followed by annoying stretches of insomnia. Sometimes he would go days without sleep, a relatively recent affliction that he concluded was subconsciously brought on by a desperate attempt to avoid being plunged back into another interminable sequence of horrific dreams. When sleep came eventually, the nightmares would begin all over again, the grotesque storyboards unfurling with even more intensity. Then he’d wake up screaming, the time projected from the clock his only beacon to reality, counting down to his impending death.

The more he thought about it, the more the decision to take his own life seemed to make sense. And today, which happened to be his twenty-eighth birthday, was as good a time as any. There was nothing to celebrate, only the encroaching shadow of death. It wasn’t a decision that had come easily. Caldwell suspected that the decision-making process had been in motion for quite some time, firing away deep within his synapses. He’d been considering it at a subconscious level, surreptitiously weighing the cons and pros.

All things being equal, suicide seemed to be the most sensible path to take. It was a path well trodden. He could not go on any longer. His recent trip to the black zone of Oval, which he’d taken while enveloped in a reality distortion field of his own making, was confirmation enough that he’d been contemplating it for a while. His impending suicide was premeditated and not a spur-of-the-moment thing as he’d tried to have himself believe.

Caldwell thought about the endless nights lying on the futon staring into space, the burning pixels of pornograms etching glyphs on his eyeballs. As the memories drifted away and the images faded, and his impending suicide came back into focus, Caldwell found himself staring into the swirling black hole that was his depression. A depression that was the cumulative sum of a whole litany of misfortunes, some of which he concluded he would never understand. He wondered how his life had degenerated into this clawing miasma of raw unfulfilled need.

Caldwell lay inert on the futon watching the green pseudo quartz of the capsule timer usher in his demise. His eyes shifted to the LCD panel set into the plastic ceiling. The sight of the backlit digits of the last units of his credit disappearing into the ether filled him with a strange sense of euphoria. This would be his last capsule hotel. Just a few minutes now and it would all be over he reassured himself. Instinctively, his eyes moved to the transparent black vial sitting on the cigarette-scalded plastic shelf. The poison he’d acquired from the white-haired Georgian in the syringe-scattered back alleys of Oval.

Caldwell wondered whether the hackers on the Hacker Underground Board, The HUB, would miss him. The HUB was a job board and community in cyberspace, a hacking workhouse, gridiron and credit source for countless Union hackers and byteboys from Vienna to Vladivostok. Scores gleaned from the HUB had kept Caldwell in Chernobyl Chicken and pizza for eighteen months. The vast majority of the deals had come from a mysterious procurer hidden behind a network of firewalls and low level intruder detection AIs so intricate that they had to belong to a major conglomerate with something to hide.

The word on The HUB, itself a dynamic piece of community code drifting through cyberspace, was that the buyer was someone on top of the food chain of a major Yakuza controlled Zaibatsu. In this business, you didn’t ask questions. It was hard enough getting into The HUB’s inner circle and once you were there, you did your damnedest to stay there. That meant receiving your electronic briefing and delivering the service, end of story. You kept your mouth shut and it stayed shut even after the credit transaction took place. No questions.

Caldwell had made a living riding the consoles of the Union’s capsule hotels. Until recently, he had never stayed in one place longer than a couple of weeks at a time. His current capsule was the only exception, ten weeks in the same claustrophobic sarcophagus, the lack of workflow and credit going hand in hand with his current state of stasis. The purpose of his nomadic lifestyle had been both to stay continually shrouded beneath a cloak of anonymity and to avoid forming emotional attachments to places or people.

He had this internal alarm clock that told him when it was time to move on. He listened for it daily, that fraying of the nerves that signaled that a change of environment was imminent. Otherwise, he would deteriorate rapidly into a nervous wreck, incapable of doing anything other than claw at the plastic walls of his capsule and drive himself apoplectic with self-loathing. Sometimes it was just the other capsule jockeys being friendly, on the rare occasions that he actually ventured outside on a toilet run, which set the alarm bells ringing.

His work on The HUB had bought him a certain level of notoriety and a modest amount of credit that allowed him to eke out an existence in the digital floating world of commercial hacking, while constantly maneuvering to stay below the radar of the ever-shrinking legal domains of the Union. The black markets were growing fast, spreading like some new-fangled disease, forcing the authorities to resort to desperate measures to reign in the escalating crime and put a stop to the shady rackets of subversive types.

Over the last two months an inexplicable stasis had taken hold of the market, at least as far as Caldwell was concerned. He had gone more than eight weeks without landing a job, a fact that he attributed to the highly publicized failure of his attempt to retrieve the private banking client list from a Sumitomo Bank database. Someone out there had a vendetta against him and they had used the free-flowing data of cyberspace to stack the cards against him. Why? Caldwell had no idea.

He had been part of the inner circle of a tight ring of anonymous hackers around the world that generated most of The HUB’s business. He’d proven himself over the months with increasingly outrageous breaches of the databanks of major corporations. The owner of The HUB who went by the nickname of Glyph took a small cut of each score. Suddenly Caldwell had been disconnected from the deal flow and from the inner cycle, reduced to a livewire of depression staring blankly at an empty command line. Hackers were born to hack, yet Caldwell was hardwired to hack only on demand. As the deals dried up, Caldwell’s enthusiasm for the game withered. He was no longer turned on by the accomplishment of compromising a secure system.

Failures were common in the digital floating world. You won some, you lost some. Since his chosen profession only allowed for a hand-to-mouth existence, Caldwell’s exile had taken its toll on his credit chip and his will to live. He had tried desperately to reverse the situation but to no avail. His hacking winter had set in and all he could do was stare at the capsule terminal as his software agents returned empty-handed. Some did not return at all, having died mysterious deaths while negotiating the intricacies of superior intrusion detection code.

It had taken a while to reach the cathartic junction but he now knew with absolute certainty that death was the only way out. He had no known relatives, nobody to grieve for him. His online associates would not miss him for long, distracted as they were by the emerging opportunities of a rapidly shape-shifting cyberspace. His memories held nothing that would give him cause to regret his own death. They said that when you were about to die your whole life flashed before your eyes. Caldwell knew his flashbacks would be very brief. In fact, he suspected that he might not have any at all.

There was cold comfort to be gleaned from the knowledge that he was soon to disappear into the ether, permanently jerked into the matrix of the great beyond. For a while, his memory deficit notwithstanding, Caldwell had believed fervently that there was some unfulfilled purpose to his existence, yet undiscovered facets of his potential. And it was that belief that had kept him going, kept him connected to the glowing lattices of cyberspace for days at a time. That belief had slowly and surely been shattered. He was going to die oblivious of his past, too scared to face a dark and desolate future.