The harsh bite of January morning nipped viciously at Caldwell’s ears, as he hunched into his worn dark brown sheepskin jacket. He had bought it second hand in the bazaars of Portobello Market for less than nothing during better times. It was easily his favorite possession, assuming of course that the mysterious console was still the property of Kenzo Yamamoto. The bulk of the console weighed heavily in the knapsack, along with the few things that Caldwell had managed to grab from the capsule. Everything else was expendable and Caldwell traveled super light anyway. He had brought the Slav’s vial of death with him as insurance.

His amber-hued eyes were on high alert. If there was anyone on his tail, he wanted to make sure he was aware of it. Apart from a bearded homeless man, wearing enough tattered clothing to fill a Salvation Army store, dousing a makeshift fire by urinating on it and cursing to himself, the streets were deserted. It was New Year’s Day after all, and the citizens of the Union were still sleeping off the massive hangovers brought on by the previous night’s festivities.

To Caldwell, New Year’s Day held as much significance as his birthday and the fact that the two fell on the same day did not make any difference whatsoever. He didn’t celebrate New Year and he didn’t celebrate birthdays, both events requiring as they did a premeditated attempt to proactively seek the company of others. Besides, he wasn’t even sure if the first of January was really his birthday.

In the distance, a Maglev hummed towards Angel Station, a thin bolt of light cutting silently through the morning gloom. The rough outline of capsule city and the Angel Capsule Hotel faded jerkily into a rapidly descending fog. Caldwell had a feeling he wouldn’t be seeing it again for a long time. He had a feeling of impending doom. His migraine had subsided given him the respite he needed to reflect on the gravity of the situation.

Cad, get the hell out of wherever you are. They are after you. Your life is in so much danger dude. Message me from The Puzzle pub, Isle of Dogs.

Who they were he had no idea but he knew he had to make contact with Glyph to find out what his strange unexpected e-mail was all about. Was this fallout from some previous job, a hack into a corporate system long ago that had returned to haunt The HUB and its perpetrators? Why would Glyph, who he had never met in person, request a physical rendezvous? It didn’t make sense.

Yet, Caldwell knew better than to distrust Glyph’s instincts. The message was sent at 5.38AM, a fact that suggested that Glyph had probably been up all night as was his habit. He was as nocturnal as Caldwell was, a firm believer that every hour spent in bed was an hour wasted. Glyph probably lived in the vicinity of The Puzzle, which the white pages search described as a respectable enough public house down in the historic Docklands area. One of those new-fangled drinking establishments heavy on wrought metal and technology.

Could the message have been a hoax, sent by someone who had managed to hack into Glyph’s secure netbase? The message had been encrypted with Glyph’s encryption key, one the hacker had built himself. And he gave the decryption key only to trusted online associates. Only someone who had access to the key could unlock it. Or someone with lots of money and access to the cutting edge of quantum computing technology. Caldwell had read somewhere in cyberspace that relatively small quantum computers could break even the most elaborate cryptographic codes. But very few individuals could actually get their hands on one unless it was some kind of university research lab. Even so, they would have to have a real hard-on for Glyph’s communications to go to that kind of trouble.

Glyph would never compromise his encryption algorithms. He was too anal for that. The Union had eyes everywhere, in places one least expected, watching and waiting for those beyond its reach to stumble. The Union had declared war on all those living outside the system. They would rather citizens were rounded up and digitally branded like cattle. It was all for their own benefit. And Glyph took huge exception to that. Exception translated into precautions, measures, counter-measures, surveying the surveyors, monitoring the monitors.

So, it went with the territory that Glyph trusted no one. Glyph was an insider turned outcast. He knew how to play the game. Caldwell was an outcast, although he may well have been an insider. Who knew? But he was not going to spend his whole life worrying about it. He had in the past attempted to track down his past but with little success. He still had no answer to the most compelling of questions. Who were his parents? Where was he born? Why was it he officially never existed until two years ago? His identification chip held only his name and his date of birth, his prior history a blank mystery.

Caldwell had once had the Slav run the chip against a rigged up stolen government reader. Data ghosts everywhere. His past had been mysteriously and deliberately erased. And that had prompted him to leave no stone unturned to find out the truth. Yet he had drawn blanks at every turn, the desire to discover the truth eroding with the passage of time. The Slav had been unable to help and had simply shrugged his huge drooping shoulders and started pottering around in his workshop muttering to himself about letting the past be. Caldwell might not like what he discovered, the Slav had reasoned.

Before leaving Angel, Caldwell had taken one last nostalgic look around his capsule, the oppressive extruded cavity that had been punched into durable plastic according to the dictates of some fabritect’s old mould. The Angel Capsule Hotel had been his abode for the last few weeks and he had felt what was decidedly a pang of nostalgia, nostalgia and fear intermingled but nostalgia all the same. Why? They all looked the same these capsules. Made no difference which one you found yourself holed up in. Memory foam mattress might be a little more or a little less comfortable, lights might be dimmer or brighter, slot may suck credit a little faster, but once you’d stayed in one capsule you’d stayed in them all. Probably all run by the same Union conglomerate out of Antwerp or Rotterdam. But the capsule had been a valuable buffer between Caldwell and the cold hard reality of Waterloo Bridge. No buffer now, only the cold finger of fear.

Caldwell descended into the stale recycled air of Angel’s subterranean Maglev station. A growing crowd of sleep-deprived revelers, overworked corporate drones making the most of the New Year holiday, moved red-eyed through the heavily fortified tunnels. The rat race had been given a temporary respite from their daily routine of being embalmed in their staid featureless corporate weaves. Not today, the mechanical manipulation of cookie-cutter morning papers, or doomed attempts at meaningless crosswords. Not today the zombie-like preoccupation with advertising. With myriad configurations of alcohol coursing through their tired veins, the citizens of the Union were retiring home to cold loveless beds, vague memories of some night on the town receding.

Caldwell reminded himself to give the rat race a wide berth if he could help it. Scanning faces now and then, from behind the frayed rim of his jacket collar.

The automatons of modern Union life never ceased to amaze him. A not altogether strange reaction given that Caldwell had never really worked in an office or any type of controlled environment. Society excluded him from working for corporations. Which was just as well as he reckoned he’d rather starve to death than undergo the humiliation of being owned twenty-four seven by the system.

There was another advantage of not being chipped? You didn’t have to pay the system for the pleasure of riding the Maglevs. And if someone was on your tail, someone with access to the system, and you had implants, you were as good as dead meat. There was talk of a new system that could read the chip in your pocket, but he had yet to see evidence of that. So far, more like urban legend. Caldwell doubted that whoever was looking for him needed to resort to such measures. They’d rather track you down in your cubby hole, like a python after a rat, heat sensors on alert. A rat trapped in a death trap of his own making. He cleared the ticket barrier with inches to spare.

On the platform, as the magnetic levitation trains whizzed back and forth to various destinations, Caldwell was treated to the shutter-effect of Union faces encased in Plexiglas, snapshots of the mundane aquarium that was everyday Union life. He was so caught up in the philosophy of this that he didn’t notice that his train was slowly pulling into the platform. The Maglevs could be too silent.

As he lunged between the closing doors to the accompanying orchestra of beeps and computerized female voices urging passengers to please stand clear of the doors, he detected some unusual activity at the periphery of his vision. He was sure now that he was being followed. They, whoever they were, were on to him. He’d probably never have noticed the man if he’d been paying attention. It was his assailant’s sudden reaction when Caldwell lunged for the closing doors that gave him away. One minute he was standing still and looking in Caldwell’s direction, the next he was doing his utmost not to be left behind on the platform. The man was too late. The doors swished shut as he pulled his arm away just in time. Even with the train picking up speed, Caldwell was able to decipher the blur of the man’s face. It was a face surgically reconstructed into the stuff of nightmares.