It was a pretentious moniker, no doubt, but this “samurai” was aiming to be the Samurai, and he was willing to pay respectably for it. At least he didn’t look that high-profile: black jeans, tastefully worn; thermaprint jacket from an ambiguous season; spiked hair in the vicinity of blue and a refreshing lack of mirror-glass. Digit, are we offline?Confirmed, the PDA replied, flashing a series of network failures across her optics. They elicited a feeling of falling in her gut, but a girl had to do what a girl had to do. She pulled a transparent card from her wrist-wrap and held it at eye level. A ghostly pattern pulsed light across a connection map with five highlighted names.“The search results?” the Samurai asked. His eyes fogged with avarice. By reflex she checked his stuff against her corp tool yet again—and, as it had five minutes ago, it came back clean; his affiliations traced a corp-tree far away from Moderna Inc. and its partners. He was still outside her network, so technically this deal was breaking a Commandment, but she quashed the voice—this one internal, for once—that squealed superstitiously.
