MAGENTA

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s a ping on the sensor grid, looks like we’ll be soon outta time, mon frere.”
“Fuck me… I’m only about half way slicing the surface of this file cluster. Not even done with a full directory walk yet.”
“You’ve had two hours! How deep does the thing run?”
“Deep man… Deepest repo I’ve seen.” Torg said.
He flipped up a small panel on his microtop, LCD flicking to life, code spilling light into the room in rapid-fire pink hues as the console copied files. The fresh infoshunt he’d had installed in his wrist last week itched, badly.
“This will have to do I ‘spose, I knew we should have sprung for a faster unit for this.” Torg pulled a cable from the console and plugged in, wincing a little when the data spike dropped as he tapped an unnoticeable button on the underside of his wrist.
“Uploading now. Three minutes tops.” Torg said.
“We might have that, might not. Just got a ping a few quadrants from here. Can’t you speed it up?” Seres was always impatient, she’d never grasped the delicate nature of data extraction as much as she had the feel of a sensor grid.
“If you want us to lose what I’ve got of this… sure…” Torg spat back sarcastically.
“Just do what you can.” Seres replied looking out the high rise window.
A thin fog had wound itself into the city and hung meters from the ground several floors below. Cathode street lights and building neons glowing hot as it passed through the misty veil.
She wrinkled her nose at a waft of bacon cooked for far too long in a stovetop pan, she breathed out and in again, this time it was worse, the scent had taken on a charred, oily texture.
It stung at her nose.
She looked back at Torg. In the half-light of the microtop she could see his hand raised and both eyes rolled back. The infoshunt was now little more than a smoking hole.
“Shit, shit!”
Seres ran toward the exit, slamming her back against the doorframe, sliding a fresh clip into sidearm.
Pulsing magenta light flooded the room as the sensor grid flashed urgently. Footsteps echoed down the long corridor to her ears, the smell of Torg’s fried corpse filling the room.

She exhaled, and whispered to herself.
“Kore wa Tōkyō no tame desu, you bastards!”