Caldwell contorted his aching body in the capsule’s confined space and switched on the louvered halogen light. He reached out and picked up the Slav’s mysterious vial. For a moment, he watched the viscous mass of the transparent liquid swirl within. The Slav had promised that it would do the job in less than a minute, stopping the activity of all the vital organs with the speed and precision of a bullet to the head.

“The problem with the human body,” the Slav had said as he fumbled around in his makeshift workshop in a disused viaduct in the inner city ghetto of Oval, “is that it is not designed to coexist with machines. The relationship is not symbiotic and sooner or later they, the machines, will fuck you up. It’s just a question of time.” There was enough tobacco smoke in the stale air of the Slav’s makeshift workshop to stop a bull in its tracks.

The Slav’s teeth were an obscene assortment of tobacco-stained enamel jutting like stalactites and stalagmites out of his gray gums. There was a thin border of pink gum bordering the yellowed teeth, struggling to hold its own against the encroaching mass of gray flesh. Caldwell could see ragged clumps of some mystery meat lodged between the rotting enamel.

“The trouble with flesh is that it has a weird habit of trying to stick around. Its a good thing man invented the toothpick,” Caldwell had ventured.

The Slavs snake-like tongue had flicked instinctively at his canines and his good eye had narrowed to a slit. He had then begun to chew on something that he had dislodged. The moment of danger came and went in a flash but within its brief existence, in that small window of time, Caldwell had seen something even uglier than the Slav himself.

“Fuck toothpicks,” the big man had said dismissively. “Indeed, when God made man, in his own image no less, he didnt count on him being smart enough to make tools. Tools for crushing berries, cracking nuts and so on were the precursors of the industrial revolution, which in turn where precursors to the age of the thinking machine, the computer. The latter happens to be the tool that will ultimately usher in our demise.”

Caldwell had wondered whether when God created man he had any idea that generations later specimens like the Slav would walk the earth. He was used to the Slavs machinations. Despite the man’s obvious dental hygiene problems and the concurrent tobacco breath, he was a loveable old fellow who loved to reflect on life while performing the illegal act of removing identification chips from the bodies of those who had had enough of being hardwired to the system. Caldwell could tolerate the Slav’s diatribes because the man never asked personal questions. He just went off on those seemingly pointless rants of his. When the Slav got his teeth into a diatribe there was no stopping him. Caldwell would keep him going with pointless statements. The Slavs was the kind of work that was best done without an embarrassing silence.

“But apes used tools long before humans.” Caldwell had protested.

“Indeed if you wish to eschew religion for the scientific approach. That was where it all started. But apes were never really victims of their own tools. Humans are. Our superior intellect is exactly what is going to trigger our extinction. Imagine a world without tools. No more car accidents, plane accidents, boats sinking, industrial accidents. No more computers. No hackers.” The Slav’s bloodshot good eye had stared questioningly at Caldwell as he foraged among his eclectic assortment of stuff.

“No hackers?”

“Indeed. Hackers, phreakers, crackers, intruders and new age hijackers, all gone. The only tools that man would need to be afraid of would be those of another flesh based thing, the teeth of a Siberian tiger or some poisonous serpent.”

“Got something against hackers, Slav?”

“Indeed. Hackers are the scum of the earth, the fact that they make up a sizeable chunk of my clientele notwithstanding. Present company excepted of course.”

“Glad to hear it.”

The Slav had turned around and fixed Caldwell with his good eye, the fake eyeball wet and glassy on the other side of his long face.

“Are you sure you are ready for this? I’ll miss your business such that it was,” the Slav had said producing the black vial crusted with dust and some ad hoc interfusion of organic slime.

“As ready as anyone can be. Where did you get this stuff? And perhaps more importantly, will it work?” Caldwell had asked, eyeing the vial suspiciously.

“A bit of insurance my friend. Figured, when all of this commerce,” the Slav had said, waving his arm theatrically around the untidy mess of the disused viaduct that he had managed to confiscate from the Union Railway infrastructure for his own personal use, “got too much for myself, I’ll just go ahead and off myself. Do myself and the system a favor, you know.”

Caldwell had nodded emphatically.

“Happy to do you the favor, let you do the honors. If it doesn’t work out for you, let me know and I’ll have the rascal who sold it to me obliterated.” The Slav had flashed that tobacco-stained smile again but he had looked like he was dead serious.

“So what is it?” Caldwell had asked, shaking the vial. He could swear he could see minute glints of silver in the liquid but they disappeared just as quickly as they had appeared.

“It’s some kind of nano poison out of Tbilisi. Very, very illegal. Got these little microscopic nano-machines in there that cause synchronized damage with mind-numbing precision. They trigger and you simply stop living. You won’t even know you are dying. Goes back to what I was saying earlier. These machines, no matter what size they are, they’ll be the death of all of us,” the Slav had said, flashing those teeth.

Caldwell dissolved the image of the Slav out of his mind and rolled over to one side of the futon, the mould imprinted by his body diminishing as the memory foam began to forget. His heart was thumping violently and his throat felt like it would seize up at any moment. Why the fear? This is the best way out. You have lost the will to live. He would make sure that the faceless capsule employees who came across his lifeless body would be able to identify him. He fished for his trousers among the impossible tangle of stale bedding and fumbled in one of the pockets for his identification chip.

Scan or slot? How do you wish your data to be read sir? The choice had been made two years ago when he had woken up cold and broken in the dank underground walkways below Waterloo Bridge, the putrid Thames River lapping at his face, to find nothing but a dull ache and a scar marking the place where his implanted chip used to be. A choice made not by him but by some unknown entity that with one neat incision had placed him in the wrong bracket of society. The scar was evidence that Caldwell, at one time like the rest of the vast majority of The Union’s population, had carried his identity beneath his skin. Not that any of that mattered now.

The mark of the beast or the imprint of a society that had become too technologically advanced for its own good, this is how it had been for decades. The rules on this were clear and incontestable. Non-government-approved removal of identification chips in the Union risked you spending the rest of your life imbibing liquid lunches or at worst embalmed in more dry ice than you cared for. The same fate awaited those carrying fake chip implants. So for Caldwell, the choice had already been made. It was slot or nothing. He was a man outside the system, oblivious to how he got there, invisible to the ever-ubiquitous scanners of the Union. And now he would be beyond it all, impervious, a mere spectator if any of the hocus-pocus about what happened to the souls of suicide victims was to be believed.

Caldwell sat up, bending his head a little to avoid hitting the capsule’s ceiling. He couldn’t even sit up straight in the confined space. He was six feet and two inches tall, give or take a millimeter or two, depending on how he kept his hair. Now he had it straight, as straight as he could get it, and shoulder length. The synthetic brown of his follicle job fading slightly but still good for another few years. Not that any of that stuff had any significance now.

Caldwell contemplated his reflection in the grimy square of plastic coated with a cheap reflective substance that served as a mirror. A thousand different disillusioned faces had studied their reflections in its shiny surface, he thought. How many had seen a message of hope? He figured he was not going to be the first. The cracked ceiling and dirty ageing synthetic material of the mirror were perfect allegories of his life. They were reflections of his pathetic existence, relics of better times.

He took what he was sure would be his last look in the mirror. The face that stared back at him was barely recognizable as his own, a time-ravaged organic showcase of his rapid descent into insignificance. How could he have degenerated to this? A valid question and yet Caldwell knew all along that deep within him had been a ticking time bomb. He had no idea how he had become a hacker. There was a huge part of his past that he knew nothing about, except for the occasional flashes from deep within his synapses, strange phantoms of the mind rising out of grid-locked neurons.

There were the mental images that made no sense in the current context, vague memories of dreams of distant lands submerged in a cloud of confusion. Sporadic dreams set in locales vastly different from the foggy and rain-drenched urban sprawl that was London and huge swathes of the Union. His mind constantly bombarded by momentary flashes of color, lots of reds and the alien sounds of some other civilization. Something reminiscent of things he had somehow forgotten or was never meant to remember. Pupils narrowing as he studied the epicanthic slant of his own eyes, tempered by the amber glow of his irises. There was definitely something Oriental there as the back alley analysis of his DNA had revealed. Caucasian, Chinese, North African, Japanese all mixed up in there. A cocktail as the quack had described him.

His was not an unremarkable face, the kind of organic configuration that could only have been the result of some complex inter-racial coming together. It wasn’t one that he had cared too deeply about, his online persona brought very much to the fore. His body was just a convenient package for hacking, his fingers the key tools for the job. He was a man who had gotten so lost in the depths of the cyberspace that he constantly had to remind himself who he was, soul and meat growing distant daily. Meat tired and swollen, soul non-committing and remote, taking what was definitely a bird’s eye view. He was anxious for the two to part company.

Minute red veins snaked like fissures below the surface of the mocha skin punctuated by the hapless sag of the eye bags that had recently become permanent fixtures. Three weeks of stubble interspersed with blotchy skin. The stubble also a dark brown after he had had his melanocytes modified, one of his few attempts at something akin to vanity.

He held the vial in his hand and took one last minute to reminisce on his life. The entirety of it consisted of windowless capsules, sleepless nights, the steady pilfering away of his hard-earned credit by unsympathetic capsule operators and the constant blinking of command-line cursors. They owed him no favors, these faceless conglomerates that operated chains of identikit capsules all over the Union to serve its disadvantaged and disenfranchised pseudo-citizens. The clientele, composed predominantly of society’s bottom feeders, was just one precocious rung up on the social ladder from the street sleepers. Like Caldwell, the vast majority of the capsule jockeys had clawed their way off the streets.

In the mirror, amber eyes, rendered slightly opaque now, stared back at him. Was that fear he saw in those tired eyes? Definitely fear spliced with something else, something unintelligible.

As Caldwell rolled his body back to the center of the futon he decided that the last memory in his mind when he drank the contents of the Slav’s vial would be the cranial residue of his most recent nightmares. He flicked open the cap of the vial and sniffed the contents. His nostrils flared at the unnatural smell of something acrid and metallic, something that smelled like death. He lay down on the foam mattress, straight like a corpse stiff with rigor mortis and willed himself to recall.

Within the dark expanse of his mind’s eye, Caldwell saw pristine white padded walls, a pair of blood-splattered latex gloves and the spectral image of a young uniformed nurse. A searing headache began to crescendo from deep within his skull, dissolving the images away and moving rapidly forward with the speed and determination of a tidal wave. Caldwell put the vial to his lips and closed his eyes.