Nera struggled to get her passcard out of her backpack. She was late, and the overcrowded State Street BAMALink station wasn't helping her schedule or her mood.
She'd been dozing on the cot she rented at a friends apartment when her agent erupted in angry noises, a notification for a work shift at least two hours away by train. It was a decent paying gig, so riding the Link through some shadier zones seemed worth the time and the risk. She accepted the offer, freshened up in the wet bath, grabbed her pack and set off.
Three minutes in an elevator, a half-block sprint and two escalators later she ran into the crowd... Some kind of show or festival bullshit, no one was wearing sports kit so that narrowed it down. They were packed twenty deep behind the gates, rowdy, laughing and carrying on in at least four languages. She finally freed her passcard, and a few endless minutes later, after one false scan caused her to panic about having refilled, the dirty glass gates swung aside and she was in.
By luck, the party people were headed to the northbound platform, and Nera's nav app sent her to the southbound platform. It was mostly deserted except for a few black-helmeted transit pigs, and their droid dogs. The pigs ignored her, but the four droids immediately swung their wedge-shaped sensor heads at her, but soon resumed their scanning of the rest of their station.
An alert tone and an announcement signaled the arriving Link train, and it slid nearly silently into the station. A pretty clean one, Nera noticed, not much graffiti at all. The doors slid open and a few scruffy-looking people got off, and as she boarded she saw that the interior was also decently clean, and none of the adboards had been defaced yet.
Three other people were in the car, and as the door slid shut, Nera's nav app showed eight stops until her destination, and at least three of them, smack in the middle of her route, had red blinking "X"'s over them. Clearly the map company was recommending against those stops.
The train picked up speed, and the next station, Forest Circle, arrived quickly. A few more passengers boarded, and Nera got lost in her agent as the train continued along. She missed the next stop, South Bay, and the trip to the last station marked in green, Schofield, took a good five minutes. The doors slid open, an Nera saw the strange looks the exiting passengers gave her as all of them left the train.
The doors slid shut, and all the adboards began flashing scary warning messages and short vids about the upcoming three stations. The lights got a bit brighter, and red light rings lit up around the doors. The train began moving again.
More slowly this time, the train approached North 4th Road, and all the adboards displayed a transit pig, in full gear, indifferently reading off of a script that the police could not guarantee the safety of anyone departing the train at the next three stations, due to ongoing violence and potential gang activity. Nera stiffened, she'd heard this shit before, but a gig was a gig, and getting the rent and next weeks' food was worth riding through an exclusion zone.
The train eased to a stop, and just as the doors finished sliding open, the train died. Dead. Everything. Nera sat in the near total darkness, the N4R station only lit by some half-assed light strips along the platform walls, and tried desperately not to panic.
She heard a weird buzzing sound approach through the door, felt a breeze of wind an heard a soft <thunk.> The train leapt back to life, the ventilators sighing as they came back up to speed, and before Nera's eyes could re-adjust, someone entered the car.
There were seven of them in all, in loose-fitting workwear pants, and mostly tac sweaters or long-sleeved tshirts, some with punk bands or dive bar logos. But all in black. And their heads were completely covered. Something between a balaclava and a respirator, with integrated full goggles, blacked out lenses. Anywhere else, they would have looked like some funky street performance artists, but here in the tunnels beneath the EZ they oozed menace.
Nera was trying to keep herself under control, the unexpected blackout had frayed her nerves terribly. She'd never seen people like these, except on vids, and they were always portrayed as either destructive pranksters or full-test criminals. Ugly scenarios played out in Nera's mind as she looked her new cabin mates over.
Their clothes were shapeless enough that their body shapes were indistinct, but they were all lean-looking, and Nera got the impression of wiry strength beneath the outfits. These kids (how old could they be?) were survivors, they had to be if the stories about the EZ were true. But their headgear was what kept drawing her attention.
They were No-Hoods, Exclusion-Zone-made versions of pig and military gear, put together from stolen or recycled tech. They covered the entire head, contained earbuds for comms and hearing enhancement, screen-backed goggles and full replaceable filter respirators. They were light, comfortable to wear and highly illegal for any non-pig persons to wear or even possess.
Nera looked them over as subtly as she could manage. She couldn't tell if they were looking at her from behind the goggles, but mostly they appeared to look straight ahead. The lankiest one, seated some way down the car from Nera, appeared to be nodding along to some unheard music.
The train reached the next stop, Stockyards, and again a platform lit only by hastily-applied light strips, slid into view through the windows. Nera's companions sat in silence. She was wondering whether of not they could speak to each other through the hoods when her agent erupted again.
Nera had grown up in BAMA, and there was a silly kids vid series she had loved as a kid called "Pug's House." Years later, she had a childhood friend gift a pirated version of the theme song to her to use a ringtone. She almost never had her agent set on anything but silent, except for gig alerts which were high priority, obviously. This seemed an awkward moment for the theme's trilling music.
The hooded kids turned in unison, staring at her as she frantically mashed at her agent trying to stop the music.
Eternal seconds passed
Then, one of the kid's masks lit up, just the respirator part, with a pixelated smiley face.
Nera looked from one to the other, and every mask was animated with faded, pixelated emojis, all of them expressions of joy.
Nera's tension melted away, and as the train pulled away from Stockyards, the animations played on for a while, before each one blinked out. Nera saw the lanky kid hunched over, turning something over in their hands.
The kids all rose from their seats or moved towards the door as the last EZ station, Osborne Park, approached. Nera only then noticed the tiny copter droid that had attached itself over the central camera dome on the ceiling. It seemed to be blocking the view of the camera, and dim light shone from the side nearest the dome. Nera guessed it was feeding dummy cam footage to the pigs. Smart kids.
The doors slid open, and the kids all left the train, but the lanky kid left last, and handed Nera something on the way past. As the copter droid detached from its perch and the doors slid shut, she saw the gift of a small origami flower, made from a discarded store receipt.
Nera smiled, slipped it into the front pouch of her pack, and rode on through the darkness.