text: [Themes: sci-fi, cyberpunk]
  
  You wake up to a throbbing headache. It's not because of a hangover like you would prefer, but because of dehydration. You have running water in your apartment, but it isn't safe to drink from the tap. Just something to clean with. You have a filter in the apartment you're sharing with about 14 other people. It's unfortunately been broken for two days. Most of them are useless or next to useless. This apartment you live in is what happens when your parents are done with your freeloading and you get the boot from home. There's only so much that pensions and welfare cover and the welfare stops when your kids hit 18 in Megacity 23.
  
  The corps don't do much business on your side of town and emergency services do even less. You're going to struggle to find work with no job experience and no education that matters. You've looked into retail, but don't present well. You'd need to kill somebody to get a union slot in transportation, be it bus or train repair. Transpo operation is all automated now. Less accidents that way. There's city work, but they all pull from the middle-class side of town, but if you're lucky you might be able to get work paving the streets.
  
  Now on to your realistic options, dealing drugs, turning tricks, and violence. You've stayed away from drugs for most of your life. Yeah living on this side of the city sucks, but dropping the money you don't have just so you don't feel like shit for a few minutes is a good way to catch a bullet when you don't have the money to pay for it. The downside of never touching the stuff is that you don't know enough about it to sell the stuff.
  
  Turning tricks, well. That's actually harder than it sounds these days. You need to get so much chrome installed, and hope your wetware is what's in style, and stays in style. It's the specialized stuff that pays well. That's so much of a gamble it's not worth it most of the time. There are more broke ho's than rich ones in the city. You need to get more and more chrome put in as the years pass too. So much to stay competitive that you'll need to carry papers to prove you're human by the time you retire.
  
  Violence is the last option. Now this option will probably kill you. Most likely on your first try. You don't have the training to really be some hardened killer. You can learn a lot of this and that from first-person shooters but that doesn't mean you can take a life. Any weapon you can pick up is probably going to be a piece of trash garage gun. You aren't even going to pretend you can handle killing someone with a knife or a bat. You've seen enough on the street to know that it takes a while to beat a human to death and stabbing can take a while as well. It usually doesn't take as many bullets. The upsides of this option are that if you get good at it you can get a corporate job. Steady pay either as a security consultant, or a wetwork contractor. Whether the wetware or cybernetics you pick up for this job are in style is irrelevant. With this job, retirement is such an unrealistic expectation that you don't really need to worry about putting into a 401k. Last but not least, if you're bad at this job you're going to die very suddenly. This sounds like a bad thing, but it beats slowly wasting away giving up food for drugs or trying to live with a gimmick piece of wetware that never became popular.
  
  [Author's Note: After the third world war, a large portion of the world was left desolate, with various poison gasses left in certain regions with a half-life measured in the millions of years most of the earth's population has moved to a chain of megacities. You were born on the wrong side of the poverty line in Megacity 23. With the increase of automation in the post-war world, work is scarce and the law never reached your side of the city. Your people are more free than anyone else in the world but life is cheap when you're really free and fortunately or unfortunately for you, a body is worth more dead than alive. This is for the 2021 Cyberpunk Contest.]
  
  > The Decision
  Now with the violence option, you need a fixer. A fixer is who you talk to about jobs. Someone who wants someone killed talks to a fixer and the fixer sends a Contractor to take care of the issue. It makes it harder for the employer to knock off the Contractor and has a system in place to make sure the Contractor doesn't walk off with the Employers money without doing the work.
  
  A Fixer can also set up a Contractor with various contacts that can set up the Contractor with the gear he or she needs for the job. Guns, armor, wetware implants, or even other specialized contractors if the job needs it.
  
  Now in your area, there are three reputable fixers that will take in someone with your skill level, which is to say without any applicable skills. Gary Jerome is a man that seems to spend most of his time in a booth of a diner. It's a fair assessment to make that anyone that sits at his table is either an employee or an employer of his. Secrecy with him is a bit of a joke. He has a lot of people meet him for breakfast lunch and dinner so you know there's work available. Of that you are certain.
  
  Mr. Lee is a local butcher. He uses the old-school cleaver to real meat kind of butchery. His bread and butter is the vat-grown stuff same as anyone else. Someone told me it's mass-produced in some sort of bacterial culture which is how you get the beef pork hybrids, but I've never seen the setup for myself. Now Mr. Lee also has some stuff that's real meat. Sometimes the rich guys from the upper city come down because they want to experience what gamey venison is like, or how real bacon sizzles. Every once in a while a block will buy a whole pig for a roast. With that being said, you can't tell who's coming to him for work, who's coming to him to have a problem solved, or who's coming to him for a ribeye steak.
  
  Your third option is Harvey Brown the Barber. The man runs a barbershop and can do anything you would like, he's got all of the traditional stuff that he can do better than anyone else, shaves, fades, traditional cuts. You name it. He can also add length to your hair if you want, your all-natural hair that is. Some sort of genetic sculpting he's got in the back. People from all over the city come by for a haircut. Some of the auto styling stations cut a few faces off a few years ago and barbers have come back into style. Mr. Brown was in the business before then and became a fixer to make ends meet. He's been rolling in money since then. Everyone styles their hair, so anyone could be a contractor or an Employer with him.
  
  Which one of these fixers do you thing you're going to try working for?
  
  > Gary Jerome, the Diner
  You leave your apartment with everything you personally own. You know your roommates well enough to believe that anything left behind would end up pawned. Which wouldn't be so bad if you came back to a functioning water purifier.
  
  The diner is only a few blocks away, so you walk. Passing the open windows you look in and see a man with long hair, sunglasses, and a light tan sports jacket sitting in a booth, reading a news article on his tablet. The other customers sit at the barstools past him.
  
  You enter the diner where the waitress says "Seat yourself!" as the bell at the door chimes.
  
  When you arrive at the booth Gary Jerome just says "Take a seat. How can I help you."
  
  "I... I'm looking for work." You smoothly manage to stutter out.
  
  "Of course, of course. Any training, or previous experience?"
  
  "Uh... No."
  
  "Of course, no powder burns, bullet holes, or gang tats. No scars you wouldn't get just growing up. Okay. I've got a starter job for you. The only training here is on-the-job training. Are you good with that? Of course you are! I have someone observing my clients as they visit me. This is what I need you to do about it. Go out that front door and take a left, go around the corner of the building and someone will have a package for you. In that package is a little throwaway gun courtesy of Hell's kitchen. Thirty rounds. Take that down the alley and cross the street so you can go around the back of the building just across the street, DON'T LOOK, enter that building, and go to room 217. Kill everyone in that room and leave. I'll have someone come by and clean up after you. They'll take care of the bodies and the camera equipment. This job is worth two thousand city credits to me. Got it? Good. Now get out of here."
  
  > do Gary's Job
  You walk around the building and a man steps out the back door and passes you a cardboard box before lighting a cigarette and leaning against the wall. He doesn't so much as look you in the face as you pass by him. You turn at the end of the alley and cross the street before walking down another alley that leads to the building your target is in.
  
  The building is an old brick affair that might have actual plaster walls inside. You're not going to see if you can punch through the wall to find out though. Nervous you take the stairs needing to keep moving and not having the patience for the elevator. You reach the second floor. Opening the package you find a pistol that looks like a modified nail gun that was clearly never designed to be reloaded.
  
  Which door do you kick in again?
  
  > put the boot to door 15.
  You kick the door handle of door 15 and the whole plate the handle was set into goes flying into the room. You shoulder past the door and shoot the man behind it square in the chest. You hear a woman screaming and turn to see her rising from the couch with a gun in her hand. You dump at least half your magazine into her. For some odd reason you don't hear a single shot. You feel something thump into your chest. Looking down you see blood well up from a hole as your fingers lose their strength and your gun falls from your hand.
  
  You look up and see a kid crying holding a real pistol in her hands. She looks just like the woman you shot. You realize the gun you saw in that woman's hand was a phone. You kicked in the wrong door. Your world fades away.