text: “Mostly, it’s just for the head rush.” “Well take care of your body. It's the only one you get.” My mother gives no stock to my excuses anymore. I’ve been dosing nicotine for nine years at this point. “Your aunt tried to call. She’s doing well at the new gig, but I feel so bad for her kids. You should reach out to your cousins ya know...” Our weekly exchanges tend to abbreviate themselves once we get on the topic of family. Still, she fills me in on what I’ve missed between my absent-minded affirmations. I’m hardly listening at this point. Over the years, my eyes grew used to the broken glares from the lights on the highway. Now, they’re just tracing trails left by the light. I like getting work done in the car. These government rentals come with a standard projection interface now. My case files populate four tiles in the center of the cabin. The viewport windows host my own notes, but I leave the back windshield blank. It’s nice to see which cars thread the eight lanes behind me. I lick my gums again, and she pauses mid-sentence. “You know that’s what killed your grandmother.” I let the sting of her chastisement hang in the air. We’ll both suffer the silence. “She used the vapors, but still. It’s your heart that I’m worried about. It’s so special, so don’t go on poisoning yourself. That’s how you break your mama’s.” “She died of lung cancer, mom.” It’s cold, but true. Gen Z had the bright idea to convert their tobacco into metallurgical liquids. Stupid fuckers didn’t stop to think about why our lungs weren’t evolved to handle anything but the air, so then they added metal to the mix. “Besides, I lowered my dosage last Monday.” A lie. I punctuate the trump card with another stroke of my gums. I haven’t felt a head rush in years. She feigned a proud smile. “Ok, I’ll let you go. Get your work done. I love you.” “Love y-” She disconnects the line, and my notes reclaim the front windshield. I expel the puff air that had welled up in my chest. The woman puts me on edge sometimes, but there’s no substitute for authentic love. Painful conversations are part of the contract. My eyes find the horizon and I take in a deeper breath. At this elevation, the pollutants settle into a mosaic of different densities. It’s almost beautiful ...for poison. My tongue finds the patch again. Only thirty more miles before I’m marooned at the deposition table. Better savor these last five minutes. My car strafes into the rightmost lane before driving itself underground to the exit ramp that enters the city. The negotiations for heroin trafficking are the minor leagues for district attorneys. I don’t want to be here. Regardless, schedule three still requires an office investigation. My display minimizes to signal that the car has queued itself to file into downtown traffic. We call these streets “the bog”. Of course, we only recognize the urban topography from global-positioning-fiber displays underground. An air-sealed town car five stories below street-level is the closest I’ve ever come to the real bog. That and the 40cm glass panels that insulate our building. I take one last hit from the patch on my molar before swallowing the thing, and motion my document files to the storage icon on my watch. I touch the vessel to the frames on my face, so I can pull them up later. My car pulls under the trail indicators for the garage-level elevator. Doors close and ventilation units kick on, silently dispelling the toxic air from the elevator. My door lifts open, and I button my suit with my right hand, reserving the left to straighten my glasses. The routine is all too familiar. Most people don’t need glasses nowadays. Ocular surgery is dirt cheap for anyone with a job, and many parents just elect for perfect vision in vitro. We never had the coin for that growing up, so I suffered the stigma and sucked it up. Now, I never leave home without them. The built-in displays are a weapon for research and cross-references in the courtroom. I cross the threshold of the entry port, and my car folds itself into the wall before the personnel elevator door grants access. I’m alone and savor the mindless silence before tracing my pocket. I curse under my breath. My patches. I left them on the seat. They’re gone forever. The odds of getting the same car again are abysmal. Decriminalizing every first-gen substance would have been the cheapest and most effective use of resources, but millennial-era policy built these drug courts. Caked with filth and brilliant graffiti, the windows of the first three floors tell the true story of the bog. As I ascend the transparent chute, I’m reminded of the institution’s vanity. An open atrium borders all three hundred floors of the building boasting two shale-backed waterfalls. Before it reaches the tenth level, one can make out the alien choreography of the streets below: masked vendors pedalling mostly meats carved from the city’s bottom-feeders, unfortunate sex-workers with no hope of meeting clients from the upper-levels, and bands of children likely muling more heroin or the latest versions of relief engineered to survive this hell. In spite of what unfolds below me or the shameless architecture above, the only persistent thought in my mind are those damn patches. The door opens to the floor reserved for schedule three hearings. I pull open the reinforced door with my left hand, and my fingers linger on the handle longer than I intended. Strange. I’m the first to arrive in the conference room. I have time. Six invisible cameras will capture me, but I don’t care. I break for the bathroom. In the mirror, I avoid the glimpse of myself before reaching into my coat. Eye drops infused with nicotine, my first vehicle for the vice, are at home in my pocket. I feel a euphoria just touching the bottle. I slide off my glasses and dose my eyes with the poison. It’s a familiar burn. I missed it, so I take three more. Sliding the lenses back onto my face, I catch my own eyeline in the mirror. This must be the version of her son that broke off my mom’s story. A grown man with a ten thousand dollar suit still desperate for relief, escape in any form. At this point, I need it to regulate. Shame wells and I sideline it with a smirk, assuming the persona I’ll need for the next two hours. I polish my lenses, and cycle through the case filename aliases again just for the motions. I need to focus. My colleague opens the conference room door for me. “Mama made you cry this week, huh?” Nina teases me regularly, but I wipe my eye again anyway. “Can’t put bad guys away with tears in your eyes, honey.” This time her concern bled through the jest. She knows what I’ve been doing. I bet she doesn’t want to be here either. Six attorneys file into the room almost immediately after I sit down. I stand again, buttoning my suit. Nina and I share a confused stare before we begin introductions and handshakes. Six. Too many for a heroin distribution case. I’m the last to reach for the top of my seat, and my left fingers unfurl slowly again. Nina catches me staring at my hand, before the doors break the seal of the room once more. Two guards with automatic rifles file a pair of bodies into the room. Two. The case file only detailed a single offender's deposition today. Both have shaved heads and full face respirators, standard for transport but a shitty protocol for a system bent on facial recognition. I turn to Nina, but she hasn’t even noticed their entry. Her eyes are locked on my hand. I tuck it under the table. We don’t have time for this. First generation drug cases are cannon fodder for the system. Last-minute takedowns are not unheard of for racketeering. Cases are turned over to sentencing in less than 48 hours sometimes. Just a statement from the lawmakers for those in the bog: We own you, and we can own your bodies if we want. I turned my attention to the defense. “We only received documentation for Mr. Morales. What are you trying to pull here?” But Nina pipes up, “Exploratory team found an accessory. Two birds, baby.” I’m puzzled but nod anyway. I shouldn’t have said anything. I broke our front. She’s going on her second decade in the office, and I’m still new. Nina soothes my concerns with a nod, and I begin reading the charges from the notes on my glasses. I take my seat while my colleague fields most of the conflict. She doesn’t need my help. I don’t even need to be here. The other lawyers in the room do not notice my absence from the tempo of conversation, and I steal a glance toward the jumpsuits. The first is a hulk of a man covered head to toe in tattoos. Biohazard symbols and animated neon clouds coil around his neck up to a face that I can only assume tells more of the story. He’s a walking billboard for his syndicate. The newest agent in this case doesn’t wait for my measuring. The black circles on the mask are pointed directly at my face. The vents are fuming with breaths, almost animal-like. Chemical formulas for controlled substances decorate a lean left arm, but I only recognize some of the art from my own research. These guys must be deep into next gen production. Their bare right arm mashes against their accomplice. Both can hardly share the end of the enormous glass table. I wade back into the jargon of the deposition, still feeling masked eyes on my face. The obviously exhausted lead counselor fights for the sake of disputing video evidence. Video evidence? That wasn’t in the file. My work absorbs my full focus once again. Nina speaks again, “You know as well as I do that the judge doesn’t waste time on bullshit like heroin. Your boy’s dead-to-rights and won’t live tomorrow. You know that don’t you?” She elevates the projected image remastered in three dimensions like all criminal court evidence. The tattooed silhouettes tell the full story missing from my file. Morales executes a transaction and the accessory defendant stands watch with a handgun. Doors are kicked open from abandoned warehouses across the street, and the leaner of the two shoots one officer before ducking into an alley. “You know how long it takes a quantum computer to cross-reference those tattoos. Two seconds. You signed your own death warrant, and it only took two seconds for delivery.” Nina was a tried and true bulldog. I still don’t know her conviction rate, but she’s kept mine at a thousand. Sometimes it seems like she’s more proud of it than me. I used to be proud of it. It’s not easy making D.A. in a city like this, even after they distributed the role and expanded the office. I used to think I was on the vanguard for justice. Then they put me on the drug team. The projection continues to play, showing the officers kick off Morales’ mask and pin him to the ground. I wretch at the bottom of my throat. The kingpin’s eyes fill with blood immediately as he vomits from the air outside. I lick the tender spot on my gums to find some kind of relief from this torture. Nothing. Then the video cuts to another perspective. A street-level safehouse. Officers tear down the door, and detain the second offender. After controlling the scene, they still rip off the ventilator. Monsters. I look away. The projection traces back to its origin and Nina punishes the room with a familiar silence. It’s broken by the lead defense counselor ceding his position. Worm. He’s valued his own ego over the clients lives, even more, their billable hours. An explosion of gurgled screams is hurled from the titan at the end of the table. Every attorney recoils in absolute terror, even Nina. The gunman doesn’t move at all. Guards rush to flush the barrels of their rifles to Morales’ temples, but there’s no stopping his wailing. He’s already been executed at this point, and he knows it. The armed guards are literally carrying Morales out of the room at this point. A single guard returns from the hallway to collect the accomplice. Nina turns to their legal team, “She’s lucky she didn’t stick around. Cop killers usually don’t make it this far out of the bog before we wipe them off the street, but this one’s lucky. She wouldn’t survive in a prison anyway.” She? I must have missed that in the second feed. I turn to the end of the long glass table matching the gaze of viewports on her gas mask. I know this woman. She hasn’t broken her stare, even as the guard escorts her to rise from her seat. I grab Nina’s left hand and sync my watch to her own, praying for an updated file. I scroll through the interface on my lens searching for a name. Then I see the tattoo on her right shoulder. A lion. I’d seen it before. Almost instantly, reality crushes me as the frame of the door breaks her gaze from mine. I wave a hand over the table sensor to expand the projection once more and lean in for a better look. That’s when I see her face. My aunt’s daughter. My mom’s favorite niece. Cousin Mira. Her mugshot finally lands on my glasses and I wretch again at the sight of her mutilated face. Blood trails from her eyes gored by the fumes outside. Mira’s chemically burned face swells over blackish-red teeth. Is this what my mom was talking about in the car? My head begins to pound. The aperture of the glass table pulsates with my heartbeat. What’s happening? I sprint into the hallway to catch up with Mira. There must be something I can say to the judges. To Nina. No one deserves this. No one deserves to die for this. I know that now. The elevator doors are closing and I reach out fully extending my left arm to stop them from sealing, but my hand convulses. My thumb slips locks into a gnarled palm, and I feel my bicep cinch tightly. Pain shoots down the limb and back up again. The pressure in my chest stabs into my frame now. I collapse, and crush my glasses between the floor and my eyes. How can this be happening, now? How did cousin Mira even get here? Mira! Every sinew of strength left in me floods into my right arm, lifting my chest from the ground. I squint through my hyperventilations and cracked frames toward the elevator. That’s when I see her for the last time. Mira has looked away. She hangs her head toward the ground. The elevator doors close, and total darkness relieves my personal hell.