I knelt over Finnegan’s lifeless shell as I took one quick snootful of liquid courage from the oil can.

The prognosis wasn’t good. He was given an old school broderick; a beating so bad that your family can’t give you an open compacter funeral. I don’t know who Finn considered associates, and from the look of things, I didn’t want to know. They didn’t play nice

I reached in the hole they cut through Finn’s plating and found the metal slag that use to be his harddrive. 800 terabytes destroyed in a nanosec; that’s what happens when you rewire the fusion battery across the grid array. Firewall or not, you told them what they wanted to know, right before you were downloaded to the big server farm in the sky. It was a hell of a way to zot someone.

I wasn’t going to miss the palooka, but I didn’t relish the thought of telling my sister that her butter and egg man had gone the way of the floppy drive.

I saw fusion rods scatter across the floor as loud crash came from the back of the shop. I wasn’t alone.