One looked away as he turned; a young guy, wearing conspicuously clean attire: freshly pressed, no evidence of a day in the office. This man had been starting his workday, not ending it. Lux’s tail.
***
The back steps of the street level entrance into Seven Corners were dark and stank of urine and sweat. The cameras here appeared dark; even in the dim reflected light of the stairwell the inner lens was shut. No one was monitoring these.
Lux pulled up the building plans on his HUD and located the clinic. It was a small facility, occupying just one floor on the east side of the tower. When he arrived, the door had a small, nondescript plaque that read SERENITY CLINIC in generic script.
The waiting room was dimly lit, the floor’s tiles smudged at the edges where foot traffic hadn’t worn away the dirt. The dull sheen of neglect hung over the room; every surface in need of cleaning. It was not a place someone would come to detox, an appearance which seemed deliberate, given the anonymity of its patients.
An attendant spoke to him through a small speaker behind a wall of bullet-proof plastic. Her look vacant; her voice monotone, like the artificial voice assigned to a computer 100 years before. Her name, Carolyn, embroidered on the right breast of her smock.
“We close in twenty minutes,” she said. The waiting room was empty. The attendant appeared impatient with him, though her voice didn’t betray it.
“I won’t need that long,” he said.