[Editor's note: Fifth night. The listener's been clutching their head all evening. Our guy notices.]
Dude, you've been gripping your head this whole night ever since you came over. You must not have heard about the red rain event.
You gotta turn your fucking commlink off, dude. I know, I know. It makes life a little harder. You can't really do much in the city without one. But at least tone it down or something. Red rain will stop in something like 30 minutes.
Oh shit, I forgot. You don't know what red rain is.
Okay, so red rain is one of these things that happens in Nuevo Bay. Basically, it's an amalgamation of multiple systems that happen at the same time. You got a terrible storm coming through around the same time as the usual electromagnetic interference that Earth gets. You know, sometimes it's a solar flare, sometimes it's something with the magnetic field, or whatever natural phenomena happens at the same time. Combined, it messes around with city systems and shorts out certain appliances. And it gives you that dull ache in your head because your neural interface, that hooks all your augments together, or your commlink, or one of your other augments, acts a little... I don't know. Not normal.
Anyway, red rain happens every once in a while. Sometimes there's more, sometimes there's less. It's just another thing that we deal with over here, you get it.
India has their monsoons. Russia has their -30° winters. Nuevo Bay? We have red rain.
Oh, you're wondering how we got the name?
I don't actually remember. Someone just hated how the corporations and the news started using all those scientific terms, and they just said, "Why don't we call it red rain?" 'Cause if you have those optical eyes from SiberTech, that company in Siberia? Well, if you have one of those, you get this weird faint red mist in your eyes. It's like someone put a little overlay on it. That's when you know you're dealing with red rain.
Or just check the info feeds. They send out a notification within a couple hours, usually.
Oh yeah, and don't forget: OCR is not gonna pay you back if your shit gets damaged. You don't even wanna deal with them anyway. It takes like 120 days or something, they say, just to get your claim heard. And even longer if you wanna actually get the money.
So yeah. See if you can lower the volume on your commlink, cut it off temporarily, or something.
Last big one? I lost three days of work. Commlink went haywire, couldn't connect to the client servers. Boss didn't care. "Should've turned it off," he said. Yeah, well, try turning off your fucking brain and see how productive you are.
Cost me about 800 credits in lost contract hours. That's rent, you know? That's the difference between eating at Chen's and eating fucking nutrient paste for a week.
But hey, that's Nuevo Bay. The city will fuck you, then charge you for the privilege.
Are you a gamer?
You get that a new VR headset that came out? If you have one of the good implants, you can actually jack into the data link cable on your arm and a VR headset won't even be needed. You just run the software and it goes straight to your eyes. Again, you gotta have the eyes, and you have to have a decent data link cable, or else you're gonna start getting some lag and shit. But if you have the good tech?
Dude, you're gonna have a hell of a time.
Oh, I gotta tell you, man. The immersion? It's like you're right there. I'm talking right there. And you know what I mean by immersion.
What was I talking about? Right. Red rain.
← Back to All Stories