___Lumen___
Doubt begins to set in in your mind as you scrabble for a plan B, but the prospect of a pint lightened the quietly awkward mood in the car.
Traffic was lighter heading away from the centre and back out to the shitty East-End, but you had to divert around a police roadblock, the audio feed in the car talking of industrial action in the Ork quarter spilling over.
No sooner had the presenter finished rambling on about the suggested political fallout of such civil disobedience than your comm rang with an incoming call.
Knives, its Mick. Get to the Swan as fast as you can. Fucking rioters are going mental and smashing the place up.
The swan was a dank little pub but it had a massive cellar and served as an illegal brewery, the adjacent blast furnaces keeping the basement at a balmy temperature year round and making it the perfect spot for brewing beers and liquors.
You knew how much cash that place span for the Clerkenwells, you couldn't afford for it to go down to some uppity Ork labourers out for a rise. Pushing timmy to take the back roads, you get as near as you can, still some blocks away as the car is brought to a standstill by a slow moving wall of a protest march.
__Zwei__
The hustle and bustle of the morning had settled by the time you headed out onto the streets but the train was rammed with tourists heading into the centre of town for some January sales shopping.
Track works meant that you had to take the overground into town and then cut across on the Circle line to Westminster, your AR alerts re-routing you as you neared the entrance at Kensington. The tourists laughed and joked and generally got on your tits as they got in the way and generally stood out like a sore thumb on what was clearly not going to be a good day for you. Tinny music escaped peoples earphones and babys cried further up the carriage as mothers desperately tried to comfort them with rattles and soft toys.
After what seemed a life time, the train clattered into Euston and you headed down into the bowels of the earth to grab the circle line, the connection not long enough to warrant trying to nod off.
You popped up above ground just as Big Ben struck 9.30, its guttoral clanging reverberating off the high rises that dwarfed the ancient building, themselves shrouded in low hanging cloud and smog.
The greyness of the morning wasn't helped by a drizzle, and the excited squeals of a Japanese bus tour did little to assist your headache.
Feeling like half-baked shit, you headed into the "Deliberators Delight" and joined the queue at the busy and pleasant deli.
Racks of cooked meats were laid out in a large glass servery, pots of spiced and oiled olives and feta cheese scattered about as adornments. The queue soon died down thanks to the speedy serving of the two young looking immigrants, an eastern european inflection on the lass's warm tone betraying her heritage.
You spot the camera, a standard factory model of ball cam, the ocular hidden behind smoked a one-way glass dome built into the ceiling.
A holo-terminal stood at the far end of the servery, hooked up to a SiN payment system and you swiped your comm near it to authorise the eye-watering payment.
You knew it was london but a tenner for a super-smoothie and a brew took the piss. Maybe the Japs were daft enough to pay it you thought as you headed back out into parliament square, taking a seat on a bench as you sat and sipped at the smoothie, using the brew more to ward off the winter wind from your exposed hands.
The cameras around here were all well defended, raised way off the street level and secured to brick away from windows so they couldn't be tampered with. Cabling into the rear of the boxes told you they weren't daft enough to risk wireless in an area this central to the British government, but their absence of data streams in your "enhanced" view of the world told you that without looking for something as basic as a cable.
