I swung my bike around the corner, still shaken from Uncle Alec's message and being caught in the Pinto by Betts, but I was on high alert knowing my head was far away. I came in smooth, aerogel shaft drive working unexpectedly better on dirt than in microgravity. I walked my bike through the door camouflaged by filth so it would blend in with the junk everywhere and snuck into the comm station. On the floor of the back office of Joe's Post, a hatch slid open, letting me and my bike down onto a long ramp that led to our warren.

I admired the graffiti etched and airbrushed onto the sandstone walls. The First 'Snatchers who built this warren had some mad good spelunks to dig these tunnels and carve out a pretty swank place for us to live. Rumor was that our gang had roots back on Old Earth, and we'd hit our peak of one hundred fifty runners back in gen-four.

Lights embedded in the rock walls flashed on as I made my way down the ramp, until corridors opened up on either side of me, and zigzagged off to mostly dusty, unused rooms. It was empty and lonely here, since our decline down to eight runners. None of the surviving 'Snatchers had lived long enough to become punks, so runners had to put all our re-cooled goods on the 'Net rather than keep them for longer like we used to, and we most def had no snipes to be the future of the gang. Eight of us living in a warren that had been dug out to house one hundred fifty was hella demoralizing.

As I meandered through the maze of corridors I could navigate without looking, I noticed some of the eroding passageways that we'd long given up on trying to maintain since we didn't use them anymore; there just wasn't enough synther fuel to survive and maintain this huge of a warren. It used to be a hella deck warren, but pretty soon it was going to all fall apart and be no better than the hovels that gangs with less history and resources lived in.

I finally made it to The Hive, the small carve-out of the warren that we still inhabited. I secured my bike to a rack right outside the doorframe. The only synther still running in the entire warren was embedded in the wall next to the rack, sputtering and coughing. Anything we needed, we made with it, providing we had enough fuel to keep it on.

Five sets of coveralls emblazoned with "Joe's Post" on them hung neatly from a taut strand of ancient fiber optic cable that was strung across the high ceiling, lengths of it stretched and pinned next to the bunks of my Bandersnatch buds. The coveralls were the only things that were noticeably clean and pressed in the entire space. I hopped up onto my bunk―the only corner of the Hive that was mine―stripped down, balled up my street clothes, and shoved them into the grubby left-most cubby hole in the wall. Even as I started slipping into the coveralls, I ran back up and out of the warren, trying not to be too much later to my shift at the service desk.

"What's up, doc?" I said, leaning an arm around Fred's shoulder. He was right in the middle of his techno-spiel to a customer, explaining how even though the dude's message was delivered via causal channel, and therefore totally instantaneous even when sent from light years away, there were still sometimes very slight processing delays at the star cluster relay stations. Fred was Bandersnatch's bithead, and could hack better than most runners on BF-II could anymore.

He shot me a sideways smile; he'd always had a thing for me, but I never did go for the emo combover look, despite his hella charm. Still, he was one of the few 'Snatcher's left I felt pretty tight with.

Without taking his eyes from the junkbunny he was doing business with, he cocked his head toward the stack of message pads on the counter. With a curt nod, I picked them up, ready to start sending out notices informing customers of their trans-stellar messages.

I saw myself reflected in the shiny black screen of the top pad; I looked sharp in my crisp, white coveralls with the red logo over my chest. I was even smiling a little bit. I reluctantly stretched it wider. Just for you, customers. Fred was nice, and for shiz, the only 'Snatcher left I could count on. I wasn't about to do him, despite his flirts, but I liked how he was sweet to me, even so. And he respected that I wouldn’t go there; that was rare among cronkites these days. I picked up the stack of pads and began tapping in routing beacons, which would deliver alerts to residents of Beta Fornax.

"Data's good, thanks for asking," he said, turning to me as the customer walked away. "Any news from the local digs?" As if I could tell him about the junkrun in front of immanently arriving 'bunnies and other legit citizens―this was about to become the busy shift, from the look of the crowds heading our way. I checked the wall display: it was lunch time. BF-II had the only starport in the system, making Joe's Post a popular and busy destination for travelers. Most travelers didn't have the stomach to go far from the starport, though, since the only sights to see here were klicks of junk and, of course, the Banyan Sea. And legit citizens didn’t want to risk rubbing elbows with the likes of us. But here at Joe’s Post we were just “mercher employees,” not Hipsters, as far as the customers knew.

I slipped into my best Academic accent; it helped me blend in better with the nerds and merchers (even they adopted the dialect since they did so much business with the nerds) that were swarming this part of town. Since nobody else was at the front desk yet, we played our game.

“Sure, doc," I said, plastering on my fakest smile ever, "I found some very important streams for the Analytical Physics department on Kappa Cephalid! Isn't that stellar? And Ginger's spawn, Larak is having his Academy entrance celebration on Omicron Asteraceae. They're Algebraics, you know, so it'll be the usual rituals and chanting to honor the Great Invariants, and all that. I don't buy into that stuff myself, of course."

Fred's smile almost cracked, but he kept it going. "Of course, of course. But a prof's gotta have his pet religion in this day and age, and who are we to begrudge her that?"

We wound it down since we could see some nerds heading our way; the 'bunnies around here weren't the sharpest tools, but of all the nerds, they were most likely to peg us.

Fred slapped me on the back. "Well Lucy, thanks for being here so promptly. I've gotta run," he said, winking. "I have to deal with my stepmother, who's cranky from being in Committee meetings all day." He rolled his eyes.

I got back to the routing beacons. Fred shuffled away to join the junkrun in progress. We rarely ever saw our benefactor, Joe, the owner of Bandersnatch HQ, a.k.a, Joe's Post. He came around to check on things every so often, just to make sure we weren't screwing stuff up and that the revenues coming in were what he thought they should be. Hipster sympathizers had a lot to gain, if they could trust the skills of the gangs they harbored; these days, Bandersnatch couldn't afford not to be pro because we weren't getting by on our leaderboard rankings alone like the good old days. Even if we couldn't eat much, at least we had a place to stay as long as we ran a tight ship for Joe.

I startled at a pair of hands slapping down on the comm desk, followed by the wheezing exhale of the chick standing before me. "Hi, I received a beacon about a long-haul message from―from―"

As she paused to catch her breath, her freckled cheeks puffed out, letting streams of hot breath tousle her red bangs. I'd never seen anyone in such a hurry to pick up an LH message. Long-haul meant it was from a system at least two months away by starship even though the message still only took a few seconds to get here by causal channel.

I guess this prof had a research deadline or something.

"It's ok, it's not going anywhere," I said, smirking. "What's your name?"

"Dr. Fuh- Fern Angstrom," she blurted. "The message should be from the Psi Arachne system, the sender, ah―"

I looked through the stack of beacons. "Dr. Sybil Angstrom," I said as I held up the beacon.

I thought back to that Rando I had danced with in the Banyan Sea. A scientist on a junkworld...and again that question floated up: Why? They hired 'bunnies to dig here, but it was hella rare they lowered themselves to do their own junk diving. Tilly buzzed against my leg and I fidgeted. My hand smacked against her as if to shush her, but her buzz was too low for anyone else to notice.

Looking back at the doc, I let out a long whistle. "That's in the Hawking Cluster. Say, any relation? She's quite a big-wig, isn't she? I heard her interviewed on causal-band radio once,"―while I was waiting for the next episode of Junk Pirates to come on, but I wasn't gonna tell her that―"That's the only message we have from that far away today."

The Hawking Cluster was a year-long trip from here. If it wasn't for the Vast―a megaparsec-wide region of empty space through which no starships could travel―it'd be a much shorter trip.

Fern's breath steadied. She pulled a crumpled sheaf of smartpaper from a pocket inside her lab coat and smoothed it out on the comm desk. She swallowed and nodded, her bright, green eyes looking right at me.

Her glance curdled into a scowl. "Yes, she's my mother," she grumbled. "One of the most prominent physicists in the Priaspora, and former chair of Arcturus Academy. Don't remind me."

I yawned. Oh these hilfiger nerds and their fronting. I held back a smirk and tapped in the unlocking code to display the headers on the beacon pad with her message, and set it down in front of her.

"How do you want to download this?" I asked, trying hard not to laugh at the nerd family drama.

She gave me a sharp glare and grabbed the pad from me.

"You might think it very funny that I cannot stand my famous mother, but it is really no joke dealing with her, ok? She is a huge pain in the—it doesn’t matter. She just uses me to further her own success, no matter what the cost to my own career or interests.” Her grip on the pad was turning her fingers red. She glanced at her wrist comm, then stumbled backwards from it as if it would bite her and almost tripped over her own feet. The pad with her message clattered to the desk.

"Rats! I have to run, can you hurry?" she asked, furiously searching her blue jeans for an Academy pay-card that she finally pulled out and set down on the desk.

I entered the security release code into her pad and the totals lit up on the screen as it bonged like an ancient grandfather clock.

My mouth must have been hanging low enough to brush the desk, because I caught her looked at my expression. "I know, it's a large message. The cost to send it must be a year's salary for you," she mumbled, shaking her head.

If only. Maybe a year's salary for Joe.

"It's data for an experiment Dr. Angstrom is having me help her with."

I raised an eyebrow. "You call your mom Dr. Angstrom?"

She sighed. "Look, I have to run. The long and the short of it is, I don't get this experiment going and find some results she's happy with, I don't get to work in the lab that makes her happy with me, ok?"

I shrugged. "You don't sound too excited about making her happy," I said, deciding to be blunt. Playing a mercher, this was only borderline uppity. If she knew I was a hipster, I could be given a stern talking-to by nerd administrative compliance officers.

She blushed and averted her eyes real awkward-like. Shiz, most nerds I'd done business with were cool as cukes and quiet as dust motes―none had ever spilled their guts like this one. It was kinda hilarious.

I swiped her card across the message pad. It pulled out more infobucks than I'd ever seen in a single transaction and delivered it to Joe's bank account in a nanosecond. And she was gone without so much as a "thank you." I didn't blame her, I suppose. I watched her run off, lab coat flapping behind her as the wind began to pick up.