The sound of the metal heating up was the one thing I could never get used to. The sound as if someone was stepping on a giant aluminum can, which you were living inside, one room in a hundred thousand inside this giant tube. It was the one thing they'd not got right with this generation. In some of the newer screws they had built in something to diffuse the sound, and in the richer places that could afford to look like whatever they wanted they had augmentations to account for it: electronic diffusion arrays, custom noise-cancelling wave generators. I was “lucky” enough to be neither rich, or young, so I already had my apartment, thank you very much, and I wouldn't have been eligible for an upgrade — if I was waiting on THEM to do it — for a little over eighteen years.
Most days I didn't go anywhere. Because where was there to go? Haha, bad joke, sure. But I had everything I needed right there. Food, work, games, toilet. Going places took effort, and there were risks. Gunfights, viruses, chemical irritants, cars. Interacting online was — and still is — the only truly hygienic thing to do. Though I was / am still far from what you might have called hygienic.
Yet today there was someone coming. You might have guessed that because I was in the shower. Water was through the roof because of all that secessionist shit happening in California, and I still wanted to get clean. I wasn't normally like that. I'd do the dry shower, sure, everyone did that, but a real wet shower, now that meant something for those of us who lived in reality.
There was someone coming and I didn't know who they were, or what they wanted; but they sure seemed to knew everything about me: like, where I lived, and where I shopped, and the exact serial number of the last frozen meal I'd eaten. Which was spot on weird even for me, so don't think I was some sort of rough and tumble chap who dealt with blackmailers everyday.
Though I was showering so I could get all the dead skin off. So that when the time came to fight back maybe whatever I did wouldn't leave a trace. At least that’s what I told myself.
Or maybe it's just that I wanted to take a good shower if today was gonna my day to die.