Jad - Runner1576

## Jad

You have to be a little blind to get by in Mega City. You roll out of bed, not sure whether your dreams were really dreams or just those black market brain-metaverse implants booting up in the night. If it was the implants, if you really did a Run alongside the Red Eyes last night…probably better if you think it was a dream. Safer. A Runner needs to be awake, but not too awake. So you head out to get your morning coffee from that place three levels down that mixes in a bit of the root with the name you can never remember that makes your memories liquid and convinces you it’s all just a dream.

You hardly notice the clown-face you pass on the way to the coffee shop as she locks eyes with a green-haired robot, sweat trickling down her face as they spar in some kind of four-dimensional fight that only makes sense in stream your implants pick up. An out-of-towner might have stopped to gawk, but you’ve lived in Mega City your whole life, and you know this won’t be the 10th strangest thing you see this morning.

It’s not that you’re jaded, not really. You just need to have a high threshold for novelty in Mega City. If you stopped to look at every bot and alien you passed, you'd end up a vegetable, staring at the crowd all day. Probably wouldn’t make it out of your hab.  Might be safer, but you want to live. So you’ve learned to tune out most of the inputs, and whenever that gets hard you pick up some more of that coffee with the strange root.

But when you enter the coffee shop, there’s an input you can’t tune out. Your first thought is that your implants must be acting up. No…there’s something about the alien sitting at the table in the corner, the one with the goggles and the messy pink hair. It’s not that he’s an alien, and it’s not the root because you haven’t had it yet. It’s something you haven’t seen before, even though you’re sure you’ve seen everything. Something you might call innocence if you didn’t reflexively scan the verse the moment you saw him and see that he’s a Runner.

You send him a coded message with your implants, and he nods as if at nothing. Act like you know me, his reply says. Call me Jad. Meeting another Runner in public can be risky, but he looks so at ease you decide to play along.

In the months to come, long after you’ve joined the Nameless—Jad’s crew—you wonder often if he came to that coffee shop to recruit you that morning. He always talks about it like it was a happy coincidence, but as far as you can tell, Jad’s  strength lies in his apparent guilelessness. To hear him tell it, he never set out to run a crew of his own. He was just working against Somnetic like any other Runner when one person, and then another, started asking him what to do next.

The Nameless isn’t a big crew—at least, you don’t think it is. You’ve only met a half-dozen others. Then again, Jad told you to act like you’re still a freelancer, and as far as you can tell everyone else does the same. Technically, for all you know, half the Runners in Mega City could be Nameless. But you still can’t wrap your head around the idea that childlike Jad is some kind of mastermind.

You have to be a little blind to get by in Mega City.