Sunlight stabbed through the grimy windows of The Rusty Tap, exposing dust particles that danced in accusatory beams across the silent bar. The light crawled across the floor, finally reaching the pool table where Marty Grissom lay sprawled like a discarded marionette.
Marty groaned and shifted, his cheek peeling from the green felt with an audible unsticking sound. Something hard dug into his temple—the cue ball, repurposed as the world's least comfortable pillow. He blinked at the harsh morning light, reality crashing back in waves.
"Son of a—" He bolted upright, neck brace askew. His fingers fumbled to straighten it, an instinctive habit despite the brace being as necessary as an umbrella in the desert. The worn velcro scratched against his stubble as he adjusted it.
"Didn't make it home again." Marty squinted at his watch. Ten seventeen. He swung his legs off the table, boots hitting the floor with a thud that rattled through his skull.
The bar looked worse in daylight—chairs perched upside down on tabletops, their legs pointing accusingly toward the ceiling. Empty bottles lined the counter like abandoned sentinels from the night before. The neon sign had stopped flickering and just looked dead.
Marty rubbed his eyes, trying to erase the grit. His gaze dropped to the pool table, now serving as an impromptu desk covered with envelopes. White ones, yellow ones, and the dreaded red ones, fanned out across the felt like a losing poker hand.
"Not now," he muttered, but picked up an envelope anyway. The words FINAL NOTICE screamed in capital letters beneath his thumb.
He snatched another. PAYMENT OVERDUE.
And another. SERVICE TERMINATION.
"Bullshit." Marty spat the word, sorting the envelopes into three piles. "Bullshit, extreme bullshit, and apocalyptic bullshit."
The stacks grew. Electric company threatening to cut power. Liquor distributors demanding payment. Something from the health department with an official seal that looked like a warning shot before execution.
"They target me specifically." Marty jabbed at an envelope with his finger. "Their algorithms flag my address. 'Hey, Grissom hasn't suffered enough—send him another notice!'"
The sound of footsteps overhead interrupted his conspiracy theory. Heavy boots thumped across the ceiling, followed by the creak of the stairs leading down from the apartment above. Marty hastily swept the bills into a single chaotic pile and shoved them under a bar rag.
Tasha Lin descended the stairs, clutching her laptop to her chest like a shield. Dark circles smudged beneath her eyes, her short black bob sticking up at gravity-defying angles. Her oversized hoodie hung from her frame, the university logo long faded into an unrecognizable blur.
"Morning," Marty grunted, trying to look like a man who hadn't spent the night unconscious on a pool table.
Tasha nodded without making eye contact, bee-lining toward the coffeemaker behind the bar. She placed her laptop precisely in the one dry spot on the counter, then pulled a bag of premium coffee from the depths of her hoodie pocket—grounds she never shared and Marty never asked about.
"Sleep well?" he asked, immediately regretting the question.
"Didn't sleep." Tasha measured coffee with surgeon-like precision. "Found a vulnerability in CAPRI's new transit code. Their autonomous buses have a back door wide enough to drive a truck through."
"Useful information if we had a truck." Marty scratched his neck beneath the brace. "Or if anyone cared."
Tasha didn't respond, her fingers flying across her keyboard, occasional glances flicking toward the brewing coffee as if willing it to percolate faster.
Marty shuffled back to his bills, pulling them from their hiding place when Tasha wasn't looking. The silence between them stretched, comfortable in its familiarity. They'd developed an unspoken agreement—she didn't ask about his neck brace, he didn't ask about her past, and neither mentioned the legality of her living arrangement above his bar.
The coffeemaker sputtered its last gasp as Tasha continued coding, her posture tense but her fingers fluid across the keys. The sound of typing filled the room with rapid-fire clicking.
Without warning, Stacy the jukebox hummed to life, soft notes of Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight" spilling into the morning quiet.
"Didn't turn her on," Marty muttered, eyeing the jukebox suspiciously.
"Never do," Tasha replied without looking up. "She knows your schedule better than you do."
Marty returned to his bills, sorting through the less threatening envelopes labeled as junk mail. Pizza coupons, political flyers, and—
His fingers stopped on a glossy pamphlet. Unlike the usual cheap flyers, this one had weight to it, the paper thick and expensive. "Cleveland Renaissance Initiative" sprawled across the top in modern blue letters, floating above images of renovated storefronts and smiling people holding coffee cups.
Marty snorted but kept reading, curiosity overriding his natural suspicion. The pamphlet detailed grants, infrastructure improvements, and something called "smart city integration." His eyes narrowed at corporate jargon until a phrase leaped from the page: "preservation funds for cultural landmarks."
"Cultural landmarks," he murmured, glancing around at the dingy bar. With enough imagination and very poor lighting, The Rusty Tap might qualify.
Tasha's typing paused. Her head turned slightly, radar activated.
"What's that?" She pointed with her chin toward the pamphlet.
"Nothing." Marty tried to slide it under a stack of bills. "Just more junk."
Tasha's chair scraped against the floor as she stood, coffee in hand, and approached with deliberate casualness. "Doesn't look like nothing."
"Some city improvement thing." He shrugged, downplaying his interest. "Probably bullshit."
She plucked the pamphlet from his fingers before he could protest, scanning it with increasingly narrowed eyes. Her free hand curled into a tight fist around her coffee mug.
"Cleveland Renaissance Initiative," she read aloud, voice flat. "Brought to you by CAPRI Technologies. The same CAPRI Technologies currently rolling out mandatory emotional monitoring in Cincinnati."
"It's just about grants." Marty reached for the pamphlet, but Tasha pulled it away. "We could use the money."
"No such thing as free money." Tasha tapped a section of fine print. "Especially from tech bros bearing gifts."
"Not all technology is evil."
"No, just the kind that wants to crawl inside your head and rearrange the furniture." She slapped the pamphlet down. "Trust me, I've seen what's behind curtain number three."
Marty picked up the pamphlet again, examining it with exaggerated interest. "We need ten grand minimum to keep the lights on. Unless you're planning to cover the electric bill with your coding magic?"
"Ten grand now, your autonomy later." Tasha's voice carried the weight of experience. "First comes the grant, then comes the 'suggested upgrades,' then the 'connectivity requirements.' Before you know it, Stacy's reporting your song choices to a central database and your beer taps are calculating your emotional state."
"You're paranoid."
"Says the man in an unnecessary neck brace."
Marty's retort died on his lips as a truck horn blared outside. The morning delivery—another bill he couldn't afford.
Tasha snapped her laptop closed, tucking it under her arm. "Need to work upstairs. Better signal."
She paused at the foot of the stairs, knuckles white around her laptop. "Remember what happened to Rick's Diner? They took the urban renewal funds. Three months later, they were a CAPRI-approved 'nutrition center' with mood-sensing menu screens and cameras in the salt shakers."
"That's ridiculous."
"Yeah, until it isn't." Tasha climbed three steps, then turned back. "They don't just want your bar, Marty. They want what's inside it. The messy, unpredictable human part that doesn't fit into their algorithms."
The stairs creaked as she disappeared, her boots heavy on each step.
Marty waited until the door closed above, then dramatically tossed the pamphlet into the trash can beside the bar. He made a show of wiping his hands together as if discarding something distasteful.
Then he glanced toward the stairs, listening.
Silence.
He reached into the trash, plucked out the pamphlet, and carefully folded it into quarters. It disappeared into his back pocket with practiced efficiency.
"Just looking into it," he muttered to himself, adjusting his neck brace. "Doesn't mean I'm selling my soul. Just window shopping in hell."
Stacy abruptly switched songs, the opening chords of "Money" by Pink Floyd filling the empty bar.
"Nobody asked you," Marty snapped, but he didn't turn her off.