The iron-red night rain was kind to nothing, least of all my long-distance surveillance drones. I was burning favors by the second piggybacking on other people's surveillance feeds. Come dawn I would be owing equipment, work, and information to an assortment of annoying people. Better to owe them than to owe the Nosferatu Casino more than they wanted you to. Nobody owed them less than that. The night's gig would halve my tab and put extra cash on my wallet. The casino's offer had been generous —I would have done it for free and they knew it. When they asked for a favor the or else was left to your imagination. I knew for sure of three people they had had killed because they had said "no" and two more that had killed themselves less than two months after being banned from both buildings and apps. Not every kind of gambling addiction could be fed elsewhere. My own compulsion wasn't that sophisticated but that was one dice I did not care to throw.
The little disk embedded behind my ear pinged and spoke softly through my skull. Some risks it was safer to take than to avoid and on a hunch I had sent an image of the woman currently having moderately nasty sex with the casino director to a friend's discrete face recog service. Another favor owed but this one had bought confirmation of what my gut had already been sure of. The woman was a high-level zombie, a VP in one of the neurotech companies trying to muscle into the local eduhealth racket. With the top-notch circuitry deep in her brain she didn't need anybody in her bed to have sex the unaugmented could only dream of. Maybe it was a weird addiction. Everybody had one and having wealth and power only changed the menu and the price. But maybe it was business and I was pretty sure it was. Despite its name, Nosferatu Casino was neutral territory between the zombies and the wet biotech companies that insisted people call them vampires. It was a convenient go-between that had found a fertile niche it had chosen to exploit for as long as it could. As insurance they continuously collected so much ugly dirt stored in digital vaults locked tighter than their bank accounts that it was high on everybody's OKRs to keep the director alive. The casino fucked with nobody and nobody fucked with the casino. That was one of the few rules.
Not what my feeds were showing. Literally and figuratively.
I expanded my surveillance radius feeling my favor balance plunge to chthonic depths. At the frontier of my data's resolution there was a semi-autonomous sniper. A whisper of an inference rather than a clear signal, I wouldn't have picked it up if I hadn't assumed it would be there, aiming at the hotel window waiting for the casino director. Or the zombie, in theory, but that wasn't the game.
The true game was the vampire security team that located and disabled the sniper a minute after I found it and twenty-five seconds before the director had crossed in front of the window butt-naked and not shy. Not because he and the zombie were finished. The fucker had probably had one of the casino's geek hives figure out timing and probabilities and he had waited for the most exciting moment to chance it out. Russian roulette by assassination attempt.
I wasn't judging and I wasn't paid to. The guy had found the game he would play until it killed him, and that's what made sisters and brothers of us all. I encrypted my recordings and sent them to the casino's dead drop, then I recorded myself destroying my copies and sent that to a second one.
I left the rented apartment leaving my flashed-out laptop behind for the owner to steal. The rain had become a storm but a voice behind my ear had told me that I had a courtesy invitation to go have fun at any one of the Nosferatu Casino's physical locations. With any luck by morning my tab wouldn't be higher than it had been yesterday but only idiots believe in luck.