michiko's life
G.
After meeting Hiro for a late night rendezvous at the Venice Star Love Hotel outside of Shibuya, Michiko walked down Dogenzaka Street as the sun came up. This was her favorite time of day in Tokyo, a tiny temporal window in which the city felt slightly at rest, when you might look down a street and see no one; a shocking visual impact as Tokyo is nothing if not a tightly intertwined morass, locked up in a rubber band ball of constant physical and mental negotiation. To see the city this empty hinted at apocalypse, disaster, and the extraordinary. Within the hour this would change and it would resume its usual manic pace.
Hiro, on the other hand, could not be more uninterested in these urban sociological inspections. He was single-mindedly on his way to meet his supplier, and was running late for the appointment. His supplier was a young guy, almost a kid, who had so far found nothing in life to interest him, other than money. And he made a lot of it. Practically the whole city of Tokyo was drugged up on the latest pharmaceutical strain of Climactis, and Hiro's supplier worked it in the most fashionable districts, fetching incredible sums for textiles coated with time-release Climactis. This kept Hiro's supplier in the latest microcircuit fashion.
(Previous episodes of Michiko's Life can be found here).