The Tumbleweed Popcorn Writing challenge

Full Disclosure:

This is a resurrection of a previous, dead thread with a similar but more labor intensive concept that I no longer have time to maintain. that said: here's the challenge:

Rules are pretty simple, Take what the previous poster wrote, and expand on it as little or as much as you want to and have time for. Be sure to reply to the post you're expanding on in case of simultaneous posts. Should two expansions on the same post go through, treat them as alternate timelines of the same story, and feel free to expand on either, both, or neither.

Don't comment or critique until you've participated, and don't link those comments or critiques with the story chain. use @'s instead.

Discuss, critique, etc. Gotta post one before you start goofing on others' work, though.

I'll start:


His chip itched under the skin behind his ear. It always itched when he was nervous.

"Step forward, hands at your waist"

He hadn't tested these new credentials, but he didn't have time to. He needed money, and he needed to get out to make money. His lungs couldn't take another month contracting in new Kowloon, and he knew it. "They tell you coughing up that black slime is normal, that it'll get better in a few weeks as you 'acclimate.' Bulllshit..." he muttered.

The guard at the turnstile motioned for him to assume the position. Grunting a terse directive at him that hed didn't quite catch.

"Keep it together" he thought to himself. It didn't help at all with the butterflies in his stomach, or the burning patch of irritation just above and behind his left jaw muscle. The pat-down was carried out by the guard hastily and without gusto. It wasn't the physical search he was worried about, though.

You see, things could have been a lot easier for Terrence. He wasn't born a dreg, and he scored well on all the trade placement tests during private contract selection. He didn't have addiction issues, as so many of his contemporaries did, and he wasn't involved with any of the underground syndicates (at least at first.)
Terrence's problem was that he loved to tinker. He more than loved it. It was a compulsion, he couldn't help it. That need to fix things until they stopped working, to hijack and game the system, to find any way he could around the technological rules that governed his world, got him where he is today. Namely, half dead in the depths of a megacity, living on corporate hazard scrip and grey market crypto from odd-jobs, alongside the dregs and criminals.

Terrence thought about this fact quite a bit. He often pondered, as he was now, while the security officer's hands palpated for contraband under his scrotum, about how different his life would be if he just kept his head down and got that job in the industrial design arm of Kowloon Consolidated. "Chip."

"Hey jerk-off! Chip!"

Terrence was yanked back to reality by this simple declaration, eyes refocusing on the face of the now disgruntled guard.

"Oh -- yeah right, chip, Here." Terrence sputtered, cocking his head to the left and pulling back his ear, as a barber does to get at those hard-to-reach short hairs. He did his best to hide his anxiety.

GO!

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@tkoham

Will be edited later. If 75 minutes have passed without edits, continue on.

The guard swipes the chip from Terrence's hand without any regard whatsoever and inserted in on a portable scanner. After a few seconds, the scanner emit one of three colors: green color signaling access, red signaling denial of access, and blue signalling complications. Noramlly under Terrence's condition, his chip would signal red without much effort due to his drug-induced state however his chip has been extensively modified to bypass certain restrictions. It is just a matter of knowing who can do what and at what price.

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The scanner emitted a quiet, but high beep, and the guard looked at it.

"Shit" he muttered under his breath.

Terrance felt the blood drain from his face as he watched the guard walk much-too-slowly to his companion. Terrance stood there waiting for them to arrest him for false credentials while they talked in low voices. He strained his ears with everything he had in an effort to hear them, but it was pointless. He couldn't make out a single word.

After a few more harrowing seconds, the first guard turned to him and said, "Sorry for the delay, this scanner's been buggy all week. We'll have a replacement in a few moments."

Terrance hesitated for a moment before asking, "What happened?"

"The damn thing keeps lighting up blue and giving false error codes. Twenty-sixth time this week."

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"Typical government junk" replied Terrance. "Yeah, they give all the contracts to the cheapest bidder" replied the guard, seeming almost human. "Laters" muttered Terrance trying to hide the relief he was feeling, and wondering how he now got the chip tested. If it turns a scanner blue again the machine learning algo's might pick up on it and start looking for patterns in the data. Once the algo's got a fix on you, you were fucked Terrance thought to himself, and then the old feelings of guilt bubbled up as he remembered how he once fucked up big...

...and they got Mandy.

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