Carl left the garage with his customary professionalism, the car so silken in its ignition that the first unmistakable sign the car was moving was the gentle press of acceleration into his seat.

He ignored the view from the windows, an irrelevancy. He was in his element, here in the custom twilight. With seven words he altered the future of mycochip development; with nine keystrokes he gave no options on options. And the market danced. How it danced. It was five minutes past nine and his shares - his shares - were up by six percent. A good day already. Having a premonition of things to come, he deactivated the profit-taking AI which liquidated scrapings of his stock on good days. On such days normally, under the guise of friendly swarms of entirely fictional family investors, he ate stock of competitors who had taken a hit and used it for profit taking, or takeovers, later. A touch of marginal gravy. On a day like this however, he was sure his competitors stock had further to fall. Far, far further.

A flicker of movement caught, then held, his attention; unusual in itself. He maintained a prideful ignorance about the streets through which his behemoth crawled. Carl took a different route every day, for all he knew. For all he cared. Still, he found occasional enjoyment in looking upon the world. There was much that annoyed him and irritation was something that carried a potent emotional charge. It brought with it the pleasures of seeing a world of flaws, a world of which he chose to have no part of and had no patience with.

Each day - of the days he cared enough to look - he saw a stew of the maggots, as his mother called them. When he was ten, he inquired why she used that word and she claimed it was affectionately meant; the offspring of the domestic fly is hardy, prolific and is a relentless though joyless consumer. They may be short lived but they have a certain energy to them, an energy that, she wryly observed, not all of their metaphorical namesakes have. All metaphors have their limits.

She did in fact mean it to be a base insult, as they both knew. The justification was just one of the games they played. They both played many games.

The maggots annoyed him, as they annoyed her. More literally now in her case.

But now, outside, in the world he was glad never to touch, things were finally being put right. Police were everywhere, cleansing the landscape. Just ten meters away there was a human virus in leather and denim, an oxygen thief, one of those pathetic remora that fed from the shoals of magnificent sleek cars held helpless at traffic lights, in the clutches of the authorities. Despite the cold she was in shorts, encrusted and ridged with stains. She dared to dress like that, and then expected some gratuity for running some dog's bathwater over Carl's immaculate windscreen and scraping it dry with something smelling of the gutters. She actually wanted money for that, tax free money. Never declared, always out of the pockets of those who have earned it, on top of the money she drained from the government's bloated teats.

The parasite looked sullen, angry. But she also had a look about her, one that showed an acceptance of her fate. He was pleased to see she at least knew enough dignity to also know shame. It was only right. It is only what you would hope to see.

Another ten seconds of journey gifted him with glimpses of more dregs, faceless, shiftless, helpless in the arms of the authorities. Bags of powder lay on the ground. Guns too, dull as their owners' eyes.

At the next corner, the scene was repeated with other maggots. So many police at work. For a moment, he was racked with the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this was another manifestation of government by juveniles, tossing around money that good citizens like himself had to fight to keep. But it was brief, that thought. Perhaps this administration (was there an election soon?) deserved more credit than that. Given what he saw, it would certainly be churlish to complain. Perhaps a personal invitation to the relevant bureaucrat was called for.

Then again, perhaps it might be best to see what tomorrow brought.

The scene outside his window, of justice served, was repeated thrice more before Carl turned the wheel one last time and the two of them were engulfed by the underground car park. For the first time, he felt sorrow at journey's end, but he sighed and let it go.