The Flesh by Marcus Daley

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People watching his life were tired of looking at the heavens and wanted to see the crowd.

Seth shook his head. It was an annoyance that he had become such a slave to his blog. However, the revenue he was pulling in from the event allowed him to quit his job a week earlier and just focus on surviving the next few hours. Gritting his teeth against the social discomfort, Seth looked down and panned around so everyone in cyberspace could see the hundred or so people flanking him and standing on the other side of the road.

As if it were a simple afterthought, Seth Googled for "relaxation technique" and read the first five entries as they appeared in his mind. Doing searches in his mind was a way to cope with nervousness and naturally led him to become the second person to reach a million searches in a year. Actually, it only took him eight months, twenty days and five hours. The thought immediately set off another series of mental searches that Seth just let float through his mind as he looked at the silent crowd.

His first search was to read the train schedule that confirmed it would arrive in two minutes and thirty-two seconds. It felt like an eternity. He uncomfortably glanced around at the people and did a search on train fatalities. He narrowed it to pedestrian fatalities involving trains. He further narrowed it to pedestrian fatalities involving trains on a platform. The odds were unlikely anyone would get hit. However, Seth hoped the group of people standing in the street would be killed by it when it arrived. The image was unpleasant, but preferable to their unwavering stares, or even worse, their companionship on the train ride downtown.

To help himself calm down, his mind latched onto another thought that showed up frequently in his blogs. Virtually all animals on the earth had been eaten or destroyed by viruses a century earlier. Many of the sicknesses that killed came from eating the meat of animals. Will I get ill from eating the cow? How will I know if I am sick? Will I die suddenly or suffer painfully from eating the beast's flesh? Seth didn't like such Google searches, but they were reasonable questions despite the guarantees from NaturBeef that the cow was pathogen free.

Seth's ears tingled with the high-pitched sound of the train as it approached. The wheels made a slight screeching noise as it slowed more abruptly than usual and several people staring at Seth leapt out of the way. Otherwise, the plastic vehicle made little noise as it rolled up to the train stop into Seth's view.

It was a series of six large, plastic compartments linked by a flexible corridor. The train was full of passengers heading downtown, perhaps for the same event. All of the passengers wore halos and seemingly stared at Seth as the door opened.

As was customary, the people behind Seth pushed him forward and he stepped rapidly inside. Someone's hand pressed into Seth's abdomen, making the folded, spare halo he kept attached to his belt snap free and pinch his skin.