The minutes fell by with every flash of deep neon and shrill streetlights through the windows of the train carriage. The strobing light show of the skyline made the pain behind his eyes throb ever more viciously, yet the lion slouching in the seat continued to watch his reflection vacantly blinking back at him in the opposite window.

He shuffled in his stuffy business suit, sighing through his nose as he tugged loose his tie and popped open the top buttons of his shirt. It took all his effort to keep up the eye contact with himself and ignore the stream of information being projected onto his field of vision by the implant near his retinas. The little orange words and lines and symbols were out-of-focus, just a vague orange glow around his vision like he was staring down a burning tunnel. Every so often a jolt of the train would make the text pop into focus, in particular the count of unread messages piling up. His wife and boss dominated the list of senders. He turned his stomach to ignore them, but he put them back out-of-focus and out-of-mind for now. It still felt like he was staring down a burning tunnel

Outside, the illuminated skyscrapers disappeared as the train sped into a forest of modest but tightly-packed buildings. On every one, hazy neon signs and wires were overgrowing like grimy vines. The relative darkness of the city's seedy outer districts was a relief, even if it did accentuate the fluorescent lights flickering aggravatingly in the carriage. The trains in this part of the city were typically quiet at this time of night and the lion was grateful that the consistent din of the engine and wheels were all he had to hear. He was aware of the carriage's sole other passenger at the opposite end, but he hadn't glanced over for details. They were keeping to themselves and he had no interest in spoiling that.

Through the uncomfortable heat and overwhelming stimuli, the lion eventually started to zone out. His eyelids sagged down and he welcomed any sleep he might be able to get, or at the very least a period of blissful daydreaming.

He heard a sharp digital ping inside his head. Yanked from his hypnagogic state, he instinctively shifted his eyes to view the message in red that had popped up on his implant display.

The train must have crossed a district border. The red text scorched his sight and the strain of his eyes pulling focus to such an uncomfortably close subject was like being hit by a truckload of daggers behind the eyes. He keeled forward, leaned on his eyes with his hand firmly over his eyes, groaning through the waves of nausea now rolling in with every pulse of his migraine. The red message disappeared from the implant display, but stuck in his mind as another trouble to address later.

He quickly opened his eyes again and tried to focus on the metal floor beneath his paws. Closing his eyes was never as relieving as he hoped; the implant projected onto his sight regardless.

“I get it," he heard a distinctly outer-districts-accented feminine voice say. “Coming to this arse-end district makes me wanna chuck up too."

The lion craned his neck up to glance at the source of the sound. The other passenger had moved and taken the seat opposite him. The thin cheetah woman sat with arms stretched out over the backs of the adjoining seats, her feet planted but relaxed. The vivid sunset fur had odd white halos around the black spots, with a pair of blue and red spot-halos punctuating her midriff. Her short white tank-top looked like it had once had sleeves, until it was ripped down to its current shape. A green flannel hoodie was tied by the arms around her hips, over a pair of rolled-up cargo shorts. A silver sheen could be seen from her left arm, where various wraps and adornments covered up what appeared to be a mechanical limb. Her left ear was half-missing, the wilted remnants protruding from the unruly head-fur. Her raised brows and smirk were a little irritating.

“You could have got off at the last stop," the lion muttered. “Why come here if you hate it so much?"

She chuckled. “I live here, pal. I grew up here. Nobody hates it quite like we do."

The lion rubbed his eyes. The cheetah broke the somewhat awkward pause following. “And what about you, Mr Business? Slummin' it here in the Outers while putting in the 9-to-5 suckin' The Man's dick?"

“No, I…" he sighed, still hunched forward. “I missed my stop. I'm going around again."

“ All the way around again?" she scoffed. “Jeez, wherever you're goin', you must not wanna get there anytime soon!"

There was another pause as the train passed into a tunnel, the interior lights dimming to suit the lack of lighting from the windows. The lion sat up again, staring sheepishly toward the front of the train as if to check how far they had yet to go.

“Well, come on!" she said, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged on the seats and leaning in. “What are ya runnin' away from?"

The lion shot a look of incredulity at her prying eyes. He repeated slowly: “I missed my stop."

“Nope, you woulda just got off and got on the train going back the way."

The lion couldn't respond.

“I think you're runnin' away from something you know you'll never be able to get away from…cos it's in there," she said, tapping her temple.

The lion's head continued to pound, filling him with a deep impatience to reach the end of the conversation. “Look, I missed my stop. That's really all there is to it. Riding it around is quicker and safer than walking and cheaper than buying another ticket. There's no big conspiracy or mystery to unravel, I just…feel like staying on the train. Okay? If you don't mind, I'd like to get some quiet now."

The lion sat back and crossed his arms. The cheetah slouched back too, pulling a small cobbled-together computing device from her pocket and flipping up the clam-shell screen. “Okay. Sure. Sorry I asked."

They sat in tense silence again as the tunnel ended, the train emerging again into the midst of unkempt blocky buildings and unwelcoming streets. Drops of rain started to cover the windows, refracting neon and moonlight through their surfaces.

The lion swallowed and stared, trying to focus mentally on suppressing the throbbing pain in his head. The midnight rainfall and absence of chatter almost threatened to become relaxing.

Like a bullet, a message shot across the display on his vision, disrupting the orange glow that had just started to settle to the periphery of his awareness.

Bluetooth pairing request from: NazcaP-c47c2f.

The message demanded acknowledgement with the usual biting light show, along with repeated strikes of a digital bell inside his head. He grimaced and squinted his eyes almost shut, hoping to stop the sudden feeling that they might explode. His hands instinctively rose to block out the light, though they'd never be able to obstruct its insistent flashing.

“Agh, god…!"

“Aha! Gotcha!" the cheetah cried, pointing triumphantly.

In a blink of his squinted eyes he saw that she'd leapt to her feet and crossed the aisle. He saw her lean over him and felt the odd buzzing sensation of a cable being pushed into the implant's external data jack behind his right ear. He protested verbally, but his disoriented attempts at struggling weren't seeming to get him anywhere. The pushes with his feet just slid off the floor and his arms were still diligently trying to block light out in front of him.

He heard typing on keys and saw corresponding letters appear on his display, but he couldn't make it out before it disappeared. Lines and lines of text suddenly scrolled down his screen, pushing all the previous messages away and momentarily turning his light sensitivity into blindness. He screamed and made a grab, finally managing to get his hands around the cheetah woman's forearm. He had to tug her away before she finished whatever she was typing next.

“Wouldja calm down?" she said, almost worryingly casually.

Her arm wouldn't budge, as much as he tugged. The lines of indecipherable output text were cleared from the screen, leaving only the four corner lines showing the bounds of the display and a single blinking underscore in the corner. She started typing again. With the ensuing moment of cogency granted by the relatively clear display, he realised that his hands had locked around her half-mechanical arm. It would never have moved, however hard he'd tried.

He panted and stared for a moment, just watching the letters tick onto his display.

imp user.move --lock -arm -leg

The lion pounced, trying to go for the arm holding the computer now hooked up to his head. The underscore fell to the line beneath the command and his limbs stopped. His back thudded against the seat, his arms fell into his lap and his tensed legs went limp, knees swaying until inert. He couldn't move any part of his body below the neck.

“What did you do? Get that thing out of my head, right now! I can't move!"

“Fuckin' scary, huh? When I found out it could do stuff like this, I didn't sleep for a week!" she chuckled.

The chuckle only made him angrier. “I mean it, let me go! I-I'll press charges! I'll sue!"

“Oh, you're here cheapin' out and spending all night on a train so you don't have to buy another ticket, but now you have credits for a lawyer?"

The lion growled. “So, you're a hacker or something? You paralyse people and then… then mug them?"

“Again, you just told me you don't have enough creds for a train ticket. You think I don't have better things to do than shake you down anyway? Besides, I ain't hacked anything. Can you believe that command comes built into the OS? Fuckin' crazy."

He gulped. He'd heard rumours of insidious things built into the implants, but there was never any credibility behind the raving anti-implant conspiracy theorists that spread them. He thought to accuse her of lying, but it seemed pointless in his position.

“Then what do you want?" he asked, firmly. His neck stretched forward as far as it could, but he was still trapped in a body that wouldn't follow.

“I'm tryna help you. You got pain, you got problems, I've been there. I got what you need."

This didn't sound like it was getting any more legal. “It's a migraine. I just need painkillers, as soon as I get-"

“How long have you had the implant?" the cheetah said, crouching to eye-level and staring into each of his eyes like a doctor giving an exam, entering something into her computer after each look.

He sighed and, still out of options, complied again. “Three months."

“How long you been getting headaches?"

“…Around three months."

“Well, Sherlock, your migraine is somethin' called implant rejection. Your body's fightin' it," she explained, gesturing towards the downtown skyscrapers with her thumb. “The bigwigs over there like to pretend it doesn't exist, blame those conspiracy nuts for makin' it all up. But here you are, and here I am, livin' proof."

“You had this too?"

“Can you believe they put these things in everyone? Like, old people. Kids. They make it mandatory and then go round buryin' all the bad press like there ain't thousands of people out there keeled over on trains wantin' to shove dicks through their eyes."

While the lion tutted under his breath at the needlessly coarse language the cheetah looked up from the computer and grinned at him. Something about her face compelled him to relax a little. It may have been the lack of malice in the smile, or the lack of the slight orange pupil colouration that near every citizen had as standard, thanks to the implants. Did she even have one?

“I'm gonna give you your arms and legs back now, if you promise not to try jumpin' me again."

“Tell me what you're planning first."

She rolled her eyes and poked a key on her computer. His arms and legs felt a rush of sensation and a few moments of uncontrollable twitching as they returned to life.

“Here in the Outers, we got our own version of painkillers."

“Let me guess: can I believe it comes built into the implant?" he mocked.

“Hey. Rude. And actually, uh…this one ain't built-in. I may be a tiny bit of a hacker." She hit another key on her computer without breaking the cheeky eye contact.

“Hey, wait-"

imp sideload euphio.zip

The new command appeared and disappeared in a blink, replaced instead by an explosion of colours across the whole display. The lion's eyes opened wide as the rainbow patterns washed over his entire vision. It was like staring at an tumultuous ocean or a disturbed cloud of smoke, with every colour he could think of sweeping through it. Eventually the colour gathered around the centre of his vision, and the patterns began to pulse in waves outwards. He could hear his own heartbeat, in time with the pulses of his migraine, in time with the drops of colours sending ripples across the implant display. The two-dimensional display seemed to grow depth in front of him, a dimension between dimensions, where the the train and the grinning cheetah receded away from him. He was sinking backwards despite not moving at all. The central point of the colourful vortex receded too, creating a tunnel of vibrant hues, the pulsating walls pushing in towards him rhythmically. Every time the colour pulses washed over him he felt these strange sensations intensify. He didn't know how long he'd been staring by now, but he couldn't stop. The pulses slowed gradually. His heart rate followed and the spikes of pain in his head grew fewer.

“Does that feel better?" The cheetah's voice was lower and quieter now. It reverberated up the tunnel, pollinating with sweet colours on its way to the lion's ears. Responding never crossed his mind, but that seemed to be a response in itself. “Good boy."

He pondered that childish phrase and why it gave him so much glee. For a moment the whole tunnel turned the roasted orange colour of her fur, but the rainbow quickly returned. Now his and the vortex's pulses had entered a harmonious rhythm, it seemed to force the migraine out of his awareness. He felt a soothing numbness in the front of his skull, like a cold compress applied to some deep, internal part of his mind.

“Migraine gone?"

It was. It felt glorious.

“You can speak if you try," she said softly. She looked further away, like she'd sat back on the opposite bench.

“Y-Yes," he muttered. It sounded like it wasn't him speaking, but another him, still on the train at the other end of the vortex.

“Yes what?"

“Yes, uh…"

“Oh, I guess I didn't tell you yet," she said, stepping in close again. It looked like he was seeing her face through the wrong end of a pair of kaleidoscopic binoculars. “Name's Nazca. Like the Lines."

“Yes, Nazca."

He felt a tugging somewhere in the distance and saw Nazca pocketing her computer and cable. The colours were no less intense, vibrant and beautiful. He thought he remembered Nazca telling him that they'd reached her stop, but couldn't recall whether she left. The image of her face was still floating around in front of him. It was falling into the vortex, followed by more and more memories. The reflection of his own face in the train window fell into the vortex as well - narrow and tired, heavy bags under the eyes, with a short mane that joined into a goatee. He felt like he didn't look like that anymore. All of the troubles of the day were falling out of him, down the colourful tunnel, making ripples in the surface of his vision, before rippling back up the sides, spread apart into nothing but relaxing colours. Any thought he tried to have, anything he pondered or pictured, fell right out of his mind and into the colourful sea. He was suspended in a state of emptiness; numb-minded, peaceful and content.

Then, after he soaked in that headspace for what could have been as long as years or as short as seconds, the colours disappeared. Reality came rushing back up to meet him and he looked around, disoriented.

He was still on the train, but now the sunrise was scattering rays of twilight between the distant skyscrapers. The train was just pulling up at a station. He saw the digital sign above the door; it was his stop. The train had gone all the way around city. He stared in a stupor at his watch. 04:51. As he rose to his feet, his back and rear were sore. Had he really been sat there for hours?

He stepped steadily towards the door, still getting his bearings. He felt like he was floating, as if he'd just stepped down from a treadmill after a long run. The implant display was back to normal. Though it strained his eyes as much as usual to look at it, he had no migraine now. His noticed his unread messages had updated with a new sender: Nazca P. He  interfaced with the implant using the touchscreen on his watch, bidding the message to open.

Left u a present on ur implant. If u want more come find me.

The message had an attachment - a file called nohud.zip.

He stepped off the train. The station was raised on a hill and straight ahead out of the train doors was a viewing platform looking out over the city. The circular shape with a concentration of skyscrapers in the middle and more scattered buildings around the Outers reminded him of the vortex he was staring down last night. He wished he was still there.

The zip file had extracted and another long output scrolled down his vision, making him squint. After that nothing happened. He swiped around on his watch, trying to find a way to activate the file. He quickly found it and tapped. Right away, the implant display was gone.

No letters, no lines, no orange glow. When his eyes were closed he only saw blackness. When his eyes were open, he could just about see the city through the tears welling up. He leaned on the railing and stared out as if through new eyes that had never seen such a sight before. He'd almost forgotten his eyes were capable of such a field of vision. The world suddenly felt deeply immersive again. The waking urban sprawl was starting to roar with traffic and life, but he felt more connected to the tranquillity at the heart of that vortex-like city.

Now he thought of the vortex again, an idea crossed his mind. He tried to search his implant for any sign of the vortex and search his memory for what the files were called. Those memories were lost in the ensuing trance-like state and so, it seemed, were the files. The path to colourful bliss was no longer open in his head.

He sighed, still content in the lack of display. He wouldn't be getting migraines anymore, so he wouldn't need the vortex. He moved towards the stairs that led off the platform, with a bound in his step. The train was still there - they tended to hang around for longer at stations outside of regular hours.

He slowed to a stop. He wouldn't need the vortex anymore. Nazca's message intrigued him, though. The vortex would be a useful thing to have access to, if he ever did need it again. Seeing the cheetah again might also be a plus - there was something rogueishly charming about her. Then he remembered the rest of the unread messages, unfulfilled responsibilities, and they played on his mind. He had bigger priorities to deal with right now and he felt reinvigorated enough to confront them. Would it help to have the vortex to hand, though? Maybe he could use it as a reward system, somehow - a motivational aid. That could be important, enough so that he should take up the offer at some point, if not right away. Nazca didn't mention anything about her offer expiring, but she didn't say it wouldn't. He knew everyone else could wait, but would she?

He started again down the stairs. He wouldn't need the vortex anymore, but he wanted more and he daren't let it slip away. He ran down the tunnel under the tracks and up onto the opposing platform. As he boarded the train going the other way, he was sure the now-invisible display would be complaining about insufficient credits. He didn't care; he could deal with his debts to the public transport system later. As the train started to pull away he turned his display back on, typing a message to Nazca through his watch: he would meet her soon.