Sid and Nancy hacked the billboard because it was there.
The screen stood forty metres above a crowded crossing, advertising expensive Gigertronic eyes to people who could barely afford the maintenance on the ones they had. Nancy wanted to put her face on the screen. Sid wanted the street to see his girl. They bought Buzz, waited for the hit, then climbed through a maintenance hatch and spent an hour cutting the advert’s feed while traffic screamed and screeched below.
When the screen finally came alive, Nancy filled the sky. She turned her head to show the translucent graft along her jaw, then opened her mouth and screamed into the camera they had wired into the board. Every speaker on the crossing carried it. People stopped beneath the rain to look up.
Sid thought she looked magnificent.
Suddenly, a courier drone came humming around the tower. Nancy grabbed it by one rotor as it passed and swung it into the screen. Glass fell across the traffic below. Down in the street, someone screamed. A woman had been hit. Nancy laughed so hard she lost her grip on the frame.
Sid caught the collar of her jacket just in time. For a second, he saw how young she looked, hanging above the street with her lips gone white. Then she swung herself back onto the ledge and punched him.
“What the fuck was that for?” he yelled.
“For looking like a frightened baby!” she yelled back.
Sid wiped his nose, and a line of fresh blood glistened across the back of his tarnished chrome hand.
They escaped through the service stairs before the Snobs could send Hammers after them. Sid’s new hand had overheated holding her weight; its fingers kept closing when he told them to open. Nancy had torn the graft beside her jaw. She looked at his hand, he looked at her face, but they decided the Fusion Doc could wait. The Roxy was already open and blasting out old punk vibes, and they had new parts to show off and a sick dance they had worked out together.
Much later, they returned to the squat they shared in the old abandoned Bradbury building. It was cold and damp and wreaked havoc on implants, but it was out of the rain and the reach of the Reapers. They both fell exhausted onto an old mattress and were soon fast asleep, wrapped around each other.
By dawn, the crossing was full of Sec-Ops. Sid and Nancy came back with some other Punks to watch the repair crew. They jeered at the guards, kissed for the cameras and told three different stories about what had happened.
Much later, when Nancy went to buy more Buzz, Sid finally managed to prise his faulty fingers apart. He could still feel her jacket caught in them. When she returned, they got high, and she called him a slow-arsed old man, then jumped up and ran. She knew her DX 2 legs meant he would never catch her, but she let him get close now and again, just for fun.
He chased her down the street as fast as he could. His second-hand leg implants gave him a bit of jip, but this was what they lived for: doing crazy stuff for no real reason, crashing into anyone stupid enough not to get out of their way. Their childlike laughter echoed through the rain-sodden streets and the dark, neon-filled alleys as the night and city closed in around them.