Sire Firebrand felt the dawn light of one of Zeus' many artificial suns play across his closed eyelids and his dream began to disappear. His mother was there, speaking to him, they were on the train, and he was only ten. His mind rose to consciousness, pulling him away from this precious moment. He clung on and tried as hard as possible to grasp some meaning he may be missing before the dream was gone. His alarm was sounding and there was a weight on his chest. The dream shattered as reality poured in and he flailed his arm to jab at the snooze button.

Sire retracted, groaning inside his cocoon of warm sheets, blocking out the rest of the world. It was seven in the morning and he had not slept well. The bed he now lay in, so incredibly cosy and inviting, had just hours before seemed a cold and uncomfortable slab where he lay staring at a white ceiling, locked in the frustration and boredom of insomnia. The weight that had settled on his chest attracted his attention and he opened his eyes, staring into two unblinking sea-green orbs. His cat, Bastet had appeared on top of him. She purred and curled up for a snooze. Sire groaned and whispered the correct keyword.

"Off."

Bastet flickered and disappeared, re-materialising instantaneously on his breakfast bar, her image glitching. She was supposed to walk about like a normal cat so her hard drive was probably on the blink again. Sire slithered from his bed, wiping the crust from his eyes and biting back a dull headache. The automatic heating kicked in and his chilly little apartment began to warm up.

He was a tall and slim young man of twenty-one, strong and agile with undeniable charisma. He was also fidgety and unfocused. He had intense dark brown eyes and long, lank, spiky brown hair. He crossed to where Bastet was washing herself and stroked her warm head as she butted his hand affectionately. To have a real cat in his apartment would be totally illegal, so he’d had to make do with this vintage hard-light model. If restored to full working order she would be indistinguishable to a real live black cat, but for some reason he had never figured out, Sire and technology did not mix and every time he got her fixed she’d start playing up again almost immediately.

His apartment was a metal box, about five metres wide and the same deep. It was just one of countless other boxes, laid on top of and beside each other in the Ponos district. This was where you lived if your wages fell into the bottom bracket of the Olympian hierarchy. Sire earned just enough to pay rent, eat and take a home study course in Media. His living space was a personal, silent rebellion against the world outside. His small and precious book collection was locked in a floor safe for security. The walls were decorated with posters of famous leaders, musicians and movies, though he had carefully placed drapes around to cover up the more controversial ones in case uninvited guests stopped by.

On the wall in front of his sofa-bed hung his third most prized possession (Bastet being his second), an outdated but sturdy video screen. Since he had no cinematic implants he was obliged to watch movies the old fashioned way, and this was one of his true pleasures in life. He was a lonely young man, but deep down, he relished that fact.

Sire showered and dressed quickly in the uniform of his trade; dark grey overalls and hardwearing leather boots and gloves. He was a messenger and delivery boy for Hermes Interplanetary, though he only worked local delivery and had not been off Zeus for years. Sire had used his savings, and the small windfall his mother had left him when she disappeared, to attend college. He had shown promise, but the money dried up too soon. Without the delivery job - at first part time - he would have found it impossible to pay his rent. In order to afford the tuition fees, he had to work more and more hours and had little time to study, so he slept less to keep up. A year and a half into his course, after nearly killing himself nodding off in traffic, he decided he had had enough. He pulled out and went full time as a delivery boy, hoping to save up enough to go back and complete his studies. That had been two years ago. He had saved a fraction of what he needed and felt more hopeless than ever before. It was a situation he could not possibly win; hence his final, grudging acceptance of the third-rate home course he was taking.

Sire had never really been very sociable but this turn of events had left him more isolated than ever before. The handful of good friends he had made in school and college had jetted off to all corners of the solar system and rarely came back to his area. If asked to name one true friend he was still in regular contact with, he would have been stumped. It seemed he could only make friends on an intensely personal level. Passing acquaintances were all well and good, but he could not trust the fair-weather friends with the kind of person he really was. The same was true for him in love. This left him looking back on a series of lost opportunities and misgivings about his awkward personality. Still, he clung to his principles and held out hope that eventually he would meet someone who would understand his contradictory nature.

He folded the bed away, and worked out as usual, in the way frustrated single men tend to do. After weight training, skipping and press-ups he attempted meditation for a while. He tried once again to calm his mind. A few seconds of total blankness was all he had managed so far, after years of practice.

Sire's mind was a maelstrom at the best of times, and whenever he pulled something from it, several other thoughts usually came too. While he was running through a list of the day's clients, he was also usually deciding, in detail, what he wanted to eat tonight, playing a random song in his head, remembering famous movie quotes, observing the body language of others in the room, and jiggling his right knee impatiently. While an ordinary person might find it taxing to get used to thinking of nothing at all, Sire found it downright impossible.

He breathed out slowly, and tried to envision total blackness. He managed to drift peacefully in his mind for a full eight seconds, before rapid images and thoughts began drifting into his head unbidden. Music began to play above the low whistling wind he usually focussed on, and the blackness became white, with grey spots which swirled and bounced dizzyingly. Sire's eyes snapped open.

He had been training himself for nearly a decade in various martial arts and philosophies, though none of the files he had searched through could teach him effective self-restraint or inner calm. Most of them were heavily controlled by the Olympian Board of Classification, OBOC, and he strongly suspected some of the key tenets and principles had been diluted.

He recalled something his mother had said about 'When the pupil is ready, the master will appear'. In this case he hated being the exception to the rule. He had been ready for what felt like forever, and he had met nobody who could teach him anything new.

Sire sat eating a bowl of cereal on the sofa-bed with Bastet curled up beside him, watching the news with the volume low. He paid no attention to it and as he stroked his automated little companion let his mind drift back to his fading dream. Why had he dreamed about his mother? He had not seen her in four years and he could feel a tension in his stomach when he thought of her. Something was there. One grey and chilly morning he had woken up to an empty apartment to find her savings and door key, neatly arranged on the kitchen table. He wasn't really very surprised. She had always taught him to look after himself, but he did worry about her. He still had no idea where she had gone. She had left no clue as to her whereabouts.

Sire recalled the train in his dream. It had been the day of the accident. Was he supposed to focus on the events of that day or specifically his mother and what she had said to him on the train?

Glancing at his watch, Sire realised he had drifted and he was going to be late for work if he didn't move now at top speed. He nuzzled Bastet’s head and whispered the deactivation code. She yawned and disappeared as he shovelled the last of his breakfast down, grimacing at the aftertaste of the synthesised milk, grabbed his flight goggles and snatched his keys off the table. Looking around the apartment he suddenly shivered. Today was not going to be the usual punch in, punch out, boring routine. Something was about to happen.

***

Stepping out into the morning light, he surveyed the cityscape on his doorstep. He was on a platform a mile and a half above the planet's surface, with the apartment complex reaching away into the distance above, below and on both sides. The rows of huge bullet-grey apartment blocks stretched on for miles. After a hard day's labour, countless low-end workers would be slotting themselves neatly away from the late evening to 8am before going off to their jobs again to repeat the process.

Sire opened his garage and rolled out his beloved air-bike. It was an old fashioned, Kittyhawk 3000 manual model, adorned with the badge of his employers, Hermes Interplanetary. He dreaded the day when Zeus outlawed manual travel altogether and he would have to get a boring sleeper car which would carry him on invisible rails to his destinations, though he knew the day was not far off. Sire hopped on and fired up the engine. The battered machine rose a foot into the air, sputtered and grumbled into activity.

Still pondering his dream, he waved the garage door shut adjusted his goggles and edged his bike to the end of the ramp, surveying the gridlock a few feet before him. Cars hung in mid-air, bumper-to-bumper, containing irate drivers who were more likely to give him their daughter's hand in marriage than a place before them in traffic. It looked like the usual manoeuvre was required. He inched forwards, gritted his teeth and dropped into space, simultaneously gunning his engine and pointing his nose up.

The engine stalled and puttered into silence.

Sire's heart leapt to his throat and the world shot past him as he plummeted downwards past every street below his apartment. Panicking, he wrenched down on the pedals. His bike was still not responding. If he didn't get it started within ten seconds then street cleaners would be sweeping his charred remains off the city floor and down a storm drain. As he plunged through the air he saw the frightened faces of the people sat in their traffic jams rush by. Falling vehicles, or 'lemmings' as they were called, were an occasional, grim occurrence in the city of airborne traffic, and the general public still seemed unable to tear their eyes away from the horrendous crashes. Sire roared at his bike and kicked the firing pedal. The Kittyhawk roared back and its beast of an engine charged into life, jerking Sire violently as he climbed back up the way he had come. Children in the backs of cars cheered as the bike rocketed up to the sky, while their parents glowered at the idiotic cowboy driving it. Sire looped around the air-jam level with his front door and followed it eastwards on his way to work.

***

It was a fine morning in the nearby Perseus district. The sun soared overhead, bouncing on and off the buildings below. The sky was a brilliant pink-orange hue. Amber clouds danced in from the horizon, and the city was a mass of shimmering silver, glinting in the morning light. Here and there, multicoloured smoke mingling with the clouds painted vibrant streaks across the sky. Never had pollution looked so magnificent.

From the surface to the highest building on Zeus the air was filled with a never-ending planet-wide network of interconnected queues. Each person was waiting their turn to squeeze through a tiny gap in the distance where the traffic lights occasionally gave them the chance to get onto yet another congested street or roundabout under construction. As a delivery boy, Sire could skip most of the queues entirely and drivers all around him glared enviously as he sped past. He wondered how people had coped back in ancient times when their roads were confined to the ground. He glanced down at the four road levels beneath this one, and ten above, all equally congested. There was an obvious reason why people stuck to the mid-air markers passing for streets up here - if you didn't want an awful crash and a pile-up which would create yet another air-jam, you stayed in your lane and shut up.

Sire swept down over a busy market square. It was an open-plan mall that attracted the attention of almost every inhabitant of the Perseus sector not actively at work at this point, mostly shopping mothers, their angry looking babies, and slacker school children, skipping class.

The youngsters wandered around with their trousers round their ankles, sporting boxer shorts down to their knees. Vast exaggerated labels protruded from the back of their t-shirt collars. Huge chains with steel balls on the end dragged behind them and tripped up passers by. Many wore contraptions over their heads allowing them to watch sixteen Templenet miniscreens at once. Astonishingly, air-boards were still fashionable, though mainly as an affectation. Few modern teenagers were capable of actually landing a trick, though they did often attempt them while standing with their friends by the fountains in the market squares. The tricks were executed in a lazy way that requires no commitment and little risk so when the kids bailed they didn't fall down so much as land clumsily on their feet and, to their minds, looked less of a fool. The kids waved complex gang signs at each other and eyed their friends' fashion statements nervously in case a new badge for the disenfranchised appeared.

Sire took a detour and flew down over the Perseus food courts barely five feet above the heads of the crowd. This was his favourite place to fly through in the morning. It was where everybody in this area went to eat, no matter what time of the day it was. Cooking smells wafted up and set Sire's mouth watering. He could discern spiced chicken and flatbread, saffron rice and blackcurrant ale, marinara sauce and pecan nuts, flaming scotch bonnet chillies, roast beef and sesame oil. All the flavours and textures of the mass of interspersed cultures inhabiting his planet combined into one glorious odyssey for the taste buds. It was what Sire loved the most about his troubled people; the way they came together to cook.

He was making good time. If he took just a few more short cuts he might not be quite so late for work. Aiming his bike at a worryingly narrow alley, Sire grinned and jammed down on the accelerator.