Crystal Glimpses

Somewhere:

"Don't gawk. Move along," the cop commanded through his armor's speaker box. The static robbed the words of any understandable sound, but he was already swinging his billy-stun in a wide arc into a growing crowd. A few people already lay unconscious on the sidewalk near the cop, their pockets being rifled by hobos and businessmen.

"This'll make a good paperweight with an edge sanded into it," one man in a suit said to a crony while trying to pop the glass eye from the socket of one of the cop's knockouts.

"Try to get the real one out, too," the crony suggested and offered the suit an unfolded paperclip.

"Are you kidding me?" the suit said, standing up and brushing his knees, spherical trophy in hand. "Blood's impossible to get out of a suit like this. Trust me, I know."
----------------------------------
Somehow:

Man sitting lazily at his desk. Thirty-something. Fleshtech cosmetic job for sure with transparent strips running up either side of his neck, the pumping of his jugulars visible along with the constant tug-of-war of his neck muscles as he talks. "So, do you think you can handle the job?" he asks.

"What? I'm sorry," says the man sitting across from him. "I was preoccupied by your tie."

"Oh, this?" Thirty-something says looking down at it. It was transparent, like most of his throat, and filled with sand. Also inside, a small colony of ants was building a tunnel system. "My daughter got it for me. You feed them through this little zipper up here."

"First time I've seen one of those. Must be new," the other man said. "But, about that job, the answer is yes. I think I can kill as long as I don't see their faces."
----------------------------------
Somewhen:

A club kid coated her body in silver grease paint before going to the downtown hotspot. She put it on thick, at least a quarter of an inch on most parts of her body and on the bikini she had donned before this grand adventure. She ran it through her hair. She used it as eyeshadow, foundation, and lipstick. Then the girl left her apartment for the evening, departing for her late-night haunt, Tech Noir. Her car's upholstery and steering wheel were smeared silver along the way.

Once there, she was greeted by the other regulars, though they were anything but regular. In pink feather boas, Bruce Lee sunglasses, Mohawks high, and dripping with the latest Nanowear, they greeted her. Hugging, every one of them took some of her silver costume with them. In the gyrating, finely-intoxicated crowd, those who had touched the silver angel brushed against other partygoers, passing her essence further yet.

And she danced with them, bass thick in the air urging young muscles to twitch, thrashing about passionately, the club kid, hot beneath her dazzling coating, let sweat run down her body in shiny rivulets. Some of the sweat flew off of her undulating body in starbursts, showering those around her, speckling their hair and clothes. The rest landed on the cement floor at her bare feet to be tracked across the dance floor by the crowd's hearty celebration of the moment.

Some time later, she held her arms up above her head to spin in circles under flashing screens of binary code. It was then she noticed her normal flesh tone showing through her bodypaint. Then, as she looked closer at her fellow merrymakers, she saw the silver everywhere, something that had been on her body, now on someone else and dancing in the club's colored lasers.

For a second, she imagined it as love.

Then she imagined it as an idea.

Then she thought of it as a virus.

Then she realized that was how everything spread outward from an origin, how everything overlapped and was connected in the act of becoming one.