Between that and all of the taxis and honking cars, I'm surprised more people don't get run over. As it was, I bumped into people quite a lot, especially as we wandered through Times Square, where the number of both virtual and real people went up exponentially.
Sadly, it wasn't always easy to tell the difference.
Right as we were about to enter Central Park, I ran full-bore into someone, hard enough that I actually fell down. Before I'd even recovered, she hissed at me,
"Watch where you're going...worm!"
I looked up at her face.
Even before I made sense of her words, I realized she had to be a seer. Her dark purple eyes bored into me from a height a good foot taller than mine, even if I hadn't been sprawled on the pavement. She wore a faux-leather dress that barely covered her crotch and one of those silver collars connected to a long necklace designed to look like a leash. The shoes on her feet, in addition to costing more than a month's rent for my apartment in SF, could have impaled my neck to the sidewalk without running out of spiked heel.
I was still staring at her when a man appeared out of nowhere. From behind her, he hit her with what looked like a three-foot cattle prod.
"Don't!" I began, holding up a hand.
But I was too late.
The woman dropped as if someone had kicked her knees out from under her. I stared in shock as Jon helped me to my feet, tugging on my arms until I was more or less vertical again. Unable to take my eyes off the woman, who was gasping on the pavement, looking at me with a kind of surprised shock, I winced when a leather boot landed squarely on her neck, pinning her face into the sidewalk.
"Jesus...don't!" I looked up finally, glaring at the man. "What the hell are you doing?"
The man looked up and I flinched, in spite of myself. He wore those dark goggles I'd only ever seen on military types, made of that shimmering green metal that was illegal for commercial use. I never saw anyone but military with goggles that looked like that.
Jon pulled me back, out of the way, even as I was taking him in.
A crowd began to form around the downed seer.
I fought Jon's tugging fingers, still in shock that the soldier had attacked the woman, unable to believe it was because of me. I didn't know for sure that she was a prostitute, but I guessed she must be. From what I knew, most of the seers in the US were prostitutes. Apparently prostitution was one of the only legal categories for businesses to import them for semi-permanent status. Jon, on one of his conspiracy rants, told me he thought it was all just a pretext to import seers to North America so they could do espionage and military work for the government and multinational corporations.