The message stalks the city like a cancer. The signal's palatinate blue. Hideous, but what part of this isn’t? False nails click on the burner keypad: there’s a ghost kitchen I need, spanning a quadrant of the city a mile wide, the Silicon Court smack in the centre. Tonight I know a boy or two. There’s an hour tops before the bacterial load fades. It starts as an acidity behind the gums. Information is power. Pressed into junk genes it’s as good as five gigabytes. Add redundancy: two-point-five with change. That’s far as it can go. I’ve seen some try to cheat it and their teeth just all fall out. Not pretty. The brokers like us original: tamperproof, fresh. Got to get it from here to there discreet. Data’s safer in our mouths than in our heads. Tucked in where the mnemocaine can’t reach.

Headlights in the delivery bay. Palatinate blue on his lips. He still asks for a name. “You’re the chick from the app?” Much faster to answer in the negative. It’s a warm load so it’ll go down fast. His tongue locks around mine. Nanoengineering springs to life. There’s barely any tingle. We exchange secure cryptographic keys. Plasmid rings recombine. Spread it on his tonsils for effect. Coat every fertile inch. His eyes go ribbon-wide. Gags. That’s the spirit. I tamp him down, unzipping his genes, burning the load into his carrier cells… tastes like sewer water when the ligase kicks in. He’s got to hold still for it to stick. Information's only useful in one piece. His fists beat down on my back. I crack his wrists against the wall. Careful not to scratch the bike paint. He kicks. Bites my tongue. I count to five. One. Wait one more for good measure. It's always hardest the first time.

Ten thousand of us across the city, exchanging keys night after night. He wipes his mouth and backs off. Drops my dummy order at my feet. His foil bag's unzipped. Steam still escaping. A single line of spittle drips into the space between two plastics, settles into the warm rice underneath. I thumb my burner. More orders to come. He'll leave for the next spoofed location. For now my part is done.

They told me to deliver it wide.