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There was always a workload, and much of it was installing new cameras not just for observing the things, but also for the safety of the Runners. The FMO’s working with the Runners were called Controllers, and it was a Controller’s job to spot the creatures during each mission and warn whichever Runner he was working with for the mission. They kept in constant radio contact with the Runners through headsets, telling them what streets to use and warning them when the things were approaching. To safeguard against distractions during a mission, each Controller had his or her own separate room, and each room had a bank of monitors against one wall and a simple desktop computer with several flat panel displays.

Verbal transmissions were vulnerable to the radiation-generated static, so a code of dih-dahs – like the obsolete Morse Code – was developed by turning the channels on and off and signaling with static itself when verbal was impossible. The codes directed the Runners to go right, go left, hide, get to the next corner, get the hell out of there, etc., and although the Runners could converse with their Controllers over headsets when the radios were working properly, they couldn’t hold their end of a conversation in static.

FMO Loeb was one of the better Controllers, which he attributed to playing the popular PC game Resident Evil hour after hour even before the Plague. The game involved moving a character around a town that had been overrun with zombies and other monsters, but to Loeb, navigating Runners through Manhattan streets was playing the game for real. Convinced his gaming obsession helped make him a true hero, he still played the game when he was off duty -- calling it “training.” No one knew  that he would also request cameras to be set up in areas that resembled the game’s maps, often at very specific angles so the images on his monitors resembled the game as closely as possible. He would lie, of course, if questioned about the validity of his request, but the Runners he controlled had the best survival rate, so people mostly left him alone. His Runners almost always made it back. The first one who didn’t was his own wife, and his co-workers still felt bad for him.

Loeb wrote a program for the static code that automated it as much as possible and made it a lot easier to use, but he sullied his own reputation with another of his programs – when he lost a Runner one day the words You Died appeared on his monitors just as it did in the game if the main character was killed. The Runner Foley was in the room and happened to see it, and he registered a formal complaint about Loeb’s insensitive attitude. Loeb was almost thrown off the detail and had to make a public apology to the other watchers and Runners. That did not sit well with him, especially since he often “ran” Foley and felt that the ingrate was alive only because Loeb was good at his job in spite of his own grief. Besides, a few more months of dealing with Plague zombies and there probably wouldn’t be any such thing as an insensitive attitude.

No one knew much about Foley, except that he just showed up one day and volunteered for the job. He passed a brief physical and psych exam, and was probably over thirty years old. The Runners never asked each other their motives for volunteering to do such dangerous work because there were no more ulterior motives – everything was survival. If you became a Runner just to do a smash-and-grab at Tiffany’s when none of that jewelry – if it was still there -- was worth anything anymore anyway, good luck.

As for Foley, he had always dreamed of commuting into the city for an important TV-related job, and he wanted to be the best -- the one everybody else chased after on the street, the one everybody else wanted a piece of. The irony was so pathetic it made him laugh.

The other Runners would often return from their missions with hair’s-breadth escape experiences to report, but not Foley – Manhattan was his chessboard and he always thought three moves ahead of his opponents, with the assumption that they were always thinking two moves ahead of him. He didn’t want narrow escapes. He wanted to age, die, and stay dead the old-fashioned way. 

Although he wore body armor like the other Runners, he never really needed it. (There’s no armor like air, he’d say. Distance.) Kevlar vests were unnecessary, since the zombies were lousy shots due to a lack of practice somewhat aggravated by not knowing what guns were. It was the arms, legs, and hands that were the most likely chomp targets on Runners who allowed the things to get too close, and these were protected by the same kind of armor riot police used. It worked so well that Foley was always fighting the urge to stick his arm into some zombie’s mouth just to see the armor do its stuff. The Runners carried side arms, too, along with back-up – a small derringer to be used on themselves if they were trapped, spent their ammo, and found themselves with no other way out. Some carried grenades -- either fragmentation, flash, or smoke -- and a couple carried samurai swords attached to their utility backpacks for an over-the-shoulder draw and quick beheading. Other martial arts simply did not work on the things, but then no one wanted to grapple with them anyway. Every Runner also carried a laptop PC, which seldom saw any use because it took too long to connect to anything – when it was needed, though, it was really needed.

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