r_kado
A 58-year-old COBOL programmer dies in a rideshare and wakes up in a dead courier's body in a cyberpunk slum, with one night to finish his delivery before a polite repo man reclaims the hardware she's living in.
Marguerite Delacroix spent thirty years keeping one bank mainframe alive. Then she is standing in an alley in Cinder Row, in the body of a courier who died about thirty seconds ago with a package on his person, a neural rig in his skull, and a payment forty-one days overdue. Mr. Halloran arrives soon after, clean suit, warm voice, first-name terms, to collect the hardware. He does not care who is inside it.
Mags has one night, one district, and no idea how to operate anything in this century. What she does have is thirty years of reading logs under pressure, and, somewhere at the bottom of the rig's legacy stack, a scheduler written in something she recognizes.
A complete short story in four chapters.