Asha kept her hands moving because stillness felt like waiting for a system reset. The little workshop at the back of the stall smelled like solder and cumin; the two aromas had become a private compass for the hours when the neighborhood slept and the sky drones drifted like indifferent moons. A strip of neon guttered above the bench, painting copper braid and worn soldering irons in a wash of electric teal. She threaded a fine silver weave into an overlay clasp, coaxing the metal until it lay like braided hair. Her movements were patient but decisive; fingers that had learned the language of tiny resistors spoke in confidence.
Patch, the service drone, perched on a magnetic rail overhead and hummed. Its voice module was patched with a sarcastic tone Asha had taught it because the market loved personality in utility drones. "You know the clientele will pay triple if you insist on incense with every seam," Patch observed. Asha smirked without looking up.
"Then charge them for it," she said, bending the clasp under a magnifier. Sparks bloomed and she swatted them away with the back of her wrist as if discarding small insects. The wedding overlay she'd been mending for a client that morning flickered through the glass palate on her bench: a cascade of golden petals that would fold into a bride's feed and hold the groom's likeness steady across thousands of phones. She'd tuned the micro-vibrations so the petals felt like a warm palm when the bride reached for them. It was a small vanity, a neat job, but she liked the way small things could be made convincing.
There were practicalities in the life of an interface tailor; it wasn't all aesthetics. She tightened a torsion clamp and flashed a diagnostic. The bench screen answered with a polite blip: the wedding patch was stable. Outside, from the lane, a vendor laughed as he pitched night noodles famed for their smoked kelp tang. The sound threaded through the stall shutters, bringing the city's appetite into the shop. Food smelled like community here; steam and spice stitched neighborhoods together in ways the overlays did not.
The door chittered and a street kid's song fell into the room on the back of a wind gust: an old market rhythm remixed with a delivery drone's ping. Asha glanced up to see the staple of her clientele at the threshold: her neighbor Mara, hands bright with vegetable dye and a grin that could unbalance people. Mara's daytime communal repair workspace had been a stubborn, warm island for months, and she waved a patterned rag at Asha like an invitation and a mild reproach.