Daydreams Of The Wire Children

The Silence: Making Shift

2012-01-23T23:46:00.000-08:00

Leeloo strode down Kurzweil and 3rd, past the Amazing Bass display windows that once showcased hardcovers and paperbacks, thick freshly minted tomes of deep thought and edification, great literature to science fiction to Big Idea bestsellers. She traced a single digit through the grimy ash acreeting on the glass like a child fingerpainting dreams into a breath-fogged backseat window.

“I can’t believe I used to hang out here. I read the entire Sandman series cover to cover three times lounging right in that corner loveseat of the Starbeans Café.” The loveseat was re-upholstered in leopard print and was crowded by surround stereo systems.

“I cracked my first bank server while deep into a Kevin Mitnick autobio here. Over an iced chai latte. I had to have my iced chai latte,” I commented into her inner ear via remote uplink, seeing things through her eyecameras.

“For me it was the caramel frappe. I met my first ex-boyfriend doing a Lady-and-the-Tramp thing with two straws. He eventually revealed himself to be a total tool, though.” I refrained from comment.

“What happened?” I extended the pause long enough to make it clear it was a philosophical inquiry and not a dig at Leeloo’s mating game record.

“Right? I can’t even afford coffee anymore. The only dates I can go on are blind ones in dark alleys.“ An awkward bubble filled the space. I veered.

“Insane to think a whole generation is coming of age, never having read anything longer than a Yelp recommendation or a Youcast, two-hundred-word, voice-written microarticle.”

The print age of the previous millenia had already become a foreign country, whose language consisted of strange dis-abbreviated words, who performed bizarre rituals involving embedding texts into dried sheets of plant life, reading them for sheer “enjoyment”. Once chameleonic Kindles and Nooks and other elderly-friendly smartgadgets in book clothing weaned the majority of the population off of their paper and cardboard with quiet paper-like interfaces and “scripted pageturn actions”, they shed their dead media facades and bombarded their 5-year contract, network locked-in “readers” with micromedia feeds, Angry Hamsters and streaming Tubeflix. The mental equivalent of dumping chickenfried double steakburgers and candy coated Snickers bars onto a plate of fresh balsalmic salad. Gadget companies disclaimered “People can choose to read if they want,” just like heroin addicts can always choose to inject a half ounce of refined opium into their median cubital veins, especially when needles are flashing at them all day. Readership dropped 50% the next year, despite skyrocketing purchases of ostensible “readers”, permanently distracted by the endless buffet of apps and entertainment. Universities replaced Literature courses with “Creative Texting 101” and “Wikipedia Tweaking 212”. The Big Electronics trusts laughed haughtily all the way to the bank at an international authors strike that lasted two days. The Nobel Prize winners and New York Times Best Sellers then joined the legal sector, selling their warm orifices on the street, living in megamalls-turned-crackhouses like everyone else. Ghostwriting protest signs for tear-gassed demonstrators. Though where attorneys had been replaced by a machine intelligence explosion, writers saw their jobs destroyed by a human intelligence implosion; two indices which are ultimately inversely proportional, coupled, like gold and fiat currency.

In that light, Krash’s vapidity should’ve been no surprise. There remained one book, browned, frayed, furring with dust in a corner of the display window, like a broken tombstone, titled with the ironic epitaph: “The End of The Book: How The Digital Revolution Will Save Literature” by some Harvard economist. The sun setting on the deep-thought epoch of Shakespeare and Galileo, of Jefferson and Joyce, the alien world of print falling into the black hole of the post-literate society leaving only this freeze-frame on the event horizon, fading into entropy. In the Astounding World of The Future that we had arrived in, there stood, in place of books, arrays of booming, rattling carspeaker cabinets the size of refrigerators. Hot blue rim lights fanning neon like clip-on male plumage. 3D holographic windshields sporting realtime Twatter feeds and huge-breasted virtu-girls dancing in licorice thongs and dark-elf ear prosthetics. Leeloo’s eyecam quickly panned away, as if by electromagnetic repulsion.

Working in an adjacent garage/chop shop was a large Hispanic in a wife beater and skinny jeans. The chico’s chest and arms were covered in blood-powered neon tattoos of Aztec gods that glowed like the runes emblazoned into the forehead of some trad-fantasy movie protagonist.

“This is the contact?” I whispered, watching dermal Technicolor creation stories and the Cortezian battle of Tenochititlan rage on tan skin through Leeloo’s optic nerve. The ocular cinematography bobbed vertically twice in confirmation.

He was flanked by two kids failing at pretending to be useful, waving car jacks around like sparklers, decked in gold-spraypainted plastic chains and baggy mid-calf basketball shorts. Banger garb that went out of Cryps fashion in the previous decade but which hit cultural centers like Bollywood years later like stealthy and long-travelling tsunami waves, leaving whole high schools flailing in floods of bombastic Punjabi Crunk, Canadian Ford F250s inexplicably covered in Confederate flags. That, and the way they barely understood the Mexican’s English or Spanish meant they were obviously escapees from some mass-murdering Coke packaging plant outside of Mumbai that was nuked from orbit after the soft drink star destroyer took off for friendlier police state regimes run by the diamond warlords-cum-noveau riche in the blood soaked jungle of the Congo. Or perhaps these were refugees of some Pacific island atoll nation swallowed by a trillion carbon belches that melted half of Antarctica.

The contact turned, revealing his back adorned with the “OBEY” street-kanji for Tony Montana waving his Little Friend, and Harry Potter characters stenciled straight from antique DVD covers. Mint Chamber of Secrets discs with artwork were trading up near the gallon price of water futures on the Bizaar, so depending on context, the luminescent ink could be taken as postmodern irony or the blacklit stains of a teen fangasm that failed to come out in the wash of adulthood. Sparks showered the grease-blackened floor as he directed a home-industrial 3D printer to carve out of a stainless steel sheet what looked like a frame component for one of those pre-Crash era “rearview mirrors”.

“Didn’t they phase those out years ago?” Leeloo opened. It was true the mirrors had become an unnecessary expense after human driving was illegalized. A liability eliminator made a liability by market force. As he turned, the expression marking his face could’ve been captured in emoticon form via a colon followed by a dash. : / He regarded Leeloo for a brief moment, eyes set in bags the color of morgue lips making a half-hearted attempt at trying to read her, as if he’d given up expending energy on his own survival in District Ten. Life was a toxic asset, awaiting liquidation. He returned to his work, lathing away.

“Right. It’s a retro thing,” he commented, ensuring the precision of the machine incision through re-melted steel. The accent coming from the Latino was cognitively dissonant, way Berkelian, surfer-nerd touched with the effeminate sigmatism characteristic of North Cali GLBT coloring. The crunchy granola lisp. It was almost certainly a joke; the retro bit, not the accent.

“More probable explanation is homey is jailbreaking the cars to allow actual people to get behind the wheel.” I whispered like a little bluebird into Leeloo’s cochlear plug. She shrugged in annoyance, made it look causual, like a shiver.

“I like what you’ve done with the place, Rodney. It’s cushy. Hearthy.” Leeloo stepped further into the shop, out of the field of view and audio of a streetlight surveillance camera, the hemisphere of oily onyx glass hanging ominously like a malevolent urban stalactite.

Rodney glanced up from his work over tortoise shell wire-rim glasses, “Yeah. I’m trying to get the jump on the next real estate bubble. The Bay Area is coming back, I hear.” A shrill barrage of explosions, like Times Square new years eve fireworks interrupted the Amazing Bass subwoofage. Leeloo and Rodney turned in time to see some hydrogen-powered grease-cooker blow out the windows of a Taco King, now also caught on fire next to the smouldering Sharper Image. The conflagration had been raging for over an hour, and there were no ululations of firetrucks, not even the automated fire extinguishing teams that had replaced human firefighters were anywhere in sight. Laughter choked up from all parties.

The two Indo-Pacific flunkies stroked their thin Asiatic goatees, examining Leeloo like a car they were considering jacking, mouthing some glib series of hodge podge slang like, “Let’s check bitch legit home.” Even though I was merely inhabiting Leeloo’s headspace via remote feed, I felt a deep sense of violation, a kind of surrogate objectification.

“I don’t know how you women handle that shit on a daily basis.”

“It grows on you,” Leeloo lied into the mic, with nausea.

“Get the fuck out of here and bring me the aluminum powder kegs like I asked before I sell you and your VerIDs to the embassy,” Rodney yelled, the idling teens waddling away in their low-crotch pants like giant tropical penguins.

“You know there’s daycare for that,” Leeloo deadpanned.

“My sister’s boyfriend and his buddy. She needs me to keep them from mugging greycollars, ripping off fuelstations with armed clerks. So I occupy them, Rodney’s afterschool science program. Family is family. Or whatever.” He kicked the chrome digitigrade toes of the automated steel printer as the hydraulics stalled out on the pivoting platform supporting the half-sculpted shell of the rearview mirror. The podium readout had bluescreened on a critical kernel error.

“Puta!” Rodney banged the screen, calling up a debugger on his personal tablet, landlined to the printer’s interface.

“So how much are jailbroken autocars going for on the dark market these days?”

“Not nearly enough to cover the hazard pay,” Rodney sighed. “Illegally converting self-driving cars to human-drivable was a booming black market, given the burnout rate of vehicle radar/ultrasonic sensoriums, whose replacement fab-schematic files are tightly monopolized via FDRM. Not unlike the music and movie IP cartels who monopolized digitized art and entertainment earlier in the century through content locks and mass lawsuits. If your smartcar’s brain scrambles, you have to cough up a ten thousand dollar fealty to your Big Auto lord to get it fixed. Then there’s the fact that you need Level Five Premium Internet – ringing in at a hundred dollars per day -- minimum to utilize the Cloud-based self-driving artificial intelligence. All of this payable only in US dollars.”

“That’s the Devil’s Currency,” Leeloo footnoted.

“Exactly. Fully surveiled and hyperinflated toilet paper.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well most of the underclasses – i.e. everyone outside of Blue County – would opt right out of the formal auto market for the riskier but actually affordable shadow economy, and that’s good for us. But then that also meant plunging quarterly reports for corporations and dwindling car loans for banks. They weren’t happy about that.

“After the global real estate fraud bubble 3.0 turned the entirety of the physical Earth into a debt-shackled planetary Gulag, the bankster Reign of Terror, having consumed the entirety of realspace, reared its bonus-hungry maw on fabricated cyber-objects. “Real estate” bubbles became “virtual estate” bubbles. Patenting not just software, car designs, better mouse traps, but language itself, even parts of history. For a few months the prison industry Gulags were filling with people who used copyrighted words or phrases like “friend”, or “Gnoss it” as verbs without paying royalties. You could not reference the second World War in a book or movie without coughing up to Omniversal Media half your commission or production budget. Bilderberg Group praetors almost daily gave unholy birth to patent-shark multinationals who landgrabbed physical design-space, drafted armies of patent-commandos from the new ‘white ghettos’ of lawyers displaced by advanced expert system roboattorneys. In the age of decentralized manufacturing when t-shirts to iPads to Maseratis could be ‘baked’ out in your garage while you slept by autonomous self-reproducing pansubstance extruders, laser-fabs, and assembler droids, the PIAA (Patent Industry Association of America) will call down an airstrike of lawsuits and/or actual Earth-scorching daisycutters if they catch you printing out even an abandonware ’04 Honda Civic.

“Chinese coder-slaves rig miniscule, virtually undetectable structural flaws into 3D printer instructions – a lugnut a nanometer too big here, a brake line polymer cocktail slightly unbalanced there – leading to catastrophic failures and fatal crashes on the road. Car companies like Xinjiao, Totech, Autonomobile then intentionally propagate the sabotaged files throughout the BitTorrent shipping routes of pirate networks, seeding killer-schematics like viruses in porn. But there is no malware-scan for physical engineering soundness, and thus the IP sharks created a paranoia-deterrent, scaring patent bootleggers off the grounds with intellectual property landmines. MakerBot rootkits, Rep Rap Trojans are routinely steganographed deep within the guts of the blueprint code, instruct sintering appendages to burn through their own DLP projectors, or start the laser arm spinning like a disco-ball and fry everything and everyone in a fifty foot radius. Your open source living room factory, innocently churning out custom auto-CADed coffee mugs and Edward Cullen tees, suddenly becomes a sleeper cell of machine homicide waiting to massacre your family in a gory cloud of rogue code and granularized industrial arsenic. So all that’s opened up a massive sinkhole in my balance sheet. My cousin and former senior partner, he got careless, didn’t read between the Java lines to see that his downloaded, ripped fab was fusing nitrogen and glycerin into his head gasket. CyberSec forensicbots are still mopping him up out of a crater of silicate glass that used to be an underground fabtory at Fisherman’s Wharf. Poor primo.” Rodney dabbed himself in a sign of the cross, leaving smudges of grease on his forehead like the residue of some Ash Wednesday sacrament.

“So why are you operating a death machine?” Leeloo inquired.

“I know enough about software and mechanics that I think I can take the gist of the designs and attempt to re-engineer a new model based on my study of the blueprints, even if they’re faulty. Reproducing the object in my own words, rather than pirating, so to speak. But any attempt will involve some amount of downside risk, complications.”

“I see. So you were a mechanic or something, before the Hot Class War?” Leeloo asked.

“I’ve actually got a PhD in nano engineering from MIT. Want to see it? That worthless piece of papyrus is hanging right in my office,” He pointed to a blown-out section in the non-functional Barnes and Nobel women’s bathroom, sealed up with a printed plexiglass door faced with plastic imitation-wood venetial blinds, stolen from the design of some 40’s detective’s office. Atemporal media mashups bleeding into physical reality, Frankenstein architecture. I could see the certificate from here.

“Graduated with honors and still couldn’t find a job along with 90% of my class, dumped out into this lawless wasteland of an economy. My parents worked 16 hours a day trimming trees, living under floorboards to allow me to indenture myself to a ball-and-chain of 200 thousand in unforgivable student loans, blow twenty eight years of my life, all so I could change tires and flip burgers. American Dream? American Scam.” Rodney rabbit punched the podium readout again, cursing as he twisted a knuckle the wrong way.

“So you’re an egghead geek in chopper’s clothing. Why bother with all the getup?”

“You’ve got to blend in, around here. Locals don’t take kindly to nerds, whom most can’t differentiate from the upper crust lawyers and traders and the rest of the people who caused the mess and stomp on their face. Besides, the hippies finally got their way and the yuppies have gone extinct. There is no middle class, there is no educated class in pressed shirts and clean shoes. Now it’s just one giant sprawling ghetto of beggars, criminals, and slumdogs with varying levels of education.”

“Right. Don’t tell your little cadets about that degree. You might lose some of that street cred, drop some ‘legit’ness.” Leeloo sniped coyly.

“So let’s cut the History Channel special and get to business.” Leeloo picked up a monkey wrench, one could assume hot off the press, given the slightly more oxidized prototype lying next to it, the Home Depot original from which it had been pirated.

“Let’s,” Rodney said, going over blocks of questionable code with a digital magnifying glass.

“You know the deal. We need the Cage,” Leeloo spun the wrench in the palm of her hand, flicking it with the tip of her index. It rang with an unnaturally thin chime, too low a specific gravity to be pure stainless steel. Some Protean-Age genetically modified ore. Rodney remained unresponsive, giving off the façade of work absorption.

“The Cage, Rodney,” Leeloo came again, impatiently.

Rodney continued scrolling with casual swipes of his finger across the screen of his tablet, occasionally zooming in with thumb and forefinger on some particularly suspicious snippet.

“You know there are almost infinite places to hide a software bug? Even if you run a program for years, you might never encounter the underlying issue until the perfect storm of conditions is met. Dozens of fortune 500 tech companies made it through with horribly infested software, relying on the notion that no one would ever do anything unusual with it, would never test it.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“The more you use and stretch the program, the more likely that the bug is to surface, and thus need to be eliminated. I’m thinking I don’t actually want any extra stretching going on around here.” Rodney said, rebuilding the latest version of his rearview mirror fabricator executable. I had had about enough of this cryptic fuck.

“Put me through to him,” I whispered.

“Spook, I don’t know if that’s the best-“

“I said put me through, now.” I growled. She reluctantly pulled a mini resonance speaker from a back pocket, patched my VoiP through it.

“Look, Rodney. Homes. I don’t know what kind of pop-tarts-and-forum-warriors outfit you take us for, but it’s insulting. But moreso to yourself, an upstanding sub-legitmate Ashlands businessman with decades of premium-grade Ivory League brain grooming, making yourself look so stupid by trying to fuck with us with this bait and switch schtick.” My voice was no doubt tinny and broken by static, but it got his attention. He pulled his face out of his screen, took off his glasses and glared, as if trying to see through space and time.

“Who is this?” Rodney set his tablet down.

“I think you know. I’m the silver lining in this mushroom cloud of a former city which you so obviously loathe. By the way, that Autonomobile fuel cell design you’ve got there in your datavault is sheer perfection. Artwork. Chinese IP cyberspies couldn’t have reverse engineered it better in a thousand years.”

“How did you know- How did you get ahold of that?”

“Details, details. I’ll let you pull all-nighters scanning through your server logs for the next few days trying to find that little “perfect storm” of bugs which I exploited. We don’t have time for that right now.”

“What do you want?”

“Same thing we agreed upon before. The Cage.”

“It’s crawling with CyberSec fauna out there, you’re probably looking at the drone swarms on your MRI right now. How can I be sure one of your operators isn’t compromised, won’t blow me wide open with an intercepted com?”

“It’s not going to have any rotten apples, because they’re hunting for apples and we’re oranges. We’ve been working for months without a single in-op transmission interception and I don’t plan on breaking that record. And even if there is a SNAFU, you’re protected as an associate. You’ve got an immunity deal with Generation Hex, backed by the full faith and credit. And, unlike the US government, we always bailout the little guy.

You’re hotfabbing cars for real people to drive, but how long are you going to let the fat cats in Ameribank City drive you, control your destiny? Hiding around in holes, giving up your rights, your dignity, your humanity, in exchange for another day of survival in hell. When are you going to take the wheel? Don’t you want to get back at the assholes who destroyed any and all possibility of the ‘good life’ that you’ve spent your entire life spinning their gears like a good little hamster for? All so the Blue Bloods could have another twenty mansions in Martha’s Vineyard they never live in, another junket in the imperial suite of some Geneva hotel, another fifty non-autonomous Maseratis ordered merely for display, never to be driven? Well, we’re serving up that revenge, on a chilled silver platter, right next to their $20,000 retsina. We’re tearing down the Wall, one cell tower, one offshore bank account at a time.”

“Look, I just can’t risk it.”

“Risk what? We’re in a goddamn war here, it’s a risk to just sit by the wayside and let Blue County turn the West Coast and the rest of the world into an uninhabited Martian desert. We’re the toilet bowl of the super rich, and if we don’t start swimming up, we’re only headed further down the tubes.”

“I’m not interested in buying war bonds. I need real ROI. I’ve got niche here, buyers. The sniffers find out I’m moonlighting for Hex Gen, a known hacktivist network, I’m over. This is systemic risk on my balance sheet I can’t hedge.”

“You’re guaranteed to go under, you don’t help us turn this Titanic around. How long before some stray heatseaker with an antimatter payload wipes you off the asshole of the USA that is District Ten like a shitstain? How long until some big dark market player decide they don’t really like other Plebians developing their own intellectual property if it cuts into their market share, and they take you out like they did your Primo? Survivability drops to zero faster than minimum wage in the Ashlands.”

Rodney stood, silent, churning, electric tattoos flashing faster, brighter as his heartbeat elevated. Hieroglyphic Voldemorts and Spanish Conquistadors blazed bright crimson red, consuming vast swaths of his chest.

“I know you’re not just another cold survivalist, Rodney. Think of those kids. We both know it’s only going to get worse. How long do you think they can hold out here?”

Rodney’s homies-in-law returned with ponderous clear plastic sacks of some fine silvery powder, like crematorial remains, or volcanic ash. The one in the stupid sideways beanie yanked open a feeder tray in the posterior of the 3D printer, nearly breaking it in the process. Tweedle dumb whipped out a butterfly knife, sliced open the top of the bag with all the elegance of an epileptic kindergartener, spilling a good amount of the grey powder on the crotch of his shorts. Leeloo gagged, no doubt automatically formulating an unspoken pre-mature ejaculate joke. Ambiently emasculating.

“Pour shit mo’ tight, foo,” his partner chastised. They did at last manage to refuel the printer with the granulated steel, with several more scoldings from the resident alpha male.

Rodney’s shoulders heaved in a sigh, bioluminescence receding.

“Fine. You can have the Cage. One hour. I’m sending the authorization codes through your ‘liaison’ here.”

“Direct link, no wireless,” Leeloo approached, outstretched her arm, pulling back black shirt cuffs over pale skin to reveal her wrist’s IVSB jack. Rodney did the same, interlocking palms. They synced up, initiated the transfer, forearm LEDs flickering. Biodata was pretty much the most secure you could get on the street. Perfectly concealed, difficult to steal without a skill saw. Viscous substrate made the stored bytes invulnerable to EMP wipe attacks and remote downloading. In the age of ubiquitous electromagnetized silicon, the meat became a kind of shield, a sanctuary of flesh. And given the exposure of one’s central nervous cloud network, allowing a nefarious party to blow out your heart with an adrenaline hyperspike, a direct IVSB transfer was also a testament of trust. The closest thing to a binding contract, in a world where trust in governments, business, economies, paper money, had been completely destroyed by endemic fraud, fiat, and exploitation. A wrist-to-wrist blood pact, sealed in commingled electrons.

“500 Ts, right?” Rodney said, ejecting his arm from Leeloo’s as the transfer completed.

“No, you know we only pay in silver grams. Untracable, untrackable, no counterparty risk. It’s the only way to fly in the business. Blood and bullion,” I corrected.

“Right. Silverspook. Should’ve known.”

With the 3D printer’s metallic stock replenished, Rodney re-ran the latest build of his rearview mirror program. Bursts of compressed air, like a craft lifting off, as the additive manufacturer sprang to life. A chrome steamroller-like mechanism oscillated back and forth across the plane of argent powder, laying down successive layers of binder. It was like watching the micrometer-thin slices photographed by magnetic resonance imaging of a brain. Not a minute later, the machine completed its work. It left a cube of powder, looking exactly as it had at the start of the job. Rodney reached in, pulling out a perfect replica of a Xinjiao Phasma rearview mirror. He blew loose grains, revealing metal, plastic and glass components printed straight in, moving parts in smooth working order. Leeloo followed him into a back room, containing an equally perfect replica of the rest of the Phasma, from tail lights to lithium batteries to supercapacitor-powered electric motors. Rodney installed the rearview, adjusting it for optimum visibility.

“Let’s get driving,” he smiled.

The Silence: Kennedy High

2012-01-23T01:29:00.000-08:00

The school was a sagging public husk, the color of dead trees, and now served as the scratch paper for urban-tribal grafitti tagging battles, squatting cubby holes for the Deadweight refugees of the endless economic recess. Frayed steel reinforcements wormed out like bone fragments from fractures in the concrete. The layout itself was indistinguishable from a prison; high barbed walls and claustrophobic passages, CCTV panopticon of a since-failed mini police-state. Since handed on the torch of civ-lib infringement to the far more menacing, off-balance sheet tentacles of Gnossis and the Olympian cabal of information-financial empires, who’d hollowed their nation-state Titan-parents into a North American Weimar Republic. The school was, ironically, an apotheosis of 80’s apocalyptic riot fear, rode in on a dark wave of paranoia over children’s safety. Infamously designed, like other Cali schools, by the San Quentin architect. Bullet proof polycarbonate windows the size of police car dividers. Several glass panes had been chiseled out of their cavities, leaving random empty sockets of jagged concrete, like the methed-out mouth of a stage four wyre addict. The impervious quartz probably serving now as anti-riotpolice riot shields in guerilla firefights against Cybersec’s drone paramilitary. Kennedy High’s star spangled banner was somehow yet waving despite the surrounding entropy, flying bright amongst the red glare of car fires and distant artillery skirmishes burning the night an eternal crimson twilight, some grand sardonic District Ten joke biled up by its collective subconscious. It was nice to see that Americans could still pull together to accomplish great things.

The bombed-out factor of Kennedy High was extreme, even among the municipal dereliction all around, and the rubble lay with a certain archaic stillness that suggested it had been hit long before the Intellectual Property Wars or the Plebland Austerity Riots. Caused, perchance, by some unforeseeably Gaiagenic Black Swan disaster, an earthquake turned armchair humanitarian guilt-sink. Or more likely, a stray missile mis-launched by a Killerhunter autono-drone, whose iffy slave-labe North Korean QA allowed the hypersonic deathmachine’s buggy AI to turn AWOL. Or, perhaps, the school’s decimation was the result of active human malfeasance, the only commodity in abundance nowadays. Whatever the true culprit, the truth was now redacted from the universe’s cache by the sandblasts of time; any bombshell fragment, any fingerprint of high-explosive residue that might indict someone had long been sandpapered by weather, fallen down a storm drain. The digital media footprint of the event would’ve equally vanished beyond the one-hundred-forty character memory horizon of contemporary humanity, attention spans eroded by a half-century’s outsourcing of mental faculties to ubicomp. Smartphone Zen retardation, 24/7 connectivity imprisonment by the ever shrinking digital Now, the last page of status updates, this moment’s car-crash. In our world, history washed away like unnoticed dead bodies swept down the Hudson, amongst shoals of shredded bank paper. To be swallowed by the vast sea of last-moment’s Shiny #trend, the bitrotting, fundless remains of actual longform journalism soundbytten to meaningless shreds by bottom-dwelling pseudo-reporter clickwhore feeding frenzies, regurgitated by aggregator leeches, erased finally into oblivion by the cleaner wrasse of corporate reputation scrubbers. The uberglomerate’s personal free market incarnations of the Ministry of Truth.

“Ohmguhz, Kennedy High, I used to go here. Fuck this place.” Krash Koarse vocally broadcasted a dozen decibals too loud. With corporate sensorwebs engulfing the world like fallout, physically shouting was the meat-quivalent of Chirping your VerID hash and TorrentCoin account number to the known universe on Friendbook, like public fucktard number one. What am I talking about, “like”?

“Dosboot said right here. Unless I’m geohacked. Which is impossible, so we should be standing at the end of the rainbow.” Krash Koarse backhanded the stone age LCD readout of his radio frequency meter. “Piece of shit paleogear must be bricked.” The kid flipped his annoying fucking devil lock that was supposed to be steemo-coldpunk-fanime or whatever musical chairs label it was this millisecond. I swear I would cut that fucking thing off with my nanotube shank he did that one more time. Maybe accidentally knick a pretty little emerald eye.

“You scanning GSM too? They could be pushing any spectrum here, FYI.” Leeloo advised, grazing Krash Koarse’s arm with her halogen white Snooki nails that jammed the fashion signal of her exgoth-turned-stable-single-mom black jeans with the branding equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy.

“What? Yeah, of course I’m scanning GSM. Pfuh.” The n00b unsuccessfully tried to bury his fail under a façade of relaxed posturing and random button presses. It was obvious that for “Krash Koarse” (what the fuck kind of alias is that?) manipulating a real device was beyond his smart-gadgetified head, so used to being manipulated by dVices that he had to reflexively check a Gnossis search engine to remember his own name. Another skull datamined of its grey matter, leaving a walking ‘net-dependent vegetable with chronic anterograde amnesia. Like the rest of the “Premium Internet” brainslave herds, forking over arms and legs to tech giants just to recall on their pocket-neocortexes how to button their cuffs and tie their shoes. Stumbling like blind infants as they reached for their ‘Gnossis maps’to download directions just to make it around the corner to the grocery. You knew when they jacked the price of wireless service, forcing the poorest links to fend without their search, their mental wheelchairs. The next wee, news feeds would be flooded with hundreds of thousands accidentally napalming gas stations with lit cigarettes, sudden infant homicides would skyrocket as mothers bottle fed Diet Coke to their babies. Course, the MSM-generated tweets cloaked in astroturfed robo-avatars would disinform everyone that the explosions were the result of World Class War suicide terror, and that the infant deaths were due to lack of proper and regular “vaccinations” which were Trojan horses for biosubversion and involuntary drug addiction. And the digitally lobotomized hoi polloi, without the mental scaffolding to disagree, accepted it. The Digital Revolution was making Pol Pot look like a small time butcher. A more streamlined Final Solution, like wars or the crack dropped by the CIA like weed killer into black and minority neiborhoods in the 70’s. filled the role of stabilizing hyperinflation by killing off demand, or in the Plebland case, simply eliminating the unnecessary worker. Astounding how you could wipe out several billion years evolution of pre-Cambrian spatiotemporal awareness with a decade of gadget abuse. I wouldn’t wager on him making it through boot camp.

And neither would Maxx, who had ADHDed off to test his Genie-Gene™ biohacked “hammer fists” on a no-parking street sign. Screeching plosives each time the lugnut haymakered the sheet metal with his hypertrophied knuckle bones, bulging like ossiferous battering rams. Weather-curled paint flakes poofed up like toxic confetti, to be inhaled by his dilated nostrils. But in Maxx’ dire case, the brain damage might actually have made him smarter.

Raised by rats in some Ashlands refugee tenement, part Samoan part Siberian, Maxx was a refrigerator, physically and mentally. Keanu Reeves on a strict regiment of steroids and paint thinner. After you finish unwravelling your braintube around how a Samoan and Siberian would ever find themselves in the same geospatial vicinity and reproduce, there was the more pressing connundrum of how to keep the bull from wrecking the China shop for five minutes. But Maxx was insurance muscle, and it never hurt to walk with a big stick, especially in District Ten.

“Maxx, buddy, let’s cage the hulk for a bit, k?” I sighed. He paused for a beat, gave me this vacant bullmastiff look, then resumed piledriving as his brain’s angular gyrus failed to connect the dots and decode the figure of speech.

“The shackles of the shadow plutonomy set upon us by the bastard children of capitalism, those errant barons of the Digital Endarkenment, cannot be broken by clenched fists, but by clasped hands.” Philacrat addended from behind a bird’s nest of dreadlocks and puffy eyes drowning in seas of weed-laced LSD. Fucking professional vaporware PhDs. Another entirely different phyla of Ashland creature, evolved isomorphically to be just as annoying. The manchild would’ve been useless as the litany of embossed wax-sealed paper he rode in on and the academic-ese seasoned word-salad he subsisted on but for his Enclave sugarparents connections and a marksmanship proficiency, randomly acquired through some prof’s gig-security bullshit elective entitled “Interpretive Riflery”.

***

Join Generation Hex they said. Hack the Planet they said. I was supposed to be busting down corporate datavaults, throwing wrenches into the Enclave’s corrupt computerized system of economic machination and outright violence spun as “counter-jobless-insurgency”. Or at least training an elite team of hacker-operatives. But here I was babysitting a daycare for meme-gurgling script kiddies, braindead meatheads and runaway haute-poseur trustafarians entertaining their La Resistance and cyberpunk badass pipe dreams. One of’em was even wearing a goddamn Matrix trench and shades.

Yes, shades. At night.

Cleaning up their fuck-ups, as they free-associated and loled at each other in txt speak. I swear I could hear their neural constellations disintegrating, every time one of them opened their mouth or checked a Feed. If these were the ‘best minds of a generation’ the San Fran jobless Ashlands could offer up against Gnossis, Ameribank and the mogul overlords, we might as well just throw in the towel.

I patched a back channel through StormCloud to Dosboot, the Hex-Gen handler and asshole in chief back at HQ, towel in hand.

“Welcome to uncle Chai’s MexiThai takeout. Try our new pad thaiquitos. Press one to hear our menu. Speak the name of the dish or dishes you’d like to order, after the tone.” Cultureless female automated-response voice.

“Isn’t it a Holiday in Cambodia?” I deadpanned the human handshake. Squall of white noise then the static cut out to silence, like rustling fabric, like a mask coming off.

“You. This better be the second coming of Steve Jobs or they’re going to Bradley Manning your ass in solitary for a fortnight.” The voice was a retro chimera, composed of Super Mario coin-bleeps and 14.4 kbps modem fireworks, molded through a vocoder into English phonemes, then animated by an autotune. A singing Nintendo. The melodification was supposedly always a randomly selected song, though I suspected Dosboot nefariously chose them for contextual irony/annoyance. This time the voice was answering in Rick Rolls. Classic Dosboot.

“It’s FUBAR, Dos. I can’t do this. These n00bs, they couldn’t hack their way into their own Friendbook accounts if they rubbed all five braincells together and OD’ed on synaptic accelerators. I’m beyond done here.”

“Have a little faith there, Nietzsche. They’ve all met the prereqs of basic training, they’re all qualified.” Dosboot’s ‘Ghost of Christmas 80’s’ voice changed stations, now channeling Eye of the Tiger. Qualifeeeeeeyed. Minimoog bassline galloping over a rocky TR-808 drum machine. Fucking asshat was probably laughing his ass off with his hand over the mic.

“That’s bullshit and everyone, including CheX, knows it.”

“The one of which we do not speak!”

“What’s it matter? The great Master CheX, legendary hacker who took out the Citycorp bank and Totech servers with nothing but a pee-wee whistle and a galvanized paper clip. The whisper lurking in the ASCII walls of every encrypted IRC channel, the go-to namedrop of every upstart lowbit-boy, the grand story upon which geeky apathetic atheists found religions. And where the hell is he? MIA since the burning of ChromeNet.” The 8-bit flourishes died down so long I thought Dosboot had hung up.

“Tell me about your father.” The voice finally said in a fifty-cent East German Freud accent. “Unfortunately, comrade Silver Spook, we’re short on ground troops after the last Cybersec sting, during the Golden Gate raid.”

“So, what, we going to put out posters now? Start a Chirper account? ‘Like!’ us on Friendbook? Enlist in Generation Hex in return for prepaid college tuition?” We once were warrior-hacktivists, taking out the fat cats, corporations, bankers, hard-right fanatics, censors, governments, all the toxic waste that the weak, cowardly masses scared of loosing their meal tickets let build up like tumors of cholesterol on an artery wall. One for all and all for the lulz. Generation Hex had been a core cadre of random alpha-hackers surrounded by an umbra of anonymous volunteers. ‘Rhizomatic decentralized organization’ or whatever the tenure-track buzz-vulture bloviators were calling it from their cushy armchair-mounted Chirper feeds while we were busy doing the revolution in the real world. But now we were out, actively recruiting, like some kind of 20th cen army. Key leaders had gone dark, and words like “mission quotas” and “clients” had started burbling up like oil bubbles in the StormCloud chatter. It was feeling all a little too eerie, too, dare I say it, ‘corporate’.

“This is not what I signed up for, Dos.” Another breath of interference that might’ve been leaves rustling or a server farm stirring awake. Or a human breath. A car alarm truncated the sound.

“Change is coming, old friend. Generation Hex, this… group, movement, terrorist organization, revolution, whatever you word it. We are assymetrical, starfish, spontaneous. Prone to combust, volatile. We are Legion, like all upwellings; poltergeists of the zeitgeist. We are everyone and no one, and, thus, we are anyone. We become anyone who Is Someone, enough. Unstable, like the roiling void of the quantum vacuum waiting to Become, like a pencil standing on its head, waiting for the slightest push. Push is coming to shove, Spook, in many directions at once. All you can do is be ready when Movement happens. And make sure the little starfish are ready as well. Everything changes. But nothing is truly lost.”

“Alright, alright, Yoda. I get it. Just stop misquoting Neil Gaiman.”

“Touche mein brunter! Hang in there for this mission, I’m sure you’ll get transferred to a desk job. Viva La. Go on fight the good fight.” Dosboot signed off to the tune of Anarchy In The UK. Typical.

***

“Second rule of Generation Hex. Leeloo. Go.”
“Never EVER use the Internet, social media, or the cloud,” she recited verbatim, complete with requisite audible caps on the “ever”, no hesitation.
“Precisely. No one cares about the Fruit Loops you ate for breakfast or wants to see pics of your latest bender. But more importantly, social media is an INSTANT violation of rule #1: Do not get sensed. Face-2-Face should be the communication mode of first and last resort. If you can’t Face-2-Face, go for Necrotech: abandoned landlines, Web 1.0, carrier pigeons, smoke signals, ANYTHING but the mainstream cloud. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES may you use a shiny sheep’s dVice over any of the Premium Internets.”

“This aspect of Generation Hex will undoubtedly be the most difficult hurdle for you n00bs to overcome with your ubiquitous dVice addiction. This means absolutely no Angry Hamsters, no Friendbook, no Chirper updates, no Gnossis Search, no Direction Finder. There will be withdrawals. You will become disoriented, nauseated, suffer panic attacks, crises of identity, and possibly a nervous breakdown. You will writhe and cry for your precious touchscreen in your sleep. But this is a necessary phase in order to release you from the ‘vice’ that is your dVice. In order to master technology, you must first emancipate yourself from your slavery to technology.”

“First rule of Generation Hex. Krash.” I spun my Hexpad on the heel of my palm, awaiting an answer.
“Um, uh.” He squinted, I could see his hand twitching towards his coin pocket, itching for his dVice. “Thou shalt not get sensed.” He gasped through gelled bangs.
“Good. Why is this rule #1. Philacrat, enlighten us.” I began to pace, unconsciously.
“If they can sense you, they’ve got you. Invisibility is priority #1.” Dreadlocks noted.
“Oooh, scary. The Gnossis boogeyman is watching!” Krash pulled the edge of his Neo coat up over nose and mouth, in a mock-spy act drawing a round of lulz.
“Go on, laugh it up. Part of the Hex-Gen mindset is the cultivation of paranoia. This principle is exponentially more important while you are active in a mission. The eyes of Cybersec fully permeate every inch of fiberoptic cable, spectrum of wireless communication, every CCTV and drugstore security camera, with shadow fleets of drones disguised as everything from hummingbirds to humans.” A fly simultaneously landed on Maxx’ shoulder. He recoiled violently, swatting it as if it contained H8N3 frog flu.
“In truth, hyperawareness is about common sense. You get careless, you get tracked, you’ll find yourself neck deep in three months of solitary, one of the Big Corrections private prisons, or biking your legs off in the Enclave’s human power plants, make a Chinese sweatshop look like a Swiss junket. There is no touchy-feely human rights-respecting progressive government. There is no Miranda Hand-holding, Habeas Corpus, just insurgents and enemy combatants with brainmatter containing vital info which must be neurohacked using any cruel and unusual means necessary. You better fucking believe the Plutos’ Big Brother really is out there. And not just watching you but reading your emails, listening to your Friendbook convos, tracking your cellphone triangulated GPS coords. They know you. They know you biblically. They know you better than the staphyllocus bacteria populating your intestinal tract knows you. True paranoia is defined by wholly imaginary threats, like schizo nutjob conspiracies, OCD hand-washer germophobia and Al Qaeda boogeymen. In our case, the threats are as real as chromosome bombs.”
I paused, letting their little imaginations ferment that last thought stream, no doubt constructing morbid images of sudden killswitch death, bursting arteries and artificial cancers, spurred into rapid metastasis by a mouseclick.
“Alright, let’s get on with the entrance exam, shall we.”

***

We trekked around the premises, looking for better reception. The school library’s Greco-deco columns had buckled inward, as if it had imploded under the inescapable gravity of some singularity, the institution now a mountain of weed-sprouting rubble. Deeply dead, though weather and/or battle-induced physical collapse occurred long after the library’s spirit and raison d’etre had been extinguished by pervasive e-readers and the usual status quo illiteracy devolution. A humane euthenization.

“Krash, you need to switch to isotropic mode. You’re in X-axis.” I attempted, futilely, to illustrate this 5th grade Cartesian geometry concept, drawing imaginary latitudes and meridians with my index finger on the miniature orange 76 ball protruding from the frequency sensor. Krash Koarse sprained an underused hippocampus attempting to recall concepts without his Gnossis search engine crutch – one of the mission parameters – and he whined the telltale whine of the Chattering Class. An infant’s milk-bleat formed in an adult larynx. I grated a strata of enamel off my teeth.

“Oh, here we go. Wait, this is just some stupid Ken High derelict signal, wuhtehfuh,” Krash meh’ed.

“You really think a high school server farm survived a tomahawk missile and a decade of rain damage? Come on. That’s just network camo.” I pulled out my Wi-Fi anylyzer, black square the size of a Noughties phone, held it up to their open-mouthed stares.

“The VerID shows up like a gov node but the signal’s got orthogonal frequency-division, multiple access. 6G tech, gotta be a Gnossis hotspot.” Leeloo elucidated with jarring competence in her twee-goth voice.

“Good. Very good.” Which it was, excellent diagnosis, even. “Were you a network admin in a past life, perchance, Leeloo?”

“Not really. Just a fast learner and an ex-IT assistant at a Bay Area plumbing headquarters. Before natural-language expert systems undercut IT jobs and specially tooled construction bots eliminated human plumbers, putting me and my potential bosses all out of jobs.” She did that rolling vacant shrug endemic to West Coast American teen girls. It lent her an air of crass innocence, for a moment.

Leeloo had the most seniority of the Hex-Gen prospects, and the most promise. She was smart enough, another seed of potential left un-nourished in the badland remains of the “Land of Opportunity”, ruined by our parents’ generation. Bright, but severely handicapped when it came to romantic involvement. Caked foundation smoothing out the assymetrical topography of once-broken cheek bones told a history of violence addiction; chronic male-abuse junkie, inseminated by a childhood incident, probably. Slit-back t-shirts revealed ovals of flesh like soft brown slugs. Cool grey wolf’s eyes glowing in densely layered shadow. In the artsy diffuse dayglo of the warzone, she might’ve been mistaken for a nu-goth cam-porn microdiva. One of the grad student Suicide Girls, filling the funding void left by the barbed divorce of FaFSA and Pell grant budget gutting with anonymously redacted credit card payments made by men in cold marriages and jackdicts desensitized to their airbrushed android Pleasure Dolls. Seeking more believable interactive fantasies. Kinky for the real, damaged-slumgirl thing. Reality drew a premium in the enclave’s Matrix of overdesigned silicone breasts and sterile celeb-clone faces, making Leeloo a Velveteen Rabbit among Barbies. Pain, in Gated Heaven, was alien, and pain could not be faked, though the persona artists certainly tried.

I felt for her, I did. She reminded me so much of mom. But she had to stop falling for these idiots like Krash. I guess his saccharine benignity would be an upgrade from what she’d come from. And she needed a fatherfigure for that bun in her oven.
Ind Cell Tower

“According to the meter, the cell tower should be right where that flag pole is standing.” Krash said. “Wait, that means…” Thatta boy, click the Legos together...

Philacrat guffawed, sending his dreads sailing back like the black snakes of a roboriotcop netgun. “Gnossis tech, ensconced in the shell of America. How poetic.” Of course it had to be in the flagpole, the artifact most likely to outlast time and bombs. It’d taken them long enough to figure out.
Ashlands

I glanced around at the Ashlands, formerly middle class San Fran neighborhoods from Richmond to Inner Sunset, razed into Southeast-side ghetto by a 60% unemployment rate’s worth of white collar firings and “austerity” pillaging. It was quiet tonight. Nothing but the usual muted bubblepack pops of distant firefights, hooded bulky shadows of looters scuffling away, the nightly clamor of household turmoil; spouses screaming at each other and their kids, the occasional dish shattering, women screaming, normal domestic abuse. Gunfire erupted from the Payday Loans/Cash 4 Gold place, slotted between the tattoo parlour and the Amazing Bass car audio shop sprouting like fungus from the rotting redwood log of a bankrupt and liquidated Benz and Nobel’s bookstore. A guy in a red-stained suit stumbled out onto the sidewalk along with a screaming woman. It was ok, though; police departments across the country had closed down due to budget gutting, so we didn’t have to worry about any cops showing up during our operation.
A terminally laid-off male attorney shambled across the street. Weather-frayed Gordon Gekko coiffe, womanly hands grimed black, and a bloodied nose, he gave the vibe of a cushy declawed housecat forced out into the alleys with the migrant Toms. Came up and tried to offer us blow jobs. "Twenty TorrentBucks a piece, come on. I swallow, brush my teeth, look. Handjobs, fifteen dollars, let’s do this guys." We had Maxx frown, which shoed him off quick.

***

“This is fuckin’ boring. Where are these CyberSec n00bs? Chickenshits. I could pwn their servers with my eyes closed. Man, this is so blirk’ed,” Krash Koarse spurted some net lingo I didn’t recognize. He gave up on the signal hunt, dumped the frequency sensor in a jacket pocket, pulled out his dVice to check social media status updates.

Leeloo blinked inch-long lashes, tinkled laughter. She swiped his synthleather-clad arm with a bright flash of nail, like a cat batting at a juicy blue fin tuna. “Krash, you’re such a hellboy. Reminds me, Shirl and Xavier are totally down for Shinjuku night tonight over at their place, themes are red-n-black and steam-nazi-zombies. I’m planning to rock my Full Metal Necromancer. Think you’re up for it?”

“Yeah, I just need to make sure I’m back by 11, my friend’s vegan black metal band is playing at The Derelict, the guitarist is MIA and I need to sub for him.” Krash said, staring at the animefied avatar of Trent Reznor on his Life Planner app, which told him what to do every second of his life. A digital leash.

“Alright, alright, enough soc-networking the flash parties or smart mob indie shows or whatever. Focus on the mission, people.” I tried to nip their smartphone hyperactivity disorder, with all the hopelessness of a border collie herding an oxephant.

“Wait, let me check my Gnossis Nitelife Planner” Krash Koarse’s hand dipped again into his vacuum-sealed skinny jeans, defying several laws of physics in the process. More importantly, he was defying rule #3 of Hex-Gen: Do not use the Premium Internet, ever.

“Krash, what the fuck are you doing, you know the code,” I caged a scream. He pulled his hand out, the little over-designed obelisk of ivory plastic plugged into his wrist’s biojack.

“It’s a dumb rule. I don’t see why we can’t just use way faster 6G networks, all the best GnossisApps.” Krash shrugged flippantly. “‘We’re so not Evil.’ Haven’t you seen the Gnossis viral ads? Harry and Fergie, ‘Fuck the System’ Ft. BizNiz and Lord Dada? They’re only ranked at the top of all the musical taste recommendation engines, duh. They’re cool hacker geeks just like us, totally cyberpunk legit. I’d give my Angry Hamsters account and my level 70 Werewolfaerie zeppelin mage to have a Red Bull with’em.”

Leeloo’s heavily lined eyes bounced back and forth between Krash and I, giggling went up a half-octave too high. The A-student good girl caught between the peer and hormonal pressure of cheering the bad-boy she's got a thing for, or taking the teacher's side.

Krash Koarse had already queued up an InstaFlix video playlist on the palm-sized v3D screen of his dVice. An a-cultural soundtrack blared forth, bastardized together thoughtlessly from audioclips of 90’s Panzer-boot-dance, 70’s hard punk and 80’s black-fist hip hop. Would’ve made Vicious, Reznor, and Chuck D roil in their graves, buried in the mausoleum of a Melrose Tower Records. The “geekstar” CEOs of Gnossis swaggered about in black leather dusters and shades, plugged into the back of their heads were chrome brainjacks stolen from the set of that millenial Chris Cunningham vid. They were ‘spittin troof to tha system’ in that trendily awkward nerd rap, as they typed command line ‘hax’ into bankvault keyboards. Android latex chicks did bungee backflips out of skyscraper windows. It was the unholy spawn of a noughties techno-thriller rehash, a transhumanist infomercial, and a crunk music video.

The four of them gathered around the little glowing altar, staring transfixed, mouths gaping in that drooling “o” that knocks off 50 IQ points.

"Krash, guys, maybe we should stay focused on the mission. I mean, this is not just another session of Caper gaming or the paintball-and-animatronics simulations back at the Generation Hex Warehouse. This is the real deal, someone could get hurt, or worse..." Leeloo made a valiant attempt, but ultimately succumbed to the attention tractor beam of the 'Tube, hypnotized by the cuteness of Krash's annoying crybaby bangs. I firmed up for an intervention. Tuned down the cool science teacher vibe a bit, played up the smug alpha-hacker role.

“Look, kid, I don’t care what you think you know about those two Gnossis PR puppets, or what you think about the rules. You need-… Would you turn that goddamn thing off when I’m talking to you!” I raised my voice to the brink of yelling, trying to keep it discrete. I was loosing them. I felt like a single foster parent facing down an orphanage of crack babies.

Krash looked up from the video, flipped his flame-dyed triangle of bangs like a middle finger. “Why should I? What the hell do you know? All you ever do is make us turn off our phones, hike around in dumps like this. We never get to hack nothing.”

“Krash, you listen to me you little shit-“

“You’re just an old man, playing with your old broken junkware, ‘Silver Spook’. You’re like a hand calculator in a 6G world.” The others laughed, returned to bobbing their heads to the autotuned, algorithm-generated pop-mush that was supposed to pass for music.

Now, I like to think I’m a pretty patient, Zen guy. I don’t drum my fingers on the supermarket conveyor when the elderly lady is informed, over the course of a half-hour argument with the android checkout doll, that the foodstamp program has been discontinued since the US government was downgraded to triple-F, and perhaps grandma should try growing button mushrooms in her old shoes. When I get jacked in the MegaMart parking lot by some junkie wyrehead looking to score some cash so he can jam more Troadz into his cranium, I don’t hack the circuits sticking out of the black-caked, infected holes in his skull and sell the Voodoo-zombie as a sweatshop slave to the Chinese for a wet wad of T-Bucks. Even though I could. But I choose not too, and the financial straits I’m in right now, I won’t say I’m not tempted by the grey market cash, some nights.

Which is why I tell myself that what I’m about to do next is for the sake of a child’s education, even though my superego is insistently informing me it’s really cause I just want to wipe this fucking shitstain off the face of the Earth like a bad sector from a hard drive.

I whip out my HexBook, slab of dulled onyx-black fiberglass that could be an East-Asian Union gov-issue laptop, but could just as easily pass as a long-tail reprinted hardcover of The Naked Lunch. Nowadays if you’re carrying around an honest-to-Gutenberg, tree-bark and ink book, people will cross the street diagonally and rubberneck at you, the retro lunatic ex-librarian or humanities professor, still clinging to his primitive bound dumbscreens filled with long-winded text messages. More importantly, Blue County’s robofuzz will as quickly spam-filter you out of its Person Of Interest database, dismiss you as a future- and culture- shocked Luddite, a bad acid-flashback regurgitated by the 20th century. The corporate enforcement AIs will file your dossier in the “benign irritant” subfolder, next to the PTSD shellshocked Vietnam and Iraq vets that once rotted to death in the streets, left with only a cardboard sign for food and a purple heart to use as toilet paper and dry their tears on the colder nights when the bottle is empty and the forgetting is hard. Forgetting was even harder for the homeless English and History PhDs, who had a degree in remembering.

I start churning away commands on the HexBook, linking up wirelessly to Devil Lock’s toy as the kiddies shit and giggle away. Krash’s dVice has a universal IVSB jack (intravenous serial bus) plugs directly into his left brachial artery, and the gadget is powered by blood glucose and oxygen, artificially metabolized into sweet electricity. The Gnossis dVice is built for maximal connectivity, while confidentiality is not even on the table, thanks to 95% of the planet in near-vegetative state not knowing or caring how their beloved tech works as long as they can still get Jersey Shore and can still dig virtual turnips in Farm Wars. The privacy settings are all worthless PR smokescreen; it takes a PhD in computer science to navigate the gauntlet of loopholes, and Gnossis’ indentured code monkies change the settings every week. The little dVice gadgets are like spy-sponges, soaking up all that juicy personal data which Gnossis or whoever can then sell off to advertisers or identity thieves or dissident-hunting dictators or to enemy nations/corporations. Or to severely fucking disgruntled hacker terrorist/revolutionary cell mentors like me.

So once I cut through the dVice’s outer shell of security, it was all cake; fields of unsecured data fanning out like delicious, gooey cake batter, ready to be kneaded, molded. Like a bank vault with the door wide open, the tellers insisting you help yourself, security guards handing out inkbomb-free bags like party favors.

From the dVice-to-bloodstream junction, it’s just a straight shot up the ulnar nerve, hard right at the shoulder blade to the central nervous cloud network and…

Krash’s stupid laughter is interrupted by a sharp cough, followed by a paroxysm of wheezing.

“What the f-“ he coughed again, wincing. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Dude, are you alright?” Leeloo sidled up to him, hands fluttering like white butterflies, uncertain if they should pat him on the back or give him a Heimlich.

“A decade ago, or several millennia in ‘net’ years, they had these things called inhalers. If you, say, had an acute asthma attack, you’d stick this little oval tube in your mouth, press a button, and breath in an aerosol hit of corticolsteroids, went straight to the lungs. They worked great, everyone with asthma carried one in their pocket. Talismans against the wheeze demon.” I illustrated, holding out my hand, taking a deep huff from an imaginary tube.

“Then along came pulmonary implants. The miracle of dispersed bioware, injected swarms of nanoscale machines permeating the body’s inner space, forming an intranet of ‘cloud computing’ right under your own skin. Choirs of American Med Association angels sang its praises on high, for their HMO pimps. They could automatically monitor your condition, 24/7/52, and if an asthma attack came on, the biocloud would respond by nanofabbing and releasing the appropriate medication directly to the affected area. It was brilliant! Now you didn’t have to lug around that cumbersome inhaler tube. Then, to make it even easier, they connected everyone’s internal nanomachine smart-inhalers, pacemakers, IVs to the internet, where medical service providers could easily update and control the bioware in your body. You didn’t have to see a doctor, didn’t even have to *think* at all, the machines would just take care of your asthma for you, batteries included! Course, the doctors weren’t too happy about that, physician and GP strikes set off like wildfire, but the HMOs just forced smiles, waved about the billions of dollars in ‘savings’ they were raking in as a result of no longer having to pay all those fat salaries bloated up by ten-years’ of med school. And pretty soon, the inhaler people went out of business, and inhalers went out of production, like betamax and paper books. If you still had an inhaler, man, you’d be so uncool. So inefficient! It’d be like using a hand calculator!”

By this time, the kid’s wheezing had started to sound like someone bouncing on a squeaky toy, and Krash’s pasty white face had blossomed flush and puffy, like a girl’s breast deep into a sex session.

“In asthmatics, such as you, the innerspatial network of bioware inside your body continuously secretes a trace amount of the appropriate steroid to the lung tissue preemptively to prevent the onset of asthma attacks. Unfortunately, over time, the body builds a dependence on this drug, and removing it causes an instant, acute withdrawal, like any other drug which one consumes profusely for long periods of time.”

I snatched the dVice out of Krash’s shaking hands, tossing it aside to clatter on the pavement.

“But it was ok, because HMOs would never think to hurt their own patients. Ah, our benevolent corporate dictators, our philosopher kings of the American health system.”

“Spook, maybe you should, ease up, man,“ Philacrat started. The other students had gathered around Krash like a trio of panicking first-day paramedics, hovering, but at the same time keeping their distance, as if they might somehow be infected with whatever hellion-juju had taken over their fellow padawan’s body. They were now shooting fearful glances my way, backing up, like I might bare multiple sets of serrated dagger-teeth at any moment.

“What the hell are you *hack* doing to me you fucking psycho!?” Krash spat. I turned a little virtual knob on my HexBook, like twisting a knife in a voodoo doll, and Krash’s compromised bionetwork obeyed, further reducing the coticolsteroid output to his lungs. His body had begun shaking, his torso heaving, as if it were attempting to purge itself of some demonic possession.

“Excuse me, Mr. Koarse, I am speaking now. We need to show respect to others while they are talking. Please raise your hand and wait your turn.” Krash didn’t raise his hand. He was in no condition to raise anything. The other three stared on in horror. No one else was feeling brave. I continued the lesson.

“Of course, most people didn’t realize what would actually happen if the buttons on their inhalers were no longer in their hands but run remotely by computers, computers programmed and controlled by major pharma companies. Companies who have since been subsumed by tech-financial megaglomerates.”

Krash toppled onto the sidewalk, bucking violently. I patted an avuncular hand on his shoulder. His bronchial squealing and whooping cough had ebbed, but it wasn’t a sign of improvement. Quite the opposite. The ominous “silent chest”. A point of no return.

“Settle down there, kid, you don’t want to accidentally whack your head on the curb and send yourself into a coma. Your body is just going into shock, the real hard broncho spasms are coming. Just ride it out.” The bright green eyes smouldered with teenage rage, glowing like cartoon plutonium rods, and I was quite certain he would’ve torn my throat out at that moment, if he had the necessary oxygenation in his arms and control over his nervous system to do so.

“Now, I’m betting you’re just dying for one of those ‘old broken junkware’ inhalers right about now, hm?”

I could see the fight leaving him now, being slowly replaced by pure insectile fear, Darwinian survival. Krash’s eyes bugged. He gasped for air like the last specimen of blue fin tuna, flopping on an Osaka dock.

“What’s that?” I bent over, cupping my ear. “I thought you wanted to do some ‘leet haxxing’? Well, this is us doing some haxxing. Pretty cool, huh? Or do I need to dye my hair with Clorox and binge on Hot Topic leather, stick computer chips in my skin in order to be ‘totally cyberpunk legit’?” Krash’s lips had waned ice-blue with cyanosis, and I wasn’t sure whether he was conscious enough to understand and reflect on my very important koan. This thought made me extremely angry, though I couldn’t be sure whether it was because a student would miss an important lesson or because I wouldn’t have the pleasure of knowing I’d epically zinged the little fucker.

“Spook, you’re killing him! You’ve made your point, let him go.” Leeloo outburst, finally. I’d been wondering when she was going to show some real color for her latest man-candy.

“You. You of all people should know better. We’ll be having words after this operation is over.”

I won’t lie; some bile-fermented primal part of me really wanted to kill him. I’d be doing the world and the human race a favor by cleansing the genepool of this sack of afterbirth shit out by womb of cybertard-space, this vapid braindead waste, this answer to the Fermi Paradox: species-wide gadget-based devolution, a Mcluhan-esque end game: the medium is the mass-extinction. The thought of Krash Koarse playing babydaddy to Leeloo’s unborn progeny was almost enough to send me over the brink. But then some insufferable other piece of me, that those sci-fi guzzling armchair nerds would call my “Ghandi neurons”, descended upon my napalm-filled heart, putting it out like God’s own fire extinguisher. And then all I see is this little snot-nosed kid, helpless, sniffling and cold, and it hits me like a bucket of icewater; I’m seeing myself. This is me, ten years ago, out on the street, blowing about aimless as a wind-tossed, month old newspaper, stupid and reckless and dadless and alone.

I turn on the bioware asthma meds, put the hack in full reverse, retract the digital tentacles from Krash’s intra-cloud and sever the connection to his dVice.

“How can I explain this to you in a language you can understand. ‘I find your lack of faith disturbing’.” But Krash’s eyes stay lifeless and inert and I get this black quicksand feeling. Oh God, he’s not breathing. I find myself mentally babbling half-remembered movie snippets of prayers to Gods I’ve never even considered believing in, hoping that one of those apathetic deities up there who seem to get off on watching us stupid talking monkies burn our world down might actually check their status updates for once and trade my life for this kid’s.

Then he hacks up a massive ball of brown phlegm, like the holcrux of Azazel from one of those exorcist thrillers, gasps for breath like he’s being born again. Leeloo is on him like a warm lavender-scented blanket, showering him with kisses and sweet inanities.

Published!

2011-07-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

The Ghosts of Cloud City, a post-apocalyptic short storified episode of my earlier fiction is up over at the scintillating bunker of wonders that is Mythaxis. And a special shout out to Gil, webmeister and editor thereof, a man who truly does his darndest out of curatorial love. For while we highfallutin 'authors' lounge about in Starbucks spewing daydreamt hallucinations, those in the editorial cutting room toil unceasingly to polish the material into gleaming publishability!

I also particularly liked the header art he created for my story. Spot on interpretation.

Be sure to check out some of the other stories as well, I am truly honored to be situated amongst such talent.

The Troubleshooter Part 4 - Debugging The Class War

2011-06-23T22:22:00.001-07:00

The Phasma’s lithium-air powered electric engines whined down like a CPU going into hibernation. Jack got out, patting it on its onyx-finished grapheme hood, a dog having completed his master’s task. Its 6G/wifi antenna wagged back and forth, almost in celebraton, as it piloted itself back out of the Cybersec employee entrance and to the nearest recharging station to quench its thirsty cathodes.

“Good morning, Jack – underscore - Newman. Your bodily presence is required by Director Winkleman in the War Room-“ The patrolling goliath-class security bot boomed. Its vocal synthesizer’s formants were selected purposefully to sound like the Skynet sci-fi military bot cliche, pop-cultural short hand igniting instantaneous fear and awe. Not that its Totech engineers had gone all bark-no bite and skimped on firepower; the Leviathan MK4 could level a city block in short order, if the economy wasn’t already taking care of that job.

“Ok, ok Gengis, I’m on it. And I thought we talked about pointing that gattling railgun in people’s faces. You’re never going to score with the vending machine if you come on all gung ho with the banana in the pocket thing.” Blasts of compressed air exhaled as the hulking twenty tons of metal obediently lowered its weapon in compliance

“Sorry Jack – underscore - Newman.”

“Oh, and ‘command rename self equals Jack Newman’, I’ve got no middle name.”

“Understood, Jack Newman.”

Ionsdaleite synthdiamond blast doors parted, the opalescent allotrope face marred by a black star-shaped burn mark. The only epitaph of the last suicide bomber, a Volkswagon packed with plastique explosives, driven in by some jobless Deadweight, turned terrorist.

“They’ve got to send some janitorbots to clean that shit up. Getting weird, you know? As if we need to be constantly reminded how badly the Pleb insurgents want to World Trade Center us.” Jack complained to the checkpoint guard as he squeezed his head into the qMRI/MEG brain scanner. The guard’s face was a mask of paramilitary professionalism.

“I agree sir, but the cleaners are malfunctioning. Head still, sir, you know the drill.” A thousand micro trodes glommed onto Jack’s cranium. Encephalometric identification was the new Black in security world. The machine flashcarded three randomly selected words (‘pig’, ‘justice’, and ‘blue’ this time) each causing a unique storm of neural firings mapping to Jack’s “envisioning” of the concept as it formed in his third-eye. The flux of thought-notes in turn harmonized into specific electromagnetic field symphonies, billowing colonies of idea association and metaphor generation, which the scanner matched to previous concept-cloud recordings of the user down to the quantum microtubules. Deep encryption, whose hash algorithm consisted of the user’s subconscious, their snowflake-unique personality, and whose key was the resulting stream of consciousness itself. Des Cartesian verification: “I think therefore I am me.”

EID was unbreakable, short of owning a living, atom-for-atom replica of the original noggin. You couldn’t even shove someone’s head in at gun point, as the scanner factored in the brain wave differentials resulting from duress. Thought-scans racked the brains of James Bond rehash writers and Tom Clancy clones alike; gone were the days of ghosting into covert compounds by peeling a micropore gel pad off a martini glass for a hand print, dangling an eyeball by the severed optic nerve before a laser scan. But they were +1 for Jack’s company. Of course recommendation-engine enabled MediaGen AIs wrote all the scripts and mashed up “your own personal movie” with a virtual keypress, so filmmaking itself had already gone the way of typesetting.

“How’s Suzy doing?”

“Good, sir. Tomorrow’s my day off, I’m planning to take her to Gagaland.”

“That’s great. Be sure to get some good footage. Holopics or it didn’t happen!” Jack unslotted his head as the machine cleared him.

“Of course, sir.”

“Well I better get in there and get them out of their handbasket.”

The Cybersec War Room was a sprawling mess of unoccupied screens strobing crisis-red, left vacant by employee machinesourcing. Understaffed threefold, and with demonstrations and riots spreading like wildfire across the skylight newsfeeds, all the king’s blazers and all the king’s polo shirts were scrambling to put Cybersec’s drone-army together again. So, basically, a usual day.

“Outstanding. What hemisphere of the sky is falling today, my brethren?” Jack cracked his knuckles as his dVice communed with the Cybersec intra-cloud, laminating another layar of context-info over his FOV. Avatar icons, framed in the Cybersec branding scheme of gold and blue popped up over the heads of team-mates with status microblurbs, all of which read, “stressed”. There were only seven human agents on the floor this morning, compared to the hundreds of robotic operatives deployed in the field and hundreds more AI handlers, fighting Pleb insurgents, preventing terrorist attacks by the billions of layed off workers who’d snapped. Near-pervasive automation of police and military. with humans handling the troubleshooting and highest-level issues, guiding overall objectives. Making sure the bot bureaus and armies were acting in the best interests of their owners, the private enclave megaglomerates, the only game in town after government budget gutting left law enforcement without enough change to pay for badges Three such ranking Troubleshooter agents under Jack pow-wowed around his terminal.

“Here’s the tweet briefing. With the help of that sexy patch you sent this morning, we’ve managed to plug most of the holes in the Sherlock 4.0s’ heuristics. But things are getting ugly out there and we’re running out of fingers here, Jack” Stasia, the colorful NorwAsian resident den mother and lead psych/social engineering agent reported, biting a tye-dye polished nail for emphasis/flirtation. “The Replicants seem to have stopped targeting innocents, thankfully. The fixed code eliminated the facial-rec bug and rooted out the false-positives we were getting for individuals on the kill-list and other wanted suspects.”

“Have the QA algs come up with an explanation for the bugs?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, it seems like the user info and social graphs Facebook sold us contained fabricated data which ‘framed’ innocent individuals.” Stasia snapped open a Facebook profile-pic of an innocent schoolteacher who had been gunned down. Steganographic overlay showed minute anomalous distortions; the ridge of a nose sharpened here, the geometry of a jawline squared there, effectively altering the identity registered by the 8-parameter Cognito algorithm. Jack sighed.

“Let me guess, we’re not sure if the data rot is coming from within Facebook or from someone paid to hack into Facebook and tweak certain users’ pics and social networks to make them appear like they’re connected to or harboring terrorists. Or if the tampering is coming from a mole right here in Cybersec itself.”

The Russian lead security consultant cleared his throat. “I assure, we have no security breach.” Sekyuritee bureech, interjected sharp, snide Slavic consonants which betrayed a Cold War one-up condescendence that refused to die, like the Cold War’s two errant once-superpowers, still limping along on the fumes of their own mythology. “I run hand-code omniheuristic firewall around server, four hundred million node botnet defense web with rotating protocol. Cybersec like Pentagon, or Kremlin more like. Even more secure than those, since I break in there four year ago, steal secret-“

“That’s enough, Kirov. Plausible deniability, comrade, plausible deniability.” Jack cut him off, then turned back to Stasia. “Well at least the bots aren’t homicidal anymore, that’s a plus in any rubric. Winkleman will be happy to have some good damage control news for the Meths upstairs.”

“Right. But…” Stasia nervously tapped the subdermal dVice beneath the skin of her forearm, powered by intra-artery hemoturbines.

“But.”

“But, apparently the roboagents’ threat-analysis threshold has dropped too low. We had one agent on Broadway and Eighth that didn’t attack until the hostile was about to point-blank it in the face with an RPG. Suffice it to say, that Replicant has been terminated.” Stasia deflated slightly, as if she could’ve prevented it.

“So essentially, we’ve got Ghandibots.” An older Samuel L. Jackson cleared the gravel out of his throat and spit on his own 5.11 Tactical Boots, kicking the Janinator bot as it whirred over dutifully to clean the saliva from its lord’s besmirched footwear. “Fuckin’ typical.”

“Thanks for the pithy framing, Darius. Ok, so we’ve got to up the Replicants’ fight/flight mechanisms. What’s the status on the riots?”

“See for yourself.” Stasia lobbed into Jack’s headspace a direct ocular, aural, and limited somatosensory uplink to one of the robo-operatives on the front line. Jack clicked “accept”, slid through a digital wormhole into the shoes of Replicant “GI134”.

RPLCNT. Remote Piloted Low-latency Cyber Neural Tele-operative. “Replicants” colloquially. The descendant of the Predator Drone and anthropomorphic robotics, the RPLCNT was the Holy Grail of the battlefield: the android soldier. The “skinjobs”, made popular during the Intellectual Property Wars, struck terror into the hearts of terrorists, bloodlust into the hearts of military-industrial complex thinktanks. In the age of zero-casualty war where machines killed your technologically disadvantaged enemies for you while you puppeteered them comfortably from your Pentagon armchair, what were once Earth-shaking events called wars were now one-sided video games – 4X real-time-strategy games with epic graphics. The usual roadblocks to wars of choice – public outrage as the flag-wrapped coffins started piling up – were stripped away, reopening a whole new and deadly chapter of brute-force colonialism. Any country that had some resource – oil, water, lithium – desired by some bigger, ostensibly “civilized” country was promptly invaded by soldierbots, leaving the ashes for UN peacekeapers to sort out. True colors were revealed as no cover story of “spreading democracy” or “protecting human rights” or “The War Against (Abstract Concept)” was necessary. No need to install a friendly genocidal dictator to maintain a steady supply of oil or slave labor. Hundreds of millions died beneath the cold steel barrel of remote-controlled terminators across the world. The Middle East and Africa were scorched into strip-mined wastelands in short order.

Plumes of smoke rampaged spitefully across the Corona commercial sky of Blue County Enclave, filling the gold white and blue reflected in the mile-high glass towers of Ameribank City with mad black ash the color of the San Francisco Pleblands. Dell Boulevard was a Great Flood of jobless marketing reps, nurses, biotech researchers, construction workers, lawyers, and every other niche and faction of obsolesced human protesting their obsolescence, overflowing the banks of the sidewalk. Millions upon millions marched, epithet-splashed signs held high, fists pumping in the air. Deafening cacophony, like two thirds of Bay Area were cavalcading down these streets: not far from the truth, given the 60% unemployment rate. They were dressed in their former work clothes – dark suits, firefighter turnout coats, ER scrubs – clinging unflinchingly to the threads of their fading identities. Roaring choruses of angry chanting came in disorganized viral waves, “No more automation!” “Eat the Plutos! Eat the rich!” “End the social cuts!” “I am not a gadget!” . Teams of humanoid-robot riot police carrying shields, stunwhips and microwave dispersal guns patrolled, spread thin by the sheer numbers, trying to keep the crowds away from storefronts, and occasionally entangling in skirmishes with the more violent rioters. The furious demonstrations stretched for miles, from the interstate all the way to Nexus Square in the financial district.

“Fear not, till Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane.” Stasia said, startling Jack out of his telepresence reverie. He windowed the robo-operative’s feed to his right eye and ear to split his focus between the Cybersec War Room and the demonstrations.

“Ok, this is bad, but not code red, yet. It’s not so out-of-the-ordinary: the protests and riots have been going on for months, their numbers have gone up maybe 30% since last week. The change is really only quantitative. Nothing our RPLCNT, military bot, and drone teams can’t handle.” Jack rejoined.

“Yes, perhaps. But quantity has quality all its own.” Kirov koaned cryptically, brows knitting as if recalling some painful demonstration of this concept in his days back in Sovietland.

“Right. ‘The Will of The People’ and everything, very touching. It might’ve even been a moving scene, if they weren’t hopeless Deadweights, inhibiting legitimate business and destroying private property.” Jack said.

A Starbeans and two McDenny’s had had their windows smashed in, gaping hole in the 99 cent double cheeseburger ad drizzling loose glass. Masked thugs short-circuited the android clerk with French fry lard and overturned the register in a cloud of green confetti, looting the cash. An Ameribank financial tower had been been defaced in radioactive green graffiti with tags reading, “Heister Barons” and “Too Big To Exist”. A fireman hurled a flare into a Lamborghini, setting it ablaze, only to see the fire put out by the wrist-mounted hose of a firefighter droid who had taken his job. A flashmob shoved the bot with its firehose into the burning car, then rocked the AI-driven firetruck till it toppled over, igniting a paroxysm of foaming mouths cheering with anti-robot schadenfreude.

“I don’t know, man, what’s so legit about fucking copyrighted RealDolls selling copyrighted-DNA vatburgers cooked by copyrighted 90 IQ microwaves? I mean, I’m no prized Harvard economist, but isn’t there supposed to be some good ‘ol honest human labor adding value in this supply chain, as opposed to just some aristocrats owning shit that makes shit by itself? I shooed off a fuckload a’ hookers back in my beat days, but at least they shook their asses off for their mon-” Darius’ voice was a black Tom Waits’ as he hacked a gob of carcinogenic phlegm, punctuating one of his chance warrior-poet insights. Jack ignored them.

“See, this is why computers need to run things. People will always get themselves into a downward spiral of nasty brutish fuck-upedness,” Jack captioned the scene.

Jack’s visual feed studdered as a thrown rock struck robo-operative GI134 in its polymer deltoid. Jack’s nerve-nanos, networked with his dVice, zapped him with electrostatic in his right shoulder, simulating the hit like a total-body rumble controller. Jack’s mount turned its head on its servo-powered neck in an automatic programmed reflex. Its facial rec immediately identified the hostile, unfolding a dossier above his head revealing every detail from his body temperature to his Funstation gamertag to the date and time of his first kiss. Langley, Jonas. 19. Two counts of minor theft from Enclave members, three counts of destruction of Enclave property, one count tampering with Enclave systems.

“Yeah, you like that, fucking toaster?” The little imp flipped his peacockish punk-cut, tossed another rock that rang the bot’s femur like a tubular bell. The bot however failed to engage the operative.

“Yeah, looks like we do need to up the aggression on these pacifist security bots.” Jack sighed. He whipped out a flurry of commands, which erected a virtual façade of realtime dubbuggers. He tested the junctures in the bot AI’s executive logic for the weak link that was providing the chrome soldier with too much conscience.

“Bingo, here we go.” Jack dislodged a neon silver key in the AI’s morality registry, spoke an incantation for voice confirmation. “Disengage Assimov Safety, all agents. Access code: X90D3C401” The first rule of robotics: “a robot may not injure a human being” thrown out the window as whimsically as cancelling a credit card. The operative’s human-like unconditional altruism vanished like a Catholic schoolgirl’s mores upon discovering the joys of a co-ed college kegger, or a politician discovering lobbyists. The newly malevolent GI134 immediately engaged its weapon systems, mapped a path between the hordes of protesters and began approaching the stone caster, who was hiding behind the now flaming Lamborghini.

“Jonas Langley, you are under arrest for assauling an officer. Put down your weapons. You have ten seconds to comply.” The RPLCNT’s voice was scientifically calculated to evoke fear and submission responses in the human species, a potent mix of lions roar and James Earl Jones’ Vader.

The punk flipped the bird and tossed another rock. The RPLCNT raised its arm toward the perp, its swat jacket and synthetic human skin showing for the first time. The tangerine peacock wave instinctively vanished behind the immolated sports car.

“Recalculating…” Darth Vader said, in its irritated GPS nav voice. Infrared revealed the little rebel was grasping the metal chassis of the vehicle, and the bot’s neural nets crackled, put together the concept of metal conductivity and electroshock incapacitation, formulating a plan. Something shuttered open in its palm, compressed air firing twin electrodes which struck the passenger door, delivering 1.2 million volts of electricity straight through into Peacock Head. His body ragdolled. GI134 made its way around the vehicle to discover him writhing on the ground in an epileptic mess.

“Resistance is futile, Jonas. You’re done.” Jack spoke through the medium of the bot. Though his words came through in the same fearmongerish voice, the miscreant could tell it was a human controller by the unmistakable change in inflection and diction. The rioter’s mouth twitched, foamed, but he eventually regained control of his vocal chords.

“F-F-Fucking Enclave fascists! C—c-come out of your climate-controlled b-b-bunkers and f-f-fight me, pussy!”

Jack bristled, engaged a virtual joystick, guiding the operative’s palm-mounted taser towards the anime banged forehead. “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, mother fucker.” The perp was knocked out instantly, the body spasming unconscious.

“Jesus, Jack.” Stasia grimaced.

“He’ll live. These assholes need to be taught a lesson. Look, their rage against the machines and the ‘Blue Bloods’ is withering and will continue to wither as the days wear on with no regime change, no bargaining, no talks, no ebbing of the tide of human job displacement or return of their precious ‘social safety net’ that they’re hoping for. Their “color revolution” is a pipe dream that will never come. It will be tough, but we’ve got to break their spirits to win. Then this, too, will pass if we just keep the system’s gears oiled and operating.”

Jack drew a rectangular frame around a cross-section of marchers within the operative’s feed, zoomed in, and tossed it up into the War Room holo-display as a case-in-point for the others. One could see the desperation setting into heavy, sinking, cyanosized eyes. Crisp ironed work shirts becoming filthy torn rags, grimy faces sporting bloody and bruised cheekbones from beatings by the robotic riot police, such as the one Jack was jacked into. Who knew how much longer these protesters could hold together?

“Jack, I don’t think you’re seeing the whole picture here.” Stasia’s calico-tipped digits rifled through a list of unit bookmarks, the operative IPs scrolling like credits on fast-forward. Upon locating it, she tapped into the feed of another military bot posted deeper into the San Fran Pleblands. The War Room dimmed, as if the space were filling with the darkness of the scenes streaming through the holographic display.

An office worker and his family, now living out of a car and cans of pork ‘n beans. A long-terminated doctor, tearing the sleeves from his lab coat to patch the bloodied, swollen eye of a flight attendant. People fighting tooth and nail over mere scraps of food as the City By The Bay dissolved into anomie. Bodies of those who had starved, been trampled, or were slaughtered by Cybersec security bots lay unburied in the streets, swarming with flies. A truly horrible, apocalyptic scene, but a nightmare which had persisted for so long it had become the Normal. The early 21st century with its 10% unemployment, Islamist “terrorism” hysteria, climate obsession, and mere billion starving African kids, that foreign country of the past now seemed the dream. A utopia, Eden, fading like the hopes and dreams in a twelve year-old’s eyes as he threw away his astronaut action figure, and picked up a rifle, to fire upon a military bot. The hulking droid turned, its AI identifying the child as a hostile, raised its .50 cal cannon to return fire.

The images seared his eyes, the bloody puddle of limbs exhuming memories of Diego's car crash, and Jack turned away. This was not his responsibility. Don’t let the Deadweights drag you into their framing of the situation, Jack remembered from his Cybersec training.

“All I’m saying here is let’s think outside of the Enclave box. If the social economic fabric continues to deteriorate this way, we might find ourselves mired in a Chinese-style revolt. Let’s just think about multi-pronging here, using a little more carrots and less sticks, start multilateral talks with the demonstrators” Stasia pleaded.

“We don’t negotiate with Jobless. That’s official Blue Blood policy, straight from the top. I’ll take your suggestions under advisement.” Jack began, escalating the responsibility up the chain of command. He felt the slightest pang of hypocrisy, then remembered his position. Remembered his responsibilities to his family.

“These people brought this upon themselves when they became lazy, when they chose to take government handouts, failed to make themselves of value to productive society. When they became Deadweights. We’re just the Troubleshooters, we fix the bugs in the system and get the hell out of the way. We do our job. And you’d all better fucking well do your job, or you’ll find you soon won’t have one, just like them.”

Jack could almost hear the simultaneous gulps of the three Troubleshooters as they considered the possibility of being tossed out of the Enclave’s sanctuary into the hell-on-Earth of the Deadweight Pleblands. Employees were constantly having their shifts eclipsed, being replaced by AIs and androids left and right. The lucky few still with a job did everything to gain edge, to prove value and desirability to the Blue County Plutos, the infinitely rich Owners of the Universe whose itchy trigger fingers were always eager to fire more “Deadweight” human employees.

***

“Ah, I am thinking you should all seeing this.” Kirov added a third layer of Trouble to the Troubleshooters’ holographic agenda board.

The feed was streaming from an air-dragon drone, patrolling invisibly above another section of the city near Gnossis Plaza downtown, its near-translucent eel-like body undulating in the sky like the ghost of a great Chinese festival puppet. Below, clouds of protesters seemed to be coalescing, galvanizing around a storm eye: a man in a blue janitor workshirt and cap, megaphone in hand, perched atop the Gnossis Plaza fountain.

“Brothers and sisters, this is a war. This is a war on the people of this city, of this country, of this world. A war initiated by those in power, by the global plutocracy. By the puppetmasters of the financial-military-robotics complex, and the tools that they have bought and paid for that they call a government.” The man continued speaking to thunderous cheers and applause. A human-musician, grunge-reenactivist band started playing an autotuned techno rehash of Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up”.

“Alright who is this asshole. I want his Facebook page as fast as inhumanly possible.” The Sherlock 4.0 AIs churned away, cyberdetectives examining every fingerprint and CCTV snapshot in meat and cyberspace. Potential vocal and partial-facial rec matches popped up like playing cards on the warboard. The AI’s neural nets were still tangled though, none of the hits showed high probability. Jack needed religious fundamentalist-caliber certainty.

“We need a better angle,” Jack determined.

Stasia conjured the air dragon’s virtual flight stick via her dVice with an interlocking-finger hand gesture, a ninja magic kuji-in summoning the mythic beast of stealth. She piloted it downward, descending the valleys of glass formed by the dizzyingly tall financial towers, towards the roiling crowds below.

“We’ve got positive ID. Paolo Guevarao. Higher-up in the World Class War, San Francisco chapter.”

“Motherfucking, World Class War. Of course.” Jack sighed.

World Class War’s official Cloudsite blurb was, “a coalition of organizations dedicated to the betterment of the lives of the underclass around the world.” There was Human Rights United, the bleeding heart Peace Corps on steroids, whose mission statement was improving basic living standards of the 80% of the world that was drowning in poverty. Then there were the anti-robotics Autonomites and Association for Human Agency, the 21st century wave of Luddites who believed the way forward through the Marxian human-obsolesence dilemma was backward, a return to the relative dark ages of the end of the 20th century. They believed a Turing Test should be enforced such that the smartest robots allowed were furbies and Call of Duty mook AIs. The Open Source Ecology people were the spiritual progeny of the enviro-commies, who gave away self-replicating tractors to third worlders in an attempt to create a plague of self-sustaining, close-knit, resilient communities: a truly apocalyptic scenario. Then of course there were the many departments of Ivory Tower Post-Capitalist, and charlatan futurist like the Venus Project people. Those academics mostly just sipped overpriced coffee and got off on viral 70’s sci-fi documentaries about the bad bad bad System, which had to be overthrown and replaced with their dissertation-plans for a Perfect World, which were diatribed in twelve chapters of crypto-Marxist theoryspeak. Armchair activism, no real affect on reality. Benign growths. Then there was the veritable rainbow of lone-wolf conspiracy nuts, anarchists, stoners, miscellaneous anti-System cultists, angsty malleable teen girls joining said cults, horny teen boys eager to mold said teen girls, neo-jihadists, and wanna-be trust-fund baby revolutionaries.

Somehow, World Class War had managed to unite, however loosely and contingently, all of these disparate, often seemingly conflicting (dis)organizations into one, fairly cohesive whole. It was almost as if WCW had evolved organically, of its own right, in response to post-post-industrial existence. Like the Anarchists who sprung from the side of Industrialization, like 911 terrorism that was forged by and retaliated against Globalization, World Class War filled a sort of societal yin to the execessive yang of exponential global inequality.

But for Blue County Enclave, i.e. for Cybersec, i.e. for Jack and his team, World Class War was an ugly hydra of nonviolent organized resistance against the Enclaves. The Plutos would’ve jumped at the first chance to disappear the lot of them, Mexico City style. But they had this nasty universalized tendency to not commit any outward aggression, thus disallowing brutal aggression against them, for fear of repercussions. “If you can’t get this little Plebian charade under control, we’ll find someone who can,” Jack recalled from his last meeting with director Winkleman.

“I want the RPLCNTs, the drones, the Sherlocks up this guy’s ass like a 6G enema. I don’t want his blood sugar to change without us knowing about it.” Jack demanded. “Also, let’s blackout his #World Class War channel from the search engines and recommendation engines.”

“What about social media updates? Those digital grass roots tend to be the biggest vectors for these revolutionary movements. Remember what happened in Iran? Total mess.” One of the cadets on the lower level asked as he was busy tweaking the Gnossis pagerank algorithm to force WCW related sites to the 300 millionth result page of any ‘net search.

“Right, well the Friendbook and Yawper updates are filtered by personalization algorithms, too. I mean who wants 50 tweets a day of their loner aunt’s cat? We just tweak the recommendation engine relevance ranking so that any tweet or status update or message permutation remotely resembling ‘World Class War’ or ‘WCW’ is immediately deemed by the filter to be as useful to the user as, say, a forwarded knitting-personality quiz. Or just have any communications containing the blacklisted terms automatically marked as spam. Boom, no more La Resistance grapevine.” Jack corrected.

“Wait, isn’t that like censoring the internet? Aren’t there net-neutrality laws against that?” The younger cadet brought up, looking up from his crystal workspace.

“Oh, look, we’ve got a virgin in the house. No, kid, it’s just called, ‘creative use of internet personalization.’ We’re just helping people find what they need, and ignore what they don’t need to see; it’s win-win. And don’t say ‘censorship’, people might think we’re China or something.”

“But you’re manipulating people’s communications with each other for ulterior ends-“ the kid began, before Jack raised a hand to cut him off.

“And thank God for the United States of Suckers who believe tech and social media companies give a shit about their customers’ data. Welcome to the real world, son. Now get back to work.”

Jack sat back in his hyperergonomic chair, reclining into expensive pneumatics and Italian leather tanned and put together by real Italian robots in Milan. What he needed was an in, a thin wedge to slide beneath the security nightmare of focused, organized, populist resistance and pry it away like a limpet. He rolled his knuckles on the mysteriously clear carbon polymer of his desk,

“Sherlock, please investigate potential connections between World Class War and violent insurgents within Bay Area,” Jack queried in conversational English. The Sherlock detective-AI’s very primitive and utterly uselss ancestor, something called “Watson”, could only answer Jeopardy questions, in question form. Luckily for Jack, Sherlock was fairly fluent, although Jack did have to tweak the AI’s lexicon cores now and again.

“Jack, there are 3,891 possible connections between World Class War and said violent insurgents.”

Jack nearly jumped out of his seat.

“Take autobus 32 from local WCW chapter at 4th and Lexington, turn right at 8th and…” Not those connections. Jack sighed, sprung open the Sherlock’s semantics kernels and rewired some of its digital axons to new synapses. He tried again, crossing his fingers. Come on baby, show me the Lead.

“Jack, it appears there have been a few incidents of violent attacks against Blue County Enclave by individuals technically affiliated with World Class War. The connection is obscure, however I confirmed it by cross-mining intercepted emails, daily behavioral patterns and confirmed the relationships via graph traversal of relevant social networks.” The machine replied, and not without a certain sense of satisfaction, although Jack had probably programmed that effect in at some point.

“Wow, excellent work! Don’t get cocky.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Well, let’s see it.”

The Sherlock accessed audiovisual archives of an incident two days prior at Gnossis Plaza. The AI multiplexed the simultaneous feeds of a squadron of RLPCNTS, Leviathans and CCTV cams on the holographic warboard, reconstructing the event like a four-dimensional jigsaw from a panoply of vantage points. The mass World Class War demonstrations were in full swing, as usual. Then, suddenly, the RPLCNT riot cops began arresting one another, only to discover their EnforceWare suspect-targeting had been compromised by hackers. On the audio channels, the intranet police chatter had been replaced with audiobook readings of Das Kapital. Worm-subverted paramilitary bots danced ‘the robot’ then dove thorax-first into the public fountain like giant steel lemmings, shorting their circuitry. Masked rioters then hurled firework bombs at disoriented cops, shattered storefront windows, and started bon fires precariously near buildings. Bank towers were broken into, the fractured ink-black glass spraypainted with the head of Guy Fawkes.

“What is it with these anarchists and the Guy Fawkes? Alright, looks like these guys have a few braincells. We got no facial rec cause of the masks and the voiceprints are blizzarded out in the protests. Let’s mine the scene for a suspect.” Jack said. The Sherlocks hunted for patterns – a fragment of jawbone curvature here matching a second of garbled vocal there, a walking gait here cross-referencing with a height and weight. Linkable constellations in the Exabyte-sized ocean of data that might triangulate an identity.

Minutes passed of the Sherlocks digging without a hit, the equivalent of all the police forensics teams, FBI and CIA analysts who ever lived working nonstop for several hundred years. Stasia broadened the investigative algorithm, had the AIs flip through various scopes and light spectrum filters: infrared, UV, without result.

“Come on people, we need something, anything. Any bone to chew on.” Jack facepalmed.

“These guys knew what they were getting into. They even pulled the gravel trick, stuck rocks in their shoes to throw off the gait analyzers.” Darius commented, pointing out the arrhythmic skipping in several video clips.

After one of the AIs reported a hit that turned out to be someone’s face reflected in a perp’s sunglasses, Jack was about to shift the incident to the backburner, call the lead a cold trail and move on.

“Alright people, let’s pack it up-“

“Jack, from speech analysis, look like this guy have heart condition.” Kirov offered just as Jack was about to jump to another event. He spun his monitor around to reveal an aural spectrograph like a rainbow colored ultrasound, the heartbeat pounding like an underwater bass drum. The timbre and rhythm of the suspects heart overlayed almost perfectly the stochastic patterns seen in heart patients, averaged across a hundred billion records fished up from the Gnossis archives.

“Ok, so he must have medical nanites holding that bum ticker together, which need to be uplinked to a health center doctor-AI for continuous nanoware updates. Find all heart patient communications with hospitals originating from this GPS point for the suspect’s hospital feed. Once we intercept the outbound packets of from his body to the med center, those subcellular nanobots’ bioinformatics, it’s just a matter of hacking his DNA sequence out of his bloodstream nanomachines,” Jack said.

“Jack we’d need to get a signed waiver for that personal info.” Stasia cautioned.

“Are you kidding me? We work for Gnossis, the biggest search and social networking megaglomerate in the world. ‘Personal info’ is a meaningless term for us. Besides, we’re the cops here, we’re the good guys, catching the criminals. Kirov, you broke into your last boss’ bodyware and changed his internal medication dosage right? You’re on point.”

In the span of a minute, the Russian had multilaterated the target’s position, tapped into his cranial 6G cellular jack, bypassed his body’s firewalls, intercepted a cybercyte transmission, cut through the target’s DNA encryption, and sucked the man’s amino acid ID right out of his cell walls.

“We have the DNA sequence,” Kirov announced.

“Have the AIs cross reference it with fetal genome registry.” It took another clearance code and a second for the Sherlocks to unearth the individual who’s DNA sample, collected at birth, matched the target’s.

A rather unremarkable, pale-pink female face emerged in the 3D space, revolving slowly.

The Troubleshooters stared on, rubbing their eyes as if the moving portrait staring back at them were some phantasm software artifact in their retinal overlays.

“What? No. That’s impossible. Not. Possible. There must be a bug.”

The Troubleshooter Part 3 - Automaton

2011-06-23T22:21:00.000-07:00

Late for work and still strung out on epinephrine spiked by the good-morning argument with his wife, Jack dumped himself into the cold synthleather passenger pod of his Xinjiao Phasma. When angry, Jack used to white-knuckle the steering wheel, a reflex that served him as a relief-well for stress oil spills, and a symbolic feeling of control. But that was back when humans were still permitted to operate automobiles.

The smartgrid-powered Phasma automatically synced with his dVice.
“Jack, based on your fridge contents you need to acquire these items: laundry soap, whole wheat bread. Given your tech purchase history and flat-lining productivity levels (14.5 man hours/day), you also need to acquire this week’s hottest gadget, the Gnossis dVice Ubiq. The dVice Ubiq comes with a free LifePlanner App. LifePlanner: simplify your world!

“Gnossis recommendation engine recommends (1) Ultrafresh liquid detergent with bleach and (3) loaves of Mother’s Own 3-grain, to be purchased from Megamart on Zuckerberg Blvd, followed by (1) dVice Ubiq to be purchased from Techtopia. Total cost of purchases + transit: $342.87 Please blink to accept planned route and purchases,” the car spoke into his brain.

Jack blinked by accident, but it’s not like he ever disagreed with the global brain’s recommendations, which were based on a massive dossier consisting of every last iota of personal info on Jack from his last shopping trip to the blood pressure of his right brachial artery to the color of underwear he was wearing. The wonders of digital panopticon and unparalleled efficiency. A Gnossis Corp meta-machine floating up in The Cloud knew everything about him, maybe better than he knew himself; an outsourcing of nosce te ipsum. So why not let Gnossis think for him? Gnossis automatically plotted a course to his nearest Megamart, tracing streets and avenues with cyan arrows overlayed on a 3D simulacra of the town. The solar-hydrogen hybrid engine was already purring awake before Jack could get his seatbelt on.

The car having confirmed its plan, the 24/7 intra-occular media wave resumed, flooding Jack’s senses .

“Epic Break Up! Taylor ‘Car-Crash’ Sheen breaks up with cyberspace pop star Lord DaDa for the fourth time’

‘Taylor Sheen goes back into gadget-addiction rehab.’

‘Riots escalating within Blue County, dozens injured in robot riot police brutality.’

‘Jack, dude, this is your new purpose in life: try this Augmented App “Angry Hamsters”. Teh awesome.” Jack began playing the illegally addictive game till another news headline distracted him.

‘Rumblings of Totech’s intentions to merge with European renewable energy giant Dryad stir up threats from Gnossis.’

Jack at last waved the unending stream of updates away again, not being in the mood, feeling more like a quiet drive for the first time in ages rather than the endless continual-partial attention inherent in the ‘net. For the first time he sensed, perhaps the edge of that hollowness, the digital wash he’d been swimming in for so long. He and Joy had once been almost joined at the hip, passionate young ruffians, wild and incandescent, sharing everything. Now he found this horrible distance growing between them, like their universes were separating into single-served bubbles whose membranes consisted of their personalized internet filters, which they spent the majority of their time in. Sealing themselves away from one another within their self-reinforcing echochambers of their ever narrowing interests, like the single nostalgic Bob-Dylan tune on eternal repeat in Jack’s head, unchanged for decades. There had emerged this cold barbed edge of ambient negativity in their brief exchanges that passed for communication; the subtle lack of acknowledgement, the encrypted derision in a question about dinner. Failed awkward attempts to incite sex. Meetings occurring in the guest room. Perhaps Joy was right, perhaps in a world run by machines, they were slowly being replaced by cold algorithms and actuators, becoming gadgets themselves.

The Phasma pulled itself out of the driveway. AI augmented self-driving cars had long eliminated what Jack called at dinner discussions “the Sword of Damocles of human error”, though Jack suspected he’d glibbed the catchphrase subconsciously from one of the Gnossis-Auto marketing e-vents he’d been to. Self-driving cars were purported to end the silent holocausts caused by drunk and distracted driving, the latter a near-existential crisis as 99% of drivers were now immersing themselves in their windshield-based augmented reality. Texting on their wipers, watching movies in their rear view mirrors, or focusing on some other shiny virtual App rather than the road.

The cops informed him the driver was playing Keggerville, a drinking App, when he crashed into and killed Jack’s best friend, Diego.

Jack would’ve reveled in the irony if the flaming snarl of twisted metal hadn’t made him feel like vomiting. But he was too busy identifying bloody fragments of his friend that weren’t mutilated by the oncoming eighteen-wheeler or burnt beyond recognition in the fire. Vaguely human body parts furred with charcoal; an arm here, eye socket and part of a nose there, burning into his memory like Polaroids beneath flashes of blue and red police lights.

They were roommates, bonded covalently in college. Like minds, immersed in the brightly bleeding edge of computer science, AI in particular, who saw that all the facets of the human universe were coming together, converging on some zero point, some singularity. Their departures in perspective were on the exact nature of that point. Jack believed wholeheartedly that the AI-Robotics revolution would usher in a golden age of abundance, wherein smart machines would finally free humanity from the shackles of labor and the scarcity-based resource wars, resulting in a post-nation state, post-economic world of well-informed global citizens, living leisurely lives of egalitarian peace and endless bandwith.

Diego was much less optimistic. And how could he, being the son of a Mexican cop who barely escaped the druglord drone bombings and a Chinese color revolutionary extracted from a Beijing sweatshop/prison by a US sanctuary deal in return for dossiers on the Chinese government blackhats who’d APT-hacked the Pentagon into shambles. Most called Diego a pessimist, “Dr. Doom” was his nickname. He would say he was a merely a humble realist. His rationale went that if human-level AI ever proved truly lucrative, the starry eyed neo-hippy nerd engineers would soon find their infant Singularity hijacked by the 500 frat brother plutocracies, and The Money would arms race their new found robot underlords into existence. The corporate-controlled AIs and robots would not be used for peace love and geek wish-fulfillment in the arms of 89 dark-elven virgins, but rather to do what the rich always do: get richer. The knowledge worker and skilled trades alike would discover themselves as obsolete as the manual loom, dislodging the crown jewel of the First World, the “middle class”, once and for all. “Toxic waste in, toxic waste out. Yeah, we’ve got an uplink to Xanadu alright, a future stairway to ‘heaven’ paved with the crushed bones of arthritic, debt-laden, unionless, purposeless Morlocks, who are then shut out in the cold as the blue bloods enjoy the ‘abundance’ behind sealed blast doors, protected by their paramilitary AIs and bots.” If only Diego could have seen how on the money he was in his prognostications.

Diego was the grey hat hacker to Jack’s white hat in shining armor, tempering Jack’s gung-ho enthusiasm with just the right leavening of realism, delivered with his signature caustic wit. Diego was Jack’s port. He’d stuck with Jack through every half-cocked startup and every terminally frivolous girlfriend-ish thing that Jack ran into the ground. Diego would always be standing there, snarking, jaws of life in hand, ready to pull him from the wreckage. “Told you so, Crackerjack.” He’d take Jack down to some watering hole, help him lick his wounds, and they’d laugh it all off, let the pain become another episode, another blogpost. Along with Joy, the three of them were inseperable. Diego, in fact, had introduced him to Joy at a compost party. He helped right Jack’s girl-dar, broken from too many hours spent in front of tangles of AI LISP code and torrented seasons of Fringe. Enough that Jack managed to ask Joy out on their first of many parkour sessions. He was Jack’s best man, applauding all the way. When the three of them base jumped the Golden Gate together, they swore they’d never touch down, and for a second, Jack believed they wouldn’t. That they’d never hit the ground, just sail on forever, into some bright boundless future-city, shimmering into existence on the Pacific horizon.

That was before the Golden Gate collapsed from disrepair, due to serial state-budget crises.

Jack would never be able to return the favor, would never pull Diego out of that smouldering wreckage. Jack had signed onto a private security firm uptown while Diego had become a social net-worker, and the fact that they had been slowly drifting apart just as Diego passed away was salt in the hole that wouldn’t heal. If it weren’t for Joy, the hole would’ve swallowed Jack whole.

Jack’s talisman against alcoholism was social entrepreneurship, apart from Joy’s unyielding support. He waged a Jihad on motor-cide, on the human error that had took the life of his best friend. To allow humans to drive cars was to condone mass murder. The unnecessary tragedies of human imperfection had to be eradicated by the unflinching perfection of machine control, by the steel-cool laser eyes of artificial intelligence which would never get drunk, never text, never make a mistake. Jack started Yawper and Friendbook rings dedicated to the promotion of pro-autonomous vehicles, joined anti-human driving rallies. He started work programming his own vehicle-piloting AI. Marched the streets of San Francisco with a picture of Diego in hand, one of the millions of other grief-stricken loved ones taken by App-using drivers each year. Human agency was the dangerous x-factor in the equation of reality, and thus had to be eliminated.

The eventual banning of manual cars caused tectonic revolts, as those metal steeds, those perennial symbols of freedom and mobility so deeply entwined with the American identity were forcibly excised. Media feeds were flooded with ads featuring Nascar drivers clinging to their steering wheels, captioned, “From my cold, dead hands!”. The American-division president of the Chinese car manufacturer was blasted for alleged “socialism”, being “un-American” when they released their first product lines of autonomous autos. Anti-self-driving protesters regularly demanded to see the US birth certificates of pro-autonomites (which had been mysteriously redacted from government servers, apparently by pro-motorist movement hackers). But all the auto-angst and fury died like analog film when the relative risk of manual operation of vehicles was met with crushingly expensive premiums- jail time in some Scandinavian countries. And thus proving, as if it was not already painfully obvious, that economics trumps ideology every time.

Human-driven “Ferrari Safaris” became a past-time enjoyed by the trillionare Moguls who could afford the seven-figure insurance premiums, and the Plebian Cityzen car-hackers who lived in the economic wastelands of cities beyond the razor-wired walls of the Suburb-States, and thus beyond the societal constructs of insurance premiums.

Jack celebrated a small victory as human agency in automobile operation was all but elliminated, though no amount of machine agency and AI automation would ever bring Diego back. Maybe Joy was right, maybe everything was dying, a byte at a time, becoming efficient and empty streams of data. Driven by lifeless automatons.

Or maybe the right App to solve it all was still out there, shimmering, waiting to be discovered.

“Jack where are you damnit, I need you here now!” His boss’ voice cut through Jack’s filters again, breaking his silent car reverie. Winkleman’s glacial FBI director-cool was calving into unstable shards of panic.

“I’m on Plymouth and 12th,” Jack mumbled through his own mandible to his cochlear microphone. Jack knew Winkleman had his coordinates down to the nearest 0.5 meter, was probably watching a green dot labeled “Jack” blip across a Gnossis Map wallpapered over his retina. The call was a vestigial formality made pointless by technology, a token of primate hierarchy assertion serving only to appease the psyche. Like pounding the enter key percussively and repeatedly, expecting one’s download to accelerate.

“I can’t get there any faster, Mr. Winkleman. The car’s driverware is hard-coded to follow speed limits and only Owner Blue Bloods get an override. What’s the status?”

“Not good. The Sherlock patch you sent seems to have cleared up the AWOL AIs but we’ve got whole new cans of worms opening up. The Deadweight protests have flared up within the confines of Blue County. All enclave members are on full recall, code red.”

The Phasma whirred along like a ghost, Chinese lithium-air batteries powering silent New North Korean electromagnetic motors, driven by an invisible computer cheauffer. Its eyes and ears were the phalanx of 3d panoramic cameras, lasers, and radar rivaling the most advanced US nuclear submarines. It drove almost too flawlessly robotic, like a road-test instructor’s platonic ideal. The speedometer frozen at the legal speed limit, car spacings exactly one-point-five seconds, and impeccable defensive collision avoidance even as traffic thickened at busy intersections. The ride was so smooth, Jack could almost believe he was discarnate, separate from the world of houses and cars and people drifting by. Too-perfect houses, infused with the sterile precision of the robot carpenters who constructed them. Missing those minute human imperfections and flourishes called nuance found in houses built by actual human illegal immigrants during that previous rash of kleptocratic ponzi-exhuberance, the housing bubble, minus-one. A silver, if twisted lining of The Great Automation was that dollar-a-day low and mid-skill labor that were previously outsourced to Asian wage slaves and insourced to basement-wetbacks were the first jobs to be replaced by smartbots. Machines, who would never tire after 16-hour shifts in boiling-hot factories, would never grow weary of a lifetime of drudgery, would never organize and uprise. It accomplished in two years what decades of WTO and Wal-Mart protests, human rights summits, and countless Rage Against The Machine concerts failed to do: achieve equality. Equal unemployment, that is. "It don't matter if you're blue or white (collar)", Lord DaDa's remash of The King of Pop, received more American Internet Idol votes than the previous two presidents combined, robo-ballot fraud included. Now the Mexicans mostly skipped over the snuffed out light-on-the-hill once known as The Land of Opportunity, boating instead up to Canada, or Europe, where the new lands of, if not opportunity, at least welfare states, remained.

The atemporal, a-relevant blandscape of the Greenwood suburbs gave way at last to the gleaming overdesigned architecture-fiction of Ameribank City, the synthetic heart of Blue County Enclave. The skyline was a volcanic eruption of mirror, overshadowing the ash-colored economic wasteland necropolis of San Francisco. The predominant design motif was Californian refractions of Mumbai’s noughtie eco-towers. Solarglass cubes laced with drizzles of green horticulture, stacked asymmetrically like the Lego cities of child-gods. Obviously designed by the Plutarchs’ trust-fund babies, those artsy bisexual blacksheep who’d not yet had their silicon-n-granola idealism forcibly expunged via re-education through the labor market, not yet forged into suitably Napoleonic heirs to their parents’ financial dynasties.

And dominating the epicenter, the Gnossis Kairoplex: a celestially high pyramid curving parabolic towards the singularity of the most powerful omni-spectrum cell tower in the world. The Ur-node, the master switch, the gatekeeper of all indexed knowledge through which all had to pass, be it searching, messaging, or even breathing – which was monitored via intravenous sensors implanted at birth. The all-seeing eye drinking data into the human species’ collective externalized brain. And for access to one’s own brain, Gnossis charged in dollars-per-second of synaptic bandwidth over the Premium Internet. Sure, you could “go open” and try the Free Web, but it had become a useless, dangerous cesspool of spam, scamware, and Russian blackhats. The “info wants to be free” decentralized favela of The Web turned, as they all must, into a hell-holish digital slum.

Jack supposed he had been one of those naïve starchildren once, thought he could change the world if only he’d had enough Mountain Dew Code Red, startup capital, and a friendly senator. Then he graduated from the cushy moebius sandbox of grad school with a newfangled cyberscience degree, and shot back to Earth. Burned up several pension’s worth of seed capital in three failed tech ventures including a crowd-sourced bank regulation software, clean nuclear energy, and an NGO dedicated to closing the education gap. (Providing hands-on inner-city tech-ed and the brain enhancing cog-augs necessary to enter the job-race proved a non-starter with the money people, and public schools were too busy trying to keep from being shutdown by budget cuts to bother with new programs)

Bank balance flaming red, social network peeling off behind him like smoke, his best friend and partner dead in a car crash, and no golden parachute, Jack frantically aimed for the softest landing point in a jobscape of feudal perma-recession ruled by tooth-n-nail nepotism, struggles for ‘safe’ administrative/gov jobs and mogul security/charity work that had not yet been outsourced or machine-sourced. He cratered solidly into the bottom edge of the middle class, filed in beside the art-school dropouts pushing brands and the gold-star kids shuffling bank paper with idle hands. He comed the stardust out of his hair, tied his wrist to Joy’s, and kept his head down. Set his life on autopilot. They spawned. Silenced their genes’ loud demand for continuity, and tried to believe the emerging world was worth continuing. Jack indentured himself to a sub-subprime mortgage, paid for by a cybersecurity job which amounted to keeping the inhumanly rich’s accelerating fortunes from trickling down onto the crumbling potholed streets of the Unemployed world. But whatever muted ethical protests the dying embers of his young self murmured, Jack was an adult now. With responsibilities. Moral feel-goodness was a luxury of children and trust fund man-children. He was finally starting to see the world through Diego's realist lenses.

The Silence Part 14: The Business Man

2011-06-03T15:42:00.001-07:00

The Business Man

“Jack! How are you today, old sport?” Julius, Jack’s neighbor was out pacing the sidewalk again in his custom Valentino power suit, briefcase handle squeezed firmly by black gloved fingers. Eternally five minutes away from a 100th floor business meeting with corporate warlords and Saudi Arabian moguls, a meeting that would never come.

“Early day today. Lots of SNAFU at the office.” Jack winced. Julius Wagner’s was an apotheosis of the AI revolution tragedy story, the twenty first century death of a salesman. In ten years, Julius would be fossilized in a virtual museum exhibit, narrated by a neuromanced holograph of William H. Macy. “The white collar worker, one of 20th century American capitalism’s finest achievements. Here we see him during the throes of the early 21st century mass-extinction event, The Great Automation.” Julius was VP of marketing for Totech, one of Gnossis’ rival search company-turned-megaglomerates. A grey haired august veteran of 25 years, Julius had weathered the storms of corporate "right sizing" during the Great Recession of 2009, and the first wave of middle-management automation half a decade later. Till the CEOs discovered that statistical algorithm-based taste-prediction and creation along with other knowledge work automation, made Julius’ eight years of Harvard and twenty five years of experience obsolete. Two beautiful kids, 8 and 14, whom he'd no doubt kept in the dark, kept up the illusion of normalcy, until they'd realized their father was cracking. Until they'd realize that there was no hope, no promise of The Good Life, even with college, they would probably still wind up scrounging tooth and nail for the scraps doled out by the dwindling remains of government welfare, being chiseled away one 'austerity measure' at a time by the Plutocrat enclaves.

How did one explain the concept of hoplessness to a child? That their life would be one of bitter struggle for a grimly basic day-to-day survival, with no hope of ever achieving anything greater. No possibility of becoming an astronaut or a fireman or an invetor, because you are a useless human, outmoded by machines. You are not important, not a valuable member of society, not a unique and beautiful snowflake but just another purposeless parasitic nuisance, another mouth to feed, another widget of red on the balance sheet, another freeloading draining Deadweight. Your life would be forever on the cruel edge between begging and insurgency. In this light, perhaps insanity was the better option. Julius was just lucky his wife hadn’t filed for divorce after she discovered the fountain of youth, diamonds, Prada, and Carribean cruises would soon be drying up along with her husband’s high six figure salary, like so many others.

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Julius split a smile that could’ve sold a kitten-burning Humvee to an Olympia Treehugger, revealing an impervious wall of ivory teeth, bone-white from decades of nanite bleaching, now showing the first yellow-brown omens of decay. “I’ve got quite a full schedule today, myself. A big meeting with potential Tehran and Johannesburg partners, we really need to hit this one out of the park. Then it’s golfing with the Silverman and Barclay’s investment representatives in the afternoon, they need an extreme branding makeover after the fourth government bailout durig the alternative energy crash. I can pencil you in if you like, old sport.” Jack was asked each day, and each day Jack declined. The countries, corporations, and titles changed, but the armature of mad-libbed meetings and golf session remained the same. Like some fantasy football for has-been MBAs, drifting down into the trough of obsolesence on the other side of peak-humanity. Maybe Julius had had a schizophrenic break, maybe he was still there but just too scared to deal with the reality that his job had been taken over by a distributed Cloud intelligence, some unembodied nightmare spirit in cyberspace that he couldn’t even see. At least if you lost your primary care physician job to a robot doctor, you could attach your feelings of anger and hatred to a visual entity, instead of wallowing in a swamp of undirected Freudian hostility, slowly digesting yourself until nothing remained but a ball of bitter bile. Whatever it was, it wasn’t like he was alone. More than half the country had been let go too. Jack’s West-Coarst suburban street was slowly checkerboarding with black-windowed vacancies, like the gaps in Julius’ deteriorating photo-op smile.

“So Julius, you’re not going down to the layed off marketing sector demonstrations?”

Julius looked up with shocked disgust, as if Jack had just spat in his face. “Why would I even want to associate with those whining plebians, those children throwing tantrums just because they couldn’t hack it in the business world? If you were let go, it is because you deserved it. You do not have the right to ask that the rest of society to pay for your laziness and lack of skill. ‘You’ve got to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,’ a great man once said. I, meanwhile, have important business to attend to. Good day, Jackson.” Julius snorted, opened his briefcase, withdrawing a stack of white-papers and spreadsheets, the edges frayed and brown from constant handling, reshuffling; not far divorced from what his now archaic “businessman? niche once entailed. The old man armed a vintage Montblanc fountain pen, apparently marking corrections to his files. But Jack could see the papers were an illegible sphagetti-like mess of ink from countless futile revisions to a document which would obviously never see the bright fluorescent light of a corporate meeting.

“Right, see you, Julius.” Jack’s Xinjao Phasma steered itself out of the driveway, and drove Jack away.

The Silence Part 14: The Business Man

2011-05-31T16:37:00.001-07:00

The Silence part 12 - "The Troubleshooter"

2011-04-05T23:53:00.000-07:00

It started out a statistically average day.

Jack Newman shuddered awake to a cliché post-nu-folk track piped in through a cochlear implant, autotuned Dylan croak squeezed into the skinny jeans of bit-rotted Atari music nostalgia. “Yes and how many times must the times go a-changing, before the last will be first, and first be last? The answer is blowing in the wind.” It reminded him of playing Tweetcasted meat-gigs in a San Francisco Chinatown club with Diego back in college. Singing hope and change to young eyes glassed up from the buzz of GMO-free weed and the superheroic thrill of tech startups. Joy, his then-parkour partner and cybercriminology studymate weaving fractals in the incense mist as she danced to the honest rasp of his song, falling incrementally in love with her future husband.

Some dusty old stack of neurons in Jack’s groggy mind considered looking up the artist. But then he woke out of the remaining film of dream-logic to remember that only holograms and androids played gigs anymore. That this song he was hearing was being generated algorithmically by software in realtime from the archived and recycled chords and croaks and melodies and lyrics of a thousand human musicians, long-starved on discarded dumb-couches in alleys behind bankrupted LA soup kitchens. No inefficient expensive human singers songwriters producers or marketing departments involved: only batteries required.

Jack’s MyMusic app had tailored the tune to his “interests” in Dylan, Iron-n-Wine, and Lo-Fi, which hadn’t changed in decades; a self-reinforcing recommendation engine stagnation. He had been listening to essentially the same song on repeat every day for half his life, the McMusic rearranged just a little different each time, like daily thirty year old fantasies of the high school prom queen. Some other atrophied little husk of neocortex once would’ve connected the synapse dots, seen this musical emptiness as a grand arching metaphor that absolutely nailed the direction of Jack’s entire life. It would have caused a sudden and irrevocable mid-life epiphany, inspired a rash of midnight songwriting sessions in a blanket-soundproofed bathroom so as not to wake his wife. From the fertile soil of a life wrecked and decomposed by the unforeseen hurricanes of techno-cultural change would blossom illuminating lyrics, reveal the mono-no-aware in crumbling Detroit skyscrapers of the psyche. This would’ve been followed by a rejuvenatingly reckless return to open-mic meat-performing.

But the spark petered out, starved of air like a defunded University, and the moment was lost forever. Instead Jack just laughed to himself, “I don’t know how anyone ever found good music before, having to go out and listen to stuff would take forever!”

And Jack continued his day, statistically average.

As soon as his dVice sensed the beta brainwaves of awakeness, a cabinet of news sites, blood pressure readouts, and social streams jostled into the oval offices of Jack’s eyes through his iris-mounted Oracle displays. “Dis vid iz teh kuteness - android kitten booting up”, “Mass nurse, management, and lawyer layoffs continue as Gnossis robots replace knowledge workers”, “Bladder: 95% full, Blood sugar: low, Intestinal nanoflora report: new colon polyps detected”, “In lieu of economic crisis and job loss, President cuts taxes for ultrarich to negative five percent to stimulate growth.”, “ “Baltimore falls to Pleb protesters as unemployment spikes to 65% after illegalization of unions, thousands dead in urban skirmishes,” “CEO of megabank enclave Silverman and Barclay’s beheaded after UK budget cut rioters breach paramilitary droid-guarded blast doors, storm corporate tower,”

Jack wiped the infobombardment from his eyes like sleep. Only flashing loud-colored malware windows remained, to be quarantined documented and deleted by his dVice’s antiviral subroutines, like curious and vaguely threatening deep sea creatures left by receding tsunami. Jack followed a glowing green arrow overlayed on meat-ality through retinal projection, directing him to the bathroom.

“Jack, we need you at HQ a half hour early, Farhad is out sick, neural Trojan virus.” The audio message from Jack’s boss cut through the colorful infonoise with its biometric voice-recog VIP pass.

“Just drop a Sherlock 4.0 AI superroutine to handle Farhad’s protocols till I get in,” Jack morning-voiced to his headset.

“I know Jack, you wrote us the Wiki entry on the contingency. But the Sherlock’s going Fukushima on us here, bit-meltdown. The layed-off marketing directors and biotech researcher demonstrations heated up this morning, so we dispatched a few squads. One of our roboagent fired on a school autobus thinking there was a hostile inside, pretty sure it was due to bugs in the Sherlock’s facial-rec and data crossmining algorithms. Wounded the son of an Owner whom it thought was a Jobless insurgent. I’ve got the brass chewing out my Oracles here, Jack.”

Nothing like bugs in the android-cop software to brighten a dull morning. But he reveled in it: this was Jack’s job, that final fortress of human value and employability holding out against the unending economic massacre of the AI-Revolution. Jack was a Troubleshooter. Part tech support, part computer hacker, part FBI agent, the Troubleshooters kept the monkey wrenches out of the AI-run machine cogwork, and kept the 60% of the country now unemployed “Plebs” at bay from the Owner Class gated city-states, through private security firms like Cybersec.

“Ok, Ethan, set your mood regulators to chill for a cycle. I’ll get you a temp patch right now and be in office ASAP. It’s probably just some rogue algos or botnet barbs left in the Google rank code that was recycled into Sherlock’s neural net kernel. I told’em it would be best to just grind out some clean programming, but you know the Owners aren’t going to pay for any coding salary hours they can steal, automate, or ‘source to Africa.”

“Thanks, Jack.”

Jack’s wife was in the kitchen, stirring herself some Earl Grey with one eye on a news aggregator site projected onto a section of smart wall; a looping collage of angry picket lines, fires, tear gas, gunshots, confused commentary, like NPR video feeds from a comfortably distant populist uprising in the Middle East or China bleeding into the local 6 O’clock news. She was fully dressed in her scrubs and ventilated clogs, as if about to head out for her shift. Again. Jack frowned.

Jack’s arms and hands flailed like a ‘netjunkie in withdrawal as he got to work in his augmented reality virtual headspace. He summoned an evo-alg search hound with each finger, fanned hands and sent them backdooring through the Lvl 7 Premium Internet with the forged IDs of a hedge fund CEO, a senator, and an Indian Water Baron. Index and thumb plucked choice needles from the piling haystacks returned by the hounds, spliced together the ribbons into a bandage of patch code, wrapped it up into a .Exe pill and fastball-pitched the stopgap fixes to Cybersec HQ for the malfunctioning knowledge-worker AI. Then he got lost in android lolcat videos and gadget pr0n.

When the Babblon VISO (Virtu-Spatial Operating Environment) hit the market, every drooling geek and their network was camping out around a Mega Mart, clawing tooth and nail to try the uber-epic 3D touchscreen interface. Including Jack, despite his wife’s confused protests against his expensive otaku fervor. But eventually the future-gloss of re-enacting the Minority Report virtual CSI “conducting scene” wore off, his daughter’s shits and giggles of swimming through swamps of drunken facebomb party pics with her friends stopped being funny, and the honeymoon phase ended. Gadget mundanity set in, as always, and people discovered, much to Babblon’s shareholders’ horror, that the spastic handwaving mostly just made you look deeply batshit, like you were shadow boxing imaginary daemons. Sent people walking off diagonal at parties. The VISO headsets receded back into the long-tail margins of techspert powertools, as the lay population favored more discrete user interfaces. Joy still called him a mad daemon boxer in spite of Jack’s repeated and rigorous arguments for their necessity in his line of work. He really was fighting invisible malicious Loa.

Joy noticed the peripheral motion, uttered some non-commital vocalization of acknowledgement of Jack’s presence, not bothering to even make a snarky comment about the VISO. Jack and his wife hadn’t exactly been on speaking terms since the big fight after she was let go by the medical center. She’d taken it hard. Their finances had taken it hard, too, as they joined the single-income ranks. They were getting daily calls from an AI mortgage officer’s voice synthesizer requesting delinquent payments on the house, three months deep. Taking Evvy out of St. Luke’s had come up in conversation more than once. Enrolling their daughter in public school was out of the question, since the “austerity measure” budget cuts that payed for bank CEO bonuses had slashed education funding 80% leaving public schools little more than feeder farms for the ballooning prison-industrial complex. But options were running thin.

Jack was still sorting through work protocols and Joy was still stirring her tea, now engrossed in an idie blog called “Cooking on Zero Budget” and this minute’s hottest news clip of a robot factory bombing. Closeups of a Starbeans android-barista’s smile melting off grotesquely in vermillion flames, plastic renditions of The Scream.

Jack made an attempt at reaching across the digital divide.

“You know there’s an App for that,” Jack said, glancing at the tea cup.

“Yeah, I like making my own tea,” Joy looked up briefly at the kitchen helper bot, giving the Jetsons rip-off “Rosie” clone a dirty eye. Errrrr, wrong answer. Thank you for playing, Jack.

“Kayla told me there might’ve been some breakthroughs in the negotiations at the clinic. There’s nothing set in stone yet, but I’ve got a good feeling about this. One of the EMT teams got called in to work for a couple hours last night. Seems the robots can’t do everything after all.”

“That’s good news. Real good.” Jack autoresponsed, whilst incessantly refreshing email and social media feeds with one hand. In the other he grabbed the uneaten half of a McDenny’s double cheeseburger out of the fridge, poured himself a cup of coffee-flavored Five Hour Energy. He popped the burger in its congealed puddle of grease into the micro. Normally Jack would’ve just thrown it out, but he’d feel guilty given the new normal of a tightly constrained budget. That’s when he noticed he’d never seen the cup before, which looked like designer-ware, like a miniature of a 50’s spaceship. Come to think of it, he didn’t recognize any of the plates in the myoelectric arms of the robotic washer/dryer/tablesetter.

“Nice cup there. New?” Jack asked.

“That’s printed bone china, made from ossein rattan. It’s local. I got it down at the barter market at Lilith community center yesterday. We needed some new dishes.” Joy shrugged.

“Yeah. Think you might have let me in on it first? I thought we agreed on full budget-disclosure, given our new circumstances.” Jack said around a mouthful of hot bun and cold meat-cheese-substitute lardiness, thermally uneven from the microwave.

“Jeeze, end of the world, huh? Sorry.” Joy turned to watch a video-article on the smart-cabinet about a new 90% efficient solar panel invented in Brazil after Big Agro copyrighted genes infiltrated all their ethanol corn strains.

“You know, maybe we should get into algae. Kayla’s getting half her groceries from her balcony farm. And biofuels. I was thinking maybe I could go back to e-Uni, get my enviroscience degree.” Joy said.

“Maybe. We’ll talk about it, later.” Jack shoveled the rest of the burger, flooded it down with energy drink, while throwing on his Cybersec clothes, hopping into shoes, whipping off a last few email responses. On the wall-screen, the tension was ratcheting up at a construction site which turned into a standoff between construction robots and protesting teamster union workers who refused to leave bulldozers, tree-hugged i-beams, as Owner suits shouted threats through megaphones.

“Honey could you please drop Kara off at school today?” Joy said.

“Why? The Kidpool will self-drive her there just fine, and I’ve put a parental lock on its GPS nav, so there’s no possibility of her pushing buttons and getting lost downtown again-”

“Look, Jack, there’s just a lot of upheaval going on right now. Have you ever read ‘The Black Swan’? An unexpected event we can’t understand except in hingsight. Everything is up in the air with the strikes and protests and violence, and who knows what else might happen. I’d just feel a lot better if you personally, physically drove our daughter to school.” Joy closed, opened her eyes, fiddling idle thumbs unconsciously as if typing on one of those old smart phones, a something she did when she was really nervous. A childhood talisman of muscle memory.

“I would, honey, but I just got messaged by Cybersec, they need me in the office ASAP.”

“Jack, I need you to do this for me, please-“

“A roboagent went haywire this morning, nearly killed an innocent. Lives are at stake here, Joy.”

“Maybe your daughter’s life is at stake here, Jack, did you ever think of that? While you were waving your hands around playing reality like some video game?” Joy turned away. Her micropore palm sensors detected elevated anger endorphins, triggering a therapist App. A flickering cyan holograph of a bearded Bill Murray look-alike in an armchair asked in accentless English for Jack and his wife to count to ten, breathe, then to describe their feelings in the first person to virtual ducks as if they each’s spouse. Joy force-terminated the App with a sharp stab of a finger.

Jack felt a mixing magma of shock and hurt flare, then harden into a hard lump in his chest before it could burst through the bedrock of verbalization.

“Joy, listen to me. Things will be fine. The turmoil is happening out there, in the city, where the freeloaders who lived on the social safety net are angry cause they’re not getting their ‘entitlement’ pensions and bargaining rights and medicare and public education and public law enforcement. Buy we’re in Blue County, a gated Enclave; we’re safe in the Owner Class domain. Evvy is safe. These news feeds are messing with your sense of perspective, pure sensationalism to score viewer eyeballs. You’re blowing this out of proportion. Trust me, the car’s autopilot is as safe as if I was driving her myself. The trouble is going to simmer down after the vote, and if we just keep the security drones and agents up and running, things will get back to normal in no time. You’ll see.

"Damn it Jack, you treat everything like it’s a ‘problem’ with a ‘solution’ you can just find a patch for, like a bug in a program, and it’s all going to work out, as long as the programs are running smoothly. But machines don't magically solve all our problems, they just create whole new categories of problems, and make us blind to them." Joy crossed her arms, rubbed her creasing forehead. Jack edged his way past the now awake and vacuuming Rosie bot, snuck an arm around the cool cotton scrubs of his wife’s waist.

“I know it’s been hard since they let you go, I get it. But maybe you need to stop doing this to yourself, with the uniform, everyday-“ Jack began, Joy pulled away. Jack quickly retreated from the no-fly zone of the kitchen, before being shot down by a cruise missile glare; kissing rights were obviously still sanctioned away.

“Jack, you are in no position to be pop-psychoanalyzing me. You don’t know what I do and do not need. What I need is to be out there doing what I’m good at, helping people, not lying around like some useless house cat.” The viral clip of Lucky-Robo-Neko waking up, stretching its carbon fiber fluidic muscles played on the wall screen as if on queue. The edges of Joy’s mouth wobbled for a moment, then she steeled them, swallowing the urge to unravel. She refused again Jack’s attempt at consolation.

“Just go, Jack,” she pointed to the door, “Go do your job.”

New Blog

2011-03-12T15:58:00.001-08:00

In light of the fact that I've been recently buffer-overflowing many a blog comment section with mile-long borderline dissertations, I've decided to Get My Own Damn Site and start a new (master) blog:

Post-Futures

There I'll be dumping my rants, manifestos, over-hyphenated polemical diatribes, and generally unloading my brain RAM. I will also link to all the fiction here.

I recommend you just go to Post-Futures instead of here as all new material will be added there.

The Silence Part 11: MACHINATIONS

2011-02-15T20:15:00.000-08:00

“Forget 4G. Negative One-G is the future,” Sergio spieled the headline in audible WIRED font. Or whatever that long gone pre-Disconnect web publication was called. He waved his shallot-beaded fork around in curlicue motions like a laser pointer, as though circling some world shattering bullet point on the projection screen of the unusually blue sky.

“Totally.” I went with sustained affirmation, always the smart choice with Sergio.

“I’m serious. Tree bark. That’s where it’s heading.”

“Tree bark, of course. Um, what?” I sipped almost-desalinated water. The few percent saline content gave it an oddly sports drink like tang, reminded me of the Powerade analog we had way too much of in Elysium Vault. The Guugul CIO had a thing for the ‘electrolyte’ drinks, having essentially lived on them in his parent’s basement back in his startup engineering days, and we had several storerooms full of “thirst quenchers” thanks to his micromanagement of Vault rations.

“Tree bark,” Sergio reiterated, pausing, as if to let unheard echoes and reverberations resound the gravitas of the words.

“Take pieces of tree bark, grind them up nice, mix it with water. I know it sounds crazy but stay with me,” he’d started with the big histrionic hand motions at this point, nearly knocking over his own glass of brackish water, taking the pitch up several notches. I glanced around, luckily there were only two other patrons having lunch, an elderly couple, too engrossed in their own food and civil disputes. The culinary sector was not exactly booming.

“So you take that woody pulp, and you strain it through a screen, like an old mesh door or something. Then you dry it out, and what have you got?”

I really had no idea what I had, at that point, except the gist of another one of Sergio’s patented cockamamie get-rich-quick schemes. He was out of his seat at this point, arms up in the air, wily eyed.

“Static screens! This is going to be huge, like the invention of electricity, or Farmville!” Sergio was clearly seeing hallucinogenic visions of entrepreneur stardom, bright lights and Big Idea book deals. I made a mental note after he wore himself down to remind him to stop binging on Old World tech conference videos.
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“So then we use these cylindrical pigment delivery devices, I’m thinking of calling them ‘keyboard sticks’ since they allow you to enter text onto physical objects. What do you think, too retro-buzz? Anyways, you use these keyboard sticks to print ink text messages onto these pieces of flattened tree bark. Static Screens. They’re like computer screens, except they’re fixed. Mostly. You can’t delete the text you’ve entered unless you use a special erasable pigment, and you can’t open a new file, or copy-paste or change the font or anything. But see, that’s the beauty of it.”

“You’re talking about paper. Mail. Books. Printing press. Gutenberg.” I offered.

“Paper? What the hell is paper? No, no. Static screens. This is so going Friendbook. If you get on board now I'll sweeten the deal to 40% plus a big executive stock option package.”

Sergio’s child-like entrepreneur smile swished about in ellipses as he luxuriated in a mouthful of his ‘scallop terrine with frisee salad.’ The luxuriation was a placebo, though. We were ‘dining’ at Lady Lala’s Luscious Luncheonette, ostensibly the “Crème De La Crème of Ibayzaar dining.” In truth it was a restaurant for people who wanted to *feel* like connoisseurs, or VIPs talking high-shop over a power lunch.

Reality was the food tasted just as crap as anywhere else in sub-executive Ibayzaar. My French Dip lamb sandwich au jus wasn’t too far from eating goat ass, I think the ‘lamb’ was made from the mutant shitake mushrooms that grew near the mouths of the sewer pipes down on Jobs Street. It didn’t help that they were focusing too hard on presentation, I could’ve sworn the glassy look on the golden flambé was achieved with hairspray. Marketing over substance. Very Old World.

Still, Lady Lala’s did their best, painted the inside walls of a shipping container to resemble exposed brick. Daily specials written in chalked cursive on a slab of (cracked) blackboard, and waitresses in strict uniform and tableside manner. (The container was apparently a lost shipment of Halloween discount outlet French Maid costumes. They all affected cheesy fake accents, but who knew what French sounded like anymore? Points for presentation, A for effort. I took style notes for me and Cyclops’ future ratburger diner, and tips on how not to cook.

“I’ll have to give it some more thought,” I said after a minute of pretending to be thinking about Sergio’s offer. I went to take another sip of water, remembered electrolytes, then reneged on the action.

Sergio sighed the long professorial sigh that warned I was in for a Ted Talks’ worth of intellerati-speak.

“Communication, it’s fundamental. What defines us as a species.” Sergio resumed after swallowing.

“In The Beginning Was The Text. See, at first, we humans back in the prehistoric Chased By Dinosaurs time, since it was so dangerous with all the T-Rexes running around eating us out of our jeeps like canned doggie food, we mostly just stayed in our solitary caves, made propane campfires, watched ‘Tube videos and played single player games. Subsisted on a diet of hot pockets.”

“But we eventually got lonely and bored, and someone thought, ‘I wish I could, like, talk to someone.’ And so the first text was invented, although no one knows exactly when, or on what phone, although some Nokia ‘brick’ fossils have been excavated from closets and recycling bins carbon dating to like, 100 BD . At first the texts were just primitive guttural grunts like, ‘lol’, and ‘zomg dis iz koooool’, and ‘stfu n00b’. But eventually the proto humans started forming semi-complete sentences, first with that crazy British guy Shakespeare in 1492 who nobody can understand cause he was new at it, and then the Egyptian Iliad, then it started getting really sophisticated with Harry Potter during the Enlightenment, and culminated ultimately in Twilight, pretty much the epitome of literature. The digital fossil record, the ebook sales and #trending topics data we have on the Twilight series pretty much speak for themselves.”

“So we humans were like, ‘Ok, this is pretty dope, talking to people, online communities, I’m totally feeling less existential and suicidal so I can stop posting self-pitying shit on my livejournal. And, now we’ve got electric stoves and flying cars which is totally cherry. But still, I feel like something’s missing. I think I’d like to actually Face 2 Face with someone.’ And by this time, dinosaurs were in trouble because they didn’t have opposable thumbs with which to text to keep up with the latest feeds, then the zombie apocalypse at last wiped out the dinosaurs, and the humans had headshotted all the zombies – that’s called natural selection and evolution in case you didn’t know, it’s pretty cool. Jocks (Homo Jockus) AKA Neanderthals also went extinct, when their reserves of creatine energy bars and ESPN dried up as people stopped leaving their caves where they worked and played and pretty much did everything on the intertubes.

“So with the dinosaurs and jocks out of the picture, the humans (mostly Homo Geekus by then) were free to go to tech conferences and cosplay cons and message board meatups and other Face2Face events and actually see each other in person. Problem was, they had only texted up until this point, so there was no vocal language plus their vocal chords and larynxes had atrophied from disuse into vestigial appendices. This moment in time is known in science as ‘The Big Ummmm’, a global awkward silence of epic proportions, and is well-documented in the cosmic microwave background radiation of the Twitter and Google trends record by a sudden crash in #Jersey Shore search traffic.

“Then out of nowhere, a man, some called him “The American Idol”, some called him “Jesus”, sacrificed his cool composure for us and started singing a Justin Beiber song that everyone knew. At first everyone just lul’d and made juvenile jokes about him, Photoshopped his face onto women’s bodies and lolcats, then people started making jokes about how cliché other people’s jokes were, then soon there was a Great Flood of ad hominems that incited The World Flame War, breaking out across the thirteen continents. But the man just kept singing Justin Beiber despite receiving the penultimate epicest bashing in the history of the universe. Then, something amazing happened. One by one, people began to see the futility of their attacks on the man, and some deep inner quantum leap was made, an inner self that was not just part of the shallow spiteful mob-essence of junior high was unlocked, nothing short of the creation of cities. One by one, people started to join in the singing. Soon the shitty Justin Beiber song filled up the hotel lobby that was hosting the Eden Con meat with karaoke, and there was much loving of their neighbors and coming together as one big human family that they’d never had isolated all those years in their caves. There was hugging and kissing and some groping and kinky fursuit sex – sex was also invented at this first physical meatup, and God saw it was good.

“But corporations like PepsiCoke Inc. and the United States and Guugol were alarmed as people were spending all their time having IRL relationships and meat-talking and not wasting millions of hours online on their servers and texting on their smartphone networks. November 25th, 2020, a “day to be remembered in infamy” the Mega Mart CEO dubbed it, was the first Black Friday that the Fortunate 500 companies failed to sell enough crap to get their balance sheets out of the red, also known as “Red Friday”. Thus the “Red Scare” began. People were asked to out their Red neighbors who participated in meat conversations longer than two minutes, wrote posts longer than 140 characters, or who failed to text at least five thousand messages a day. ‘There could be a Red in your social network!’

“People who continued in the “deviant” social behavior were branded “communityists”. (Europe and Tibet were labeled red communityists states, AKA the Axis of Evil) The corporation-network-nations began marketing campaigns like, “shorter is better” featuring RealityTube celebrities typing two letter texts. They propagated dubious studies, funded by the Kotch brothers and other thinktanks, that showed Face 2 Face conversation could cause loss of eye-thumb coordination, and could lead to dangerous ‘relationships’, physical contact and hazardous meat-sex. They instated a national holiday, “Christmas” – which comes from the latin ‘chrinsumere’, meaning ‘to consume’, and mass, or ‘Day of Mass Consumption’. Christmas was a bizarre ritual involving a competition of who could buy the most smartphones and smartpads and game systems and trendy clothes and exercise equipment and other products for every single person they knew, products that ended up getting returned or thrown away or left to collect dust in the garage.”

“Entranced by their shiny new devices, humans began getting caught up in them again, meat-talking to each other less and less, spending more time enamored with countless apps. Attention spans and vocabularies dwindled. The deep interpersonal connections they’d made eroded again as they succumbed to cultural entropy and reverted back into the monosyllabic 140 character lolspeak from whence they came. Addicted to the monthly Hot New Tech, the latest gadget, 3g, 4g, 5g, 6g. Unlimited texting. Hi-Def video. Virtu-‘Sperience. Even walking around in the meat-world, sitting across from each other in a café, people still only talked through their little shiny screens. Long, well-thought out posts became instant messages, then instnt msgs then mcro msgs, then nanmgs. Ashes to ashes, lulz to lulz. Humans at last arrived back in their lonely caves, back at their monkey-like txt-grunting from which they had started. This is illustrated in the documentary ‘Planet of The Apes.”

“Ok, ok, ok, ease up on the history lesson spamming a sec, buffer overflow, Sergio, dude.” I breakpointed. “Firstly, are you sure you’ve got your facts straight? And secondly, what the hell does any of this have to do with paper, I mean ‘Static Screens’?” My sandwich had gone cold over Sergio’s fifteen minute diatribe, not that I was planning on finishing it anyway.

“Of course it’s accurate. I fact checked everything on a Wikipedia archive. And it’s like I said, the Ancients had texting right, it’s just they got the format wrong. We make technology, then technology makes us. A steady diet of hi-speed constant texting and status-updating ultimately leaves people distracted, lonely, unhappy. That’s where the Static Screen Negative 1G network comes in. It slows communication back down to the human level.”

I nodded, afraid to say anything provocative that might set off another verbal landmine from the mouth of my exceedingly eccentric potential partner. I guess there were a few snowflakes of wisdom in his mad blizzard of spaz-warped babble. Paper would become a useful commodity, especially when our burgeoning little societal experiment reached the level where people started wanting to read books, and newspapers. You could be the next Citizen Kane if you got in on the ground floor with the right connections. Hell, it was like the second coming of the printing press, you could easily disseminate information, organize a resistance, maybe break the Ibayzaar deathgrip. Of course, eventually the internet 2.0 would be invented and come around to kill your print empire (again). But then who knew when that would be? We had home-gene mod hacking due to its user-friendly simplicity, but no cure for polio or antibiotics. Some had managed to get solar-powered electrical motors up, but not a clue how to get a combustion or steam engine running. Ibayzaar was a place of disparate technologies, like being in the Dark Ages one moment and a sci-fi flick at the same time.

“Can I get this to go, ma chérie?” Sergio hailed a French Maid waitress in a tacky lace-up bodice who proceeded to giggle and pretend-dust our table with her plastic feather duster.

“Oui, oui, monsieur. Would you lack any dessieut wis zat?” The bubbly cosplayer asked, hands folded down in front, black and white poofy shoulder sleeves like twin chocolate frosted éclairs. Eclairs soaked in hairspray, I reminded myself.

“No, no dessert, Violette, your company is more than my daily recommended sugar intake,” Sergio took her florally manicured hand in his, leaning down to kiss it. I was always taken aback by how this crazy man-child could be such a damn player, womanizer, even. He was no cover-boy Adonis, although he did have a certain boyish Latin charm, and attempted to dress way above his pay grade, like he was eternally waiting for an upper-echelon business meeting to start, soon on to bigger and better things. But I think mostly women were lured in by his intense aura of manic-compulsive lunacy, which they mistook for confidence.

“Sergio! (Sershio) I am workeeng!” The waitress reclaimed her hand, although not forcefully enough to have displayed convincing outrage. She threw up a smoke screen of feather duster in his face playfully, causing him to sneeze, and laugh his annoying high pitched laugh, like a child squeezing air out of a balloon.

“So am I.” Sergio winked. “I’d like to introduce you to my good friend and very soon to be business associate, Jericho. Jericho, Violette.” I waved subtly that ended up looking pretty gay in retrospect.

“Enchanté, monsieur Jericho,” Violette smiled at her new gay friend, then aimed back at Sergio. “Meet me out back in a half hour, I must ‘ave a word wis zee staff.” Violette clopped off, whipping the duster at two of the other French Maids who were lounging around playing cards on the company dime.

***

In all honesty I was not really buying into Sergio’s ideas. (or perhaps “drinking the koolaid” is more accurate) But in truth, my prospects were, to put it mildly, not looking good. Cy and I were going underwater on our payments at the Chateau Du Hole-In-The-Wall. A month later the landlord’s cancered-up meatthugs came and roughed us up in our coffin-flat (on the bright side the 6x6 apartment was so small they didn’t have enough room to wind a punch more than a few inches. They left me with only six cracked ribs). We ate cheap, which meant fallout weed. It’s not bad, kind of like the seaweed used for sushi nori, but with an aftertaste like chemotherapy. Living on fallout weed porridge has its benefits. That shit will grow anywhere and it’s always warm on account of the radioactive isotopes, but you gotta watch your rad count or you’re likely to grow an arm out your stomach. Or, you know, die horribly of radiation sickness. After we got beat down again and started projectile vomiting blood along with the nuke-soup, I finally decided to take up a second gig, warehousing boxes of synthehol and petri-dish meat for The Derelict, via networking through Syn.

When that wasn’t enough, I hit a new low and started dancing on The Derelict’s Ladies Night for a stint. As decidedly uncool as I was with the idea, it was either shake my junk for money or sign my life away and become another victim of the Sweat Shop human power plants. “Love Machine” I was stage named, for my cybernetic arm, and my stiff-limbed possibly genetic lack of dancing ability which worked to my robotic Chip n Dale persona’s advantage. I gained a disturbing fanbase of Netfreak nutjobs and chicks who had some fucked up kinky desire to fuck robots.

Lady Three Jane was a notable VIP room regular for “The Love Machine”, and a loony but generous benefactress. She was the damaged-goods daughter of some absent, controlling Old World Silicon Valley mogul with an obsession with sci-fi, who named her after his favorite cyberpunk character. She liked to give orders, liked to roleplay. Sometimes I’d be the robot love slave called ‘Wintermute’ (apparently another character from her dad’s books), sometimes she’d bust out the latex and cuffs and I’d get whippings, verbal and physical, dressed in her father’s business suit, as she screamed stuff like, “Fuck you, you selfish bastard!” Sessions would generally end with her crying to me about her daddy issues, then abruptly running out the door in tears. The secondary stress was fucking draining.

From what I’d gathered, her dad’s company and fortune had gone up in smoke, a corporate casualty of the colliding digital continents of the United Territories of Googul and EurasiaNet. Edged out in a network dominance war. Out Edged. He’d jumped out the window of his 102nd floor corner office a week later. Three Jane was the lone mad relic of a crumbled digital Cloud empire, fished from the wreckage by a family friend in the Ibayzaar inner circle, encased in a straight jacket and padded room at the top of a corporate tower, like a cracked crown jewel in a museum display. Preserved with humble reverence as a reminder of former West-Coast entrepreneurial grandeur. Being the only survivor of a Googul Vault invasion myself, maybe we weren’t so different. I guess what Three Jane taught me was everybody had problems, for some it was more psychological, for some more concretely economic.

For Sergio, the problems were psychological and economic. His legs had that wiry strength that you get from extreme physical activity but not enough nutrition and protein for the body to properly rebuild new muscle tissue after the lactic breakdown. It was fairly obvious he’d spent some ‘quality time’ in the human powerplant sweatshops, lots of it if he’d become a debt slave. You could go crazy down there, and who knows how long he’d been. Heat stroke was also common as the sardine-like proximity combined with elevated body heat generated by the physical exertion of generator peddling could cause temperatures to soar to sweltering triple digits. The system was designed to wear people out to husks of their former selves. Planned obsolescence, like the short fixed lifespans of Old World cars, fashion, Asian factory workers. He didn’t like to talk about his time in the human power plants, which he referred to as, “the dark time”. Said it messed with his aura of positivity.

“Great, my first business connection is a half baked nut showing schizophrenic symptoms of Post Traumatic Internet Withdrawal Disorder,” I remembered thinking. Still, he was enthusiastic, you had to give him that. From what I’d gleamed between flash flood-of-consciousness rants, Sergio’s day job was as a delivery guy, a courier, mostly freelance. Holding down a job necessitated hanging onto at least a modicum of sanity, right? Either way, I wasn’t too many anemic paychecks away from going back to sleeping in a cardboard box or melting into an indiscriminable puddle of radioactive goo.

***

We took a stroll down Geepeeyess street, to run an “errand” before the “business” with Violette. Also known as “Craigslist District”, it was one of the first Ibayzaar favelas scaffolded upon the crumbling vestiges of an Old World megamall. It had since gestated into one of the biggest commercial centers of Ibayzaar, where rumors said you could get literally and notoriously ‘anything’.

A favorite was Rei’s Chibi Pet Shop. A pink-themed boutique selling cats gene-hacked to resemble Hello Kitty!, with gigantic heads, tiny eyes, and vaguely anthropomorphic bone structures. “My little sis loves these things.” Sergio pet a beady-eyed kitty homunculus.

“How much for this one, Rei?” Sergio pointed to “Kiki” the nametag on the white-furred chibikitty who was now licking the palm of his hand affectionately.

“Ten Ebuck, good discount for you my brother, Sergio.” Seijyo The shopowner said, through a big Asian sun-mottled smile like the peel of a ripe banana.

Sergio exhaled as if gut-punched. “Phew, wish I had the credits, but you know, business been pretty slow lately. Sure you can’t slash it any lower for me?”

Rei’s Shinjuku-polite sales smile wavered, but held. “Sumimasen friend Sergio, no can lower. Business not so good also. Cost raise kitty, plus seller fee, rent, nine Ebuck each. Losing money already.” Sergio sighed.

Swaths of customers seemed to be leaving Rei’s and flocking across the street to Pet-Mart, a massive block-size big-box ripoff of Rei’s Chibi Pet Shop, recently opened, with a golden “Ibayzaar Preferred Seller” emblem. The prices were rock bottom at three Ibucks each but most of the chibi animals had milky crossed eyes, arthritic movements and blotchy fur. It was clear the DNA-tweaking had left the cats with as many recessive gene ailments as an Old World inbred Euro-monarch. A sign read, “Half the lifespan, but twice the kawaii!”

“That is deeply fucked,” I uttered, dry heaving a little.

“No shit,” Sergio concurred sadly.

Rei’s shopkeeper front at last gave way to a frown, like Mr. Miyagi disappointed in the lack of harmony in the universe. “I do this all life, father teach neko bushido. Pet Mart steal technique, only make shit obake kitty. No bushido. No quality. No respect worker. No respect life. Rei only quality, like like Sony, like samurai. Pet Mart only shit. Like China Foxconn factory.” Fuck-sukon. Rei brushed the fur of the mewling Kiki like a beloved daughter, as if to reassure her of her value, and himself of his.

We continued West on Geepeeyess and took a right at Page street. “You know Pet Mart’s squeezing of Rei’s out of the market is not an isolated anecdote, not the exception, but the norm. It’s ugly out there.” Sergio remarked.

And the more we looked, the more I saw that it was true. The Plastigicians, another well-known family-run shop that made masterfully crafted plastic sculpture and pottery with a rackety half-working RepRap 3d printer was overshadowed by a Cup n Bowl Warehouse. All around, fixture coffee shops and restaurants like Lady Lala’s were being gobbled up by hordes of Buckster’s and McDanny’s spreading like drug resistant e-coli.

“There’s a new breadline of obsolesced John Henries showing up every month. Couple that with the fact that Ibayzaar Big Players will steal your biz model and market share the week after you launched your new product line and the picture is not so hot for your average bright-eyed entrepreneur. The game is seriously rigged. That’s why we’ve got to play this smart, my friend. We’ve got to go lateral.” Sergio tapped his forehead and looked left and right. Sometimes he seemed so lucid and sharp, but then he’d do or say something that suggested he had no idea what he was talking about.

We came at last to a log cabin, made from real sequoia logs, with a rustic carved-wood sign reading, “Uncle Bunyan’s Timber”. There was a very tall, broad shouldered bearish man in overalls standing outside, having a conversation with one of the Ibayzaar suits backed up by a pair of mercs packing heavy. In his effeminately cut, pearly dinner jacket, the suit seemed even more girlish in the face of the Bounty Man’s brawn, but he also appeared to have the verbal upper hand in whatever they were discussing. The lumberjack did not look at all happy, grizzly beard rippling atop grinding jaw muscles.

The suit appeared to serve up some kind of ultimatum, given his stiff posture, like a circus conductor trying to assert dominance over an angry lion to get him into a cage. The lumberjack stood silent, stoic, iconic. Turned to glance at his cabin, back to the suit. Suddenly reached for the clipboard the suit was holding, and ripped it in half with his bare calloused hands. The suit cowered, covering his rose-tinted spectacles with a limp wrist and making a pathetic squeak like a frightened mouse. The assault rifles snapped onto the lumberjack’s neck like electric prods. The suit regained his composure, straightened his bleach white collar, shaken, but also resigned. No longer dueling, more like preparing to attend the funeral of a not particularly loved relative. The corporate entourage about faced.

It was Alistair, the sniveling blood sucking little bastard who had Cyclops and I locked up and “interrogated” under suspicion we were robots plotting to blow up town square. I prayed he wouldn’t get close enough for fear of what involuntarily harm I might cause to his person.

“Ah, Jericho. The one that got away.” Blinding flash of white teeth.

“Alistair. Still crucifying the innocent and washing out the spots with paperwork, I see.” I said.

Alistair clucked. “How far the apple has fallen from the Guugol tree. From one of the few Chosen network-nation Vault Dwellers to wallowing in that festering shanty slum Derelict Town, playing revolutionary with these roaches and their lack of… refinement.” Alistair swiveled his upturned nose to sniff at Sergio, nodding as if finding his point proven.

“You can steal all the nicest Old World costumes, powder your nose all you want, we both know who the real ugly cancer in the stomach of ‘civilization’ is here.” I spat, literally.

“You and your criminal friends enjoy your little commune, you hear? Progress is coming, old sport. Modernity 2.0.” Alistair signaled to his motorcade to move out. “Oh and could you do me a favor and talk some sense into that deluded ape over there?” Alistair waved offhandedly in the direction of the lumberjack, as if brushing dandruff from his clavicle.

“I’ve gotta see the old man.” Sergio ran off behind the cabin where the lumberjack had skulked off, I followed. The big guy had an axe the size of a traffic light and was hacking a two-foot diameter log up into sections like he was chopping farmer’s sausage on a cutting board. And about as easily.

“Uncle Bunyan, hey, Papa B, John, what’s the deal?” Sergio was standing there beside the lumberjack, trying to get him to talk. The lumberjack seemed to be mumbling to himself while he swung the axe as hard as he could. Each blow echoed like a gunshot, a pound of wood chips exploding outward, and Sergio found himself hiding behind one of Uncle Bunyan’s large shoulders to cover from the shrapnel.

“Great axe, this. I reckon you could chop down one ‘o them concrete sky-touchers, given the proper sharpening.” Uncle Bunyan said at last.

“What happened, man? Come on, just put down the axe.” Sergio placed a hand on Bunyan’s back. He shrugged it off. On the next chop, a piece of wood the size of a fist flew wild and hit Sergio in the nose.

“You know my momma, she hated machines. Daddy was obsessed with that ‘World of Wizardcraft’, lived in the attic with his computers, never came down to see us. Gave me a whippin’ if I ever interrupted his dungeon raids.” Bunyan stopped chopping for a moment, resumed. “Momma said the devil’ed possessed him, came in straight through the wires. She thanked the good Lord when He brought down the second Great Flood to wash away the ‘lectronic sins of the world with the EMPs.” Eeyayumpees “’Things is finally goin’ right for a change,’ she said. Daddy was real angry when the machines died, and he left me and momma to find his lost World of Wizardcraft out there, but we all knew there wasn’t none to be found. ‘Devil finally took his soul, all we can do is pray for him,’ mama said.” Bunyan rolled away the last disc of wood, sawdust blowing in the wind as he moved to a new log.

“When Armageddon done broke loose with people lootin’ then killin’ and then eatin’ each other, momma and I escaped up into the mountains, to live just like how the pioneers of the ‘ol US of A used to live, before the machines, before the dark times. Mama had an old picture book, Paul Bunyan: the greatest lumberjack that ever lived, who could level a forest with one swoop of his axe and who got so thirsty from all his hard logging work he drank up all the water in the Grand Canyon, leaving just a trickle. She showed me how to swing an axe, move logs, and the Paul Bunyan book filled in the rest. I kind of thought of him as my real daddy, you know? And so I became John Bunyan.”

“When momma died of the whoopin’ cough that one devil’s winter, I didn’t know what to do. I felt like, like I was lost in the deepest darkest redwood forest. I thought ‘bout takin’ my own life, I did, at one point. But then I thought, “What would Daddy Bunyan do?” And I knew he wouldn’t just give in to the devil and lay down and die like my poor first daddy, bless his soul. No, old Paul would have Babe his ox pull the sun down into the darkness to light his path, and then chop his way out. So that’s what I did, I started chopping, chopping like my life depended on it. And you know what? Eventually winter passed, Spring came along, and I pulled through and moved on. Just like the great pioneers Lewis and Clark on the Oregon trail headin’ west into the sunset. Then one day I found this little group of pioneers like me forming a settlement on the Pacific coast and thought, ‘Here, I’ve found my home at last!’”

Bunyan finally stopped swinging his axe, the sweat raining from his brow, his shirt damp to the waist. He leaned on his axe handle, head weighing heavily on his forearms, the muscles large but earned through years of Earthy labor, not like a meathead’s injected insta-buffness used as a blingy fashion accessory.

“Now I see the devil machines have finally found their way here. You want to know what I told that tuxedo wearin’ demon? I said, ‘No sir, I am not just gonna keel over and give up the business I built from the soil up with my bare (bayur) hands cause some gosh durned city slickers got them some fancy new fangled tree-cutting dinglehoppers! There’s nothing can’t be overcome by a strong will and hard work! This is America goddamnit! I’ll show them dandy smoothskins and their machines yet, you just wait and see.” Exhausted, his age was more apparent now, hair gone a deep wintry grey, back hunching, rubbing his wrists stiffening with arthritis, an archaic relic of a simpler time.

“John, buddy, just take it easy ok? Just breath, think this through. We really need you with us on this project. I need you. You’re the best- ok, you’re the only lumber supplier I’ve got.” Sergio tried consoling Bunyan again, again he shrugged off the hand, then finally relented.

“What is it John, is it money? I can’t get you the cash right now, our venture is not quite at the return stage yet, but I guarantee you this static screen thing is going to be huge-“

“I don’t need no money, Sergio. (Surjeeyo) All I need is to work harder and beat that blasted tree chopping machine.”

“John, maybe it’s time to put down the axe-“ Sergio tried to gently pry it away but the lumberjack snatched it back, furious.

“I ain’t never puttin’ this axe down! I’m Paul Bunyan!” Bunyan rose to his full near-7ft height and redoubled his efforts, swinging in great arcs as if his life depended on it, splitting tree after tree with ungodly speed. It was unbelievable, majestic, even, and maybe for a moment we believed he was the real Paul Bunyan, believed that he could bring the forest down with a single swoop, believed that he might defy the odds and overcome the machines. Then the moment passed.

Something creaked in Bunyan’s wrist and he yowled out in pain, dropping the axe involuntarily and nursing his injured hand. As he hunched over, the giant began to whimper.

“They’re going to take everything. Everything. What do I tell Lucy and the kids?”

The whimpers became sobs, then the sobs became deep bawling. “There there big guy, we’ll figure it out,” Sergio held the huge man, like a squirrel comforting a grizzly bear. True to his legend, Bunyan even cried big.

“Maybe we should come back another time.” Sergio said, and we headed in solemn silence back toward Lady Lala’s to leave the broken giant to his misery.

I’d been introduced to Sergio by Syn one night at The Derelict. She referred to him as “The Sergio”. I suppose, if you want to get technical, I was actually introduced to “The Neurochemical Entity Formally Known As Sergio”, as he was tripping a home-nano engineered super LSD at the time, and his personality construct had melted into an unstable slush, like the ice caps. He was babbling in tongues some insanity about, “the impact of post-Cartesian hypermediasphere on glocalized collaborative-consumption within the reputation economy,” between snorting lines of spaz off the striped cleavage of a Siberian-tiger gene spliced furhooker named Alexia.

“He’s a budding entrepreneur too, you guys should link up,” Syn had said with that trademark demure auto-smirk, throwing ocean spray with the wink of glittering peacock lashes. I’d bought her the drink that night so maybe she was just feeling generous. Or maybe she just wanted to give herself a break, tag someone else’s ear into the ring to be talked off by “The Sergio” for a few rounds. I still wasn’t sure which.

After that first whirlwind Friday at The Derelict with Syn, we seemed to have something going on, although I couldn’t quite suss out what. I don’t think we had sex that night, not that I didn’t want to, and it’s not like we would’ve remembered if we did, we were so plastered from Global Meltdown on the Beaches. It didn’t feel like the thing to do on the first night, although that could just be me superimposing my sheltered outdated Vault worldview on new reality again.

Since then I’d been down at The Derelict regularly, although more, at least at first, because The Derelict was an oasis of authentic experience and meaningful art in the wasteland. It made me feel less stalkerish to think that, anyway. I would let Syn dredge her overloaded psyche on me, let her pour out all the worst scum and slimy men she’d encountered during the week stripping. Let her flog my collective gender for a while. Mostly I’d try to not talk about my present shit-pushing job, and instead share my plans for opening Jericho & Cyclops’ Ratburger Diner, or how many paychecks I was to affording the Ibayzaar sellers fee, or a new recipe Kalki taught me that I'd managed not to charcoal. Sometimes I’d spool off oral blog posts of life back in the Guugol Vault.

It was becoming increasingly bizarre to imagine the very idea of blogging, Tweeting, sitting in my Batman underwear and blathering on pointlessly about banal events like, “We had the first of a four-part Tron light-cycle model building seminar today! Mine is blue and super epic!” The Law of Diminishing Relevance – the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the more pointlessly shallow and trivial that civilization becomes. Would explain why The Ancients lived vicariously through their pre-Industrial Revolution magical fantasy lands of elves and wizards and orcs, endless Tolkien rehashes of the spotless minds.

In a sudden moment of what dad would called, “nowness”, I realized how different the person I was now was from my old sheltered Vault self. “The past is a foreign country” was a favorite quote of his, by some British novelist from back when novels were published on paper, “They do things differently there.” Like coming across a mold eaten analog film camera at the bottom of a cardboard storage box, welling up mute sadness, at what it once meant, but feeling simultaneously alienated, a foreigner. Having fought across the chaos of the fallen world to the bursting saplings of new civilization, having met so many truly real human beings, who lived each day as if it might be their last (as it very well could), even if I made it to another Elysium, could I ever go back to living an aimless life in the controlled, Privileged, baby crib of a bomb shelter?

Syn didn’t like talking about her own past, and she was an artist at parrying and deflecting my occasional snipe-probing questions. A skill no doubt honed by rejecting advances of countless men slipping Ibucks in her thong. “There was no past for me out in the wastes, just a string of moments of survival, primordial time.” I filed these remarks under ‘bullshit’ as the conversation would slingshot off a tangent into the outer orbits of drunken existential philosophical musing. The nature of survival, primordial time, why the Old World collapsed, or some other tenure-track fodder.

I could accept that she did not want to discuss the Darwinian horror of her time in the wastes, Guugol knows I didn’t want to talk about my eight month gauntlet after the fall of my Vault. But even behind that front, there was something else, something tugging at my subconscious, something she was hiding from me. Some liminal inconsistency in her personality landscape, like the camouflaged entrance to a subterranean compound of unknown depth. The unusual facial tic here, the seemingly unprovoked outburst there, an out-of-character wording here. Each time I would approach, I thought I could sense the cold impenetrable steel of the blast doors in her eyes. It put some amount of distance between us I disliked. But perhaps I was paranoid, seeing reality through the hyper-secrecy of a Masters of the Universe EMP shelter enclave that was full of utter opacity, an impenetrable labyrinth of whispers, scrubbed barcodes and over-encrypted RFID tags. That was no way to live.

“We’re residual pockets of Old World culture.” Dad used to tell us about the pre-Apoc times. A world dominated by the paradox of ultra-transparency, where every second, every purchases, every page view, every trode-excavated thought of a person’s private lifestream was on view for the world. Yet permeated simultaneously by the ultra secrecy of corporation-network-nations bunkered behind one way mirror panopticons. Selling off people’s personal info, making up reasons to go to war, robbing the world blind through shadow finance, running the world from the shadow reality. Dad hated it, seeing the horror from the inside as a researcher for Guugol, but anything he could do would jeopardize his position at a time when his co-workers were being replaced left and right by robots and outsourcing. “They denied all of it of course. The director of AnonLeaks, who revealed corrupt corporate secrets to the world for free was branded a villain. The CEO of Friendbook, who sold the private data of individuals to corporations for money was named Person of the Year.” Dad would laugh haughtily at the irony. He would then unfailingly descend, tears glassing his eyes, “That’s what happened to your mother. She tried to break the one-way mirror. She was so strong, so strong.”

In the Digital Age, dad would say, there was no analog grey area, no nuance. It was all-on or all-off. Either you were a “social media” wirehead, constantly refreshing email or status updates for a pellet of shallow social interaction, struggling to maintain and damage-control your digital identity, or you were a disconnected nobody. On or off. Binary. Life as algorithm, individual as computer circuit. Mindless rerouter of signals, retweeter. If anything good could be said to have come from The Disconnection and resulting fall of The Cloud, it was that it put breathing room between individuals again, figuratively and literally.

Perhaps I feared that the breathing room between Syn and I was filling with shallow pellets and one-way mirrors.

***

Sergio and I shuffled out behind the glorified shipping containers of Lady Lala’s Luscious Luncheonette to wait for Violette. We stepped over a couple Tree Dwellers in fig leaves who preached that eating animals is a “crime against nature, you’re destroying the world (again)!”. Next to them were some MAC women -- Mothers Against Cannibalism -- yelling, “Save a child, eat an animal!”

“That’s a new species of protester.” Sergio coughed.

“Cannibalism incidents are up. More of the wild wild wasteland is flocking to proto-cities like Ibayzaar.” I noted.

We stood around behind the shipping container for at least fifteen minutes, I could’ve sworn I saw entropy at work peeling chips of blue paint from the container’s sides. “What are we doing here, exactly?” I asked.

“Patience, you’ll see. I don’t want to ruin the surprise.” He said, thinking of a way to derail the subject. “It’s all about networking, my man. It’s not what you do, it’s who you do. You’ve got to get your chips on the shoulders of giants, you know what I’m saying?” Barely, through your broken aphorisms and mixed metaphor nonsense.

“Definitely. Networking is where its all headed.” I said.

“There! See? Now you’re getting it, you’re getting the Order Flow, the Way of things, or something.” Sergio enthused. Right. Oh boy oh boy, I’m leveling up in the world of Sergiology. Kind of wished the Order would Flow a little faster.

As if on cue, Violette emerged from a cargo door cut into the back of the shipping container. From some secret pocket in her French Maid costume, she produced an African knockoff of a Cartier lighter. The synthehol flame was faint, but it did the job, fossil fuelled butane having all expired decades ago. Sergio and I stared in cognitive dissonance as she lit up an honest to Guugol cigarette. No one had seen one of those smoke sticks in forty years.

“Where the hell did you get that?” Sergio asked. Violette sent grey plumes through pursed lips to waft around the edge of the building. The vegan proselytizer and Mothers Against Cannibalism lady were briefly thrown off their soap box into a fit of coughing.

“Debutante Cigarettes, menthol. A fresh startup, on Gawker Avenue. Zey ‘ave managed to get a crop of mutant tobacco plants groweeng.” Violette had let down the overly corned up doll-like French Maid character she played in the restaurant, but she still had a slight French accent. Could it be that she actually was French?

“Better watch out, I heard those things can kill you.” Sergio cautioned, while motioning for Violette to offer him one.

“Actually I think they outlawed real tobacco sometime in the 2020’s. The United Networks of Guugol ran up astronomical budget deficits after the blow up of the government debt bubble and gold crash and the dominoes really started coming down. Bond vigilantes threatened to stop buying Guugol unless they got their fiscal shit under control. Massive austerity. Health care costs were so out of control they simply outlawed products that increased health risk, like tobacco. Only way to sell poisonous stuff like cigarettes in stores was to de-toxify it. Easiest way was to take a nucleotide razor to the plant DNA and create benign strains.” I interjected, with a spontaneous spiel from a Vault history lesson. They both looked at me quizzical like I’d just stepped out from a gaping tear in the fabric of spacetime. In a certain sense, I had.

Sergio leaned against a crate of unwashed shit-take shrooms, reaking faintly of sewage. “So, how’s business going?”

I thought I saw an inkling of a wince tug a crow’s foot from Violette’s eye. “Good, you know, the usual. A little slow during the eckonomeeck downturn, maybe, but, c’est la vie, no?” She smiled. “Although I kind of wish the Digitant terrorists would blow up that fecking McDanny’s burger.” She flipped off the chain restaurant across the street.

The Lady Lala’s chef, a handlebar mustached, unusually bulky man that might’ve had some warthog spliced into his gene stew, kicked open a door, dumping a pot of boeuf bourguignon soup to splatter on the dirt. A pigeon flew down to sample the broth, and keeled over. Violette flourished a string of curses at the chef in French, who ignored it and slammed the door.

“C’est la vie indeed. Well, shall we take care of ‘our’ business?” Sergio asked, pushing off the crate.

“Beezeeness before pleasure, how contraire, Sergio,” Violette intoned with a flirtatiously sardonic smirk.

Sergio dropped the butt of his fag, crushed the cherry. The wind shifted, delivering the last breath of Sergio’s cigarette like a smoky pie to my face. Even if it was de-toxed, it still smelled like carcinogenic death. “’Synergy’, my dear, synergy, is what we call it in the big leagues. Business is my pleasure.” I felt I might throw up, although I wasn’t sure if I was gagging on the smoke or the steaming pile of bullshit.

“And your friend, he is ship?” She said, underlining ‘ship’ with the click of the tongue, hot green eyes on me like a pair of long-distance RFID scanners. I suppose I was just a Prospect Newb in the ‘shipster’ underground. I hadn’t proven myself in mortal kombat or defaced a corporate building with po-mo streetart or anything.

Sergio threw an arm over my shoulder in an awkward show of bromance.

“Jericho is ship as the Moderator in Chief Burroughs Klein himself. The J-man here’s a dyed-in-the-wool goddamn freedom fighter, did hard time in the Ibayzaar Guantanamo. Took the waterboarding, neurohacking, the whole nine yards of cruel and unusual, for the cause. He should be TSAing you and me, grabbing our junk, when you really get down to it.” I had to hand it to the crazy bastard, Sergio did know how to spin a web of bullshit truthiness, weave a Nigerian Email. He would’ve been a star in marketing or financial fraud in the Old World.

Violette’s jaw clenched, unclenched.

“We can blindfold him and put him in the back of a van if you want.” Sergio said, laying on the sarcasm.

Violette smirked, and said something in French that seemed to signal the passing of a threshold of trust. “Ok, follow me.”

We followed her through the employee back door, into a kitchen, and I immediately wished I had been blindfolded. Workers were cleaning slimy feces from mushrooms, removing teeth and hair from Petri dishes of tumor-like flesh, then chopping it up and frying it. It took all I had not to projectile vomit my ‘lamb sandwich’.

Violette led us to a pantry with shelves of baking ingredients, stacks of ziplock bags stuffed with whitish powder. A very serious looking meathead with a face like a car crash and about as wide as he was tall stood there, hands clasped behind him, an impressive feat with all the muscle in the way.

“Arms out please.” The meathead began giving Sergio a pat-dow, and whipped out a device which I recognized vaguely from the Vault but which lacked the overergonomic haute-futurist design values. It seemed to have been hacked together from random salvaged Old World electronics, involving a coiled rosary of fridge magnets feeding into a smartphone brain. A metal detector/bug scanner.

“Sergio, what exactly are we doing here?” All kinds of red flags were going off in my head. This “business” we were taking care of obviously wasn’t of the legitimate sunshiny sort. I was already on thin ice with the authorities, half the rotten Ibayzaar security force were just waiting for a reason to get drag me back into a dark windowless room, their crosshairs locked firmly on my head. The last thing I needed was to give them ammunition.

“Don’t worry about it, my man, just a precaution.” Oh, of course. Just a precaution. The muscle finished up precautioning Sergio and turned to me.

“Sir, arms out.” The muscle sounded like a baying bull, voice so low I had to strain to differentiate the vowels, like even his diaphragm was on steroids. I did as requested, as calmly as I could (which I now know actually makes you look even more nervous). The pat down was uneventful, if nerve wracking. No ball juggling, thankfully. However the hacked-together metal detector’s cell phone base screamed the Black Sabbath Iron Man ringtone into my ear as it hovered across my right shoulder. The thug instantly removed my jacket and peeled the glove from my right hand, my cybernetic NeuroArm spilling out into the open like an incomplete Terminator time machine warp-in. The temperature in the room seemed to suddenly drop ten degrees as the tension spiked. Violette and the muscle both gawked for a few seconds in cognitive dissonance, unable to contextualize what they were seeing and determine if it was good or bad. My upper lip tasted salty, like the Lady Lala tap water.

“You’re a circuit head?” The thug accused more than asked. The way his fists were clenched and head lowered menacingly into a mountain range of trapezius dorsi was not giving me warm and fuzzy.

“It’s just a prosthetic. I’m all natural-born meat.” That seemed to piss off the meathead more, seeing as he was mostly unnatural DIY gene-hacked meat. Bad word choice. Or was I subconsciously defending Digitants? Empathy by proxy? At any rate, it wasn’t like shipsters were much higher on the Ibayzaar social food chain than robots. The corporates would be happy if both were excised from their world.

“Just get zis over wis.” Violette ordered.

Captain Beefheart continued his exam, slower and more thoroughly now. I kept a close eye on the bastard to make sure he didn’t plant heat on me or anything.

“He’s clean,” Beefy grumbled, folding the patchwork scanner back away. A chorus of exhalation from all parties.

“You see? Jericho’s a thoroughbred-“ Sergio went to pat me on the back, thump pressing into the nape of my neck. I heard a dentist’s drill whine straight through my auditory bone. “Oh. Fuck.” I mouthed, praying to the god of Mexican standoffs to be merciful, knowing what would come next.

My Guugol holographic RFID projected out the back of my head. Another anachronism beamed through from the future (or past in this case), followed by the cold circle of a gun barrel pressing against my skull. Luckily I was accustomed by now to people freaking out thinking I was a roboterrorist or a spy and pointing guns at me, otherwise I probably would’ve emptied my bladder into my shoes. As it were, I was only moderately scared shitless.

“He’s got a bomb! Fucking toaster!” I could feel Beefy’s fat hand-cannon shaking against the back of my head. I prayed that the cancerous masses of un-telomered muscle cell had not eaten away too much of the decision making regions of his brain, yet.

“What ze fuck is zis, Sergio?” Violette fumed, accent bleeding through heavily, her ridiculous goth-loli sex fetish outfit somehow making her even scarier.

“Woah, woah woah! Everybody just take a warm glass of Chill!” I could see Sergio’s inner lawyer working overtime as his dilated pupils darted back and forth like flies trapped under a glass bowl.

“It’s a network ID badge.” I figured I’d try playing the truth card before Sergio’s yarns took us off a cliff. I’d had enough of the secrecy, I decided to start breaking the one way mirrors myself. It’s what mom would do.

“That’s bullshit! Don’t listen to this bucket of bolts, that’s what they do, they try to fuck with your head-“

“Shut up, Grog!” Violette snapped. “What network?” a film of genuine curiosity appeared to temporarily paper itself over her suspicion and anger with Sergio.

“United Networks of Googol.” They stared at me like I’d just turned into some mythical creature, like a dragon, or a record store. “That’s where this arm came from.” I held up my metal appendage. Beefy flinched.

“That’s impossible, the networks were all destroyed during the Great Disconnect. Wiped out by the EMPs.”

“Most of it was. Destroyed. They took, ‘precautions’, like any self-respecting superpower would. Topside went to hell, but underground.. well, you seem like you know something about surviving by keeping your head down.”

Violette processed that for a moment, seemed to grok it, nodded. “So why are you here?”

“The Vault I lived in was destroyed as well, eventually, overrun by Wasteland netfreaks and cannibals. One security trip up too many. I escaped. I found this place.” The truth will set you free, dad would say. I hoped it was more than Karate Kid wisdom-speak.

“I am sorry to hear that. But then maybe you know something about making sure the ‘underground’ stays air-tight.” Violette offered. I could accept that.

“So he’s corporate, he must be a robot working double agent for Ibayzaar!” Beefy finished Lego-ing together bits of information into his latest paranoid conspiracy.

“Ibayzaar has been trying to exterminate the Digitants, why would they start hiring them?” I pointed out to my induction-challenged friend.

Violette inspected my holotag. Revolving corporate logo, biometrics, vital stats, video sequences. “Very hard to fake this, the ‘Zaar could not pull this off, yet,” she noted. “Plus we might be able to use someone with your… background.” She had a brief private conversation with Beefy whose saggy-sack-of-potatoes face said he obviously disliked whatever she was saying, but begrudgingly went along.

“Ok. He is cool.” Violette decided.

“That wasn’t so hard now was it? Can we get past the spook-world pretense and get this party started?”Sergio straightened his shiny suit. I switched my light show off, feeling less naked without my Facebook profile dancing around in public, exposing my private bits.

“Oui.” Violette pulled a lever behind a stack of wooden crates. A trap door made of an upside down car hood and drawn by bicycle chains dropped down in the floor of the shipping container. The odor of industrial chemicals bit my nose as we ducked our heads to get down the car hood ramp. “Bienvenue, to ze Shipster Underground.”

***

Beneath Lady Lala’s we entered a secret lab, with a junkyard’s worth of scavenged Old World tech. A seven fingered mechanic/scientist was busy welding cut sections of sewer piping into an ethanol-burning combustion engine, based on some kind of reverse engineered schematic. He’d start the engine, which would overheat or blow a gasket, at which point he’d cuss up a storm, make changes, and try again. Eight hundred ways not to make a light bulb. A bird-necked dandruff-dusted nerd in glasses had apparently given up on getting under the hood of an iPad IV, digitally pad-locked with a closed OS and DRM, seeing how the screen was smashed in. He was now banging his head against a wall trying to figure out the myriad obscure key-combinations to get a pair of Linux machines to say “Hello World!” to each other. Ah, the humble rebirth of internet 2.0. A mad chemist in a black trench/labcoat and an acid green Mohawk was surrounded by creaky clunky centrifuges, beakers and vials of compounds with labels like, “FiReJoOsE” and “!!!GERM-CRUSHR!!!” on a lab table marred by ominous black star-shaped burn marks. Another sweaty shirtless meathead in spandex had the contents of a home gene-therapy kit sprawled out on the Olympic pad of a bench press bench. The skin of his bulging forearms had hardened some sort of woody armored carapace, however it had also begun to sprout oak leaves. He was injecting new mixtures into his arm desperately trying to stop his veins from mutating into tree roots.

“You see? This is where the magic happens, my friend. ‘Technology is the mother of invention.’” Sergio (mis)informed me.

Violette shouted something into one of the back rooms, sealed behind two thick safety doors. A beat later someone in a homemade hazmat suit affecting a steampunk aesthetic emerged, resin faux metal fittings and unnecessarily elaborate leather strappings. He had a ziplock bag that looked identical to the whitish powder in the pantry, except he was carrying it the way you might carry an unstable high explosive, or anthrax, or a slice of steak from an actual honest-to-gods cow.

“You do know how ‘ard zis was to come by.” Violette took the bag of powder, rolling it in her hands. This deal was looking worse and worse by the minute. Whatever that substance was it looked and sounded very goddamned illegal. Sergio’s big dreamer-eyes swelled and started to water at the sight of the bag, it seemed he might burst into song any minute.

“It’s so beautiful!” He grabbed Violette by her frilly French Maid sleeved arms and gave her a big sloppy kiss on the lips. “Yes, yes, I know.” Sergio pulled out a small card-sized piece of paper – I mean “Static Screen” – handing it over to Violette. “Have your men drop my name to this inspector at the northwest gate and he’ll get whatever you want into the ‘Zaar, under the radar. No questions.”

My ribs ached as I flashbacked memories of getting beaten by angry mobs of guard-mercenaries in the Ibayzaar slammer. My mind traversed the plot-graph again and again, but every scenario seemed to end up with me back in a cell. I couldn’t take it any more. What was that stuff?

“What is that stuff? Cocaine? Uranium yellowcake? Neutralized anti-matter? Will someone tell me what the fuck that powder is!?” I shouted, shocking all the ‘researchers’ out of their individual projects, and interrupting Sergio’s daydream of business success.

“None of the above.” Violette laughed. “Something way more dangerous.” denjuros

“Sodium hydroxide.” Sergio proclaimed in his WIRED headline font.

“Ok, define.”

“Aids in the separation of cellulose fibres from lignin, breaking wood down into pulp.”

“So.”

Sergio threw his hands up in the air, flailing the bag of the shit that transforms wood into pulp, which I guessed turns human flesh into ebola goo. I dodged a potential spill preemptively. Didn’t feel like being liquefied, or taking a bath in potentially illegal substances.

“Have you been listening to anything I’ve been telling you? This is the key to making Static Screens!”

Oh, duh. Wood pulp. Paper.

“Like I said, way more dangerous. Mass spread of information. Think of Reformation. Not so good for ze ‘eads of ze Ibayzaar royalty.” Violette clopped off to chat with the digitally-challenged mechanic.

“Is this sodium dioxide, whatever, will you get in trouble for it?” I asked.

“Ehh. It’s not illegal per se.” Sergio shrugged.

“Ok, so if this stuff is legit then why all the covert ops and smoke-and-mirrors? If there’s nothing to hide then why are we hiding?”

“It’s not hiding, it’s just… maintaining intellectual property, shall we say.”

“Ok. So you’re trying to make pap- I mean Static Screens. I get it. But I still don’t get why the need for all the clandestine network stuff. This whole Underground Railroad Area 51 thing.” I said.

Sergio tapped the tips of his fingers together, brows furrowing, like a military officer trying to decide the best way to break difficult news to a superior.

“You’ve got to understand, The World 2.0 is in a state of what we might call continuous techno-economic upheaval. It’s not a matter of making slow, hard won breakthroughs, but often just sifting through the wreckage and reverse engineering the gadgets, sometimes just finding the “on” switch. Old Worlders thought technological change during the post-industrial 21s century was turbulent, try going through 10,000 years of human tech and cultural evolution in the span of years or months, or even days. Every other day someone figures out how to get some ancient pre-renewable engine working or the DNA alphabet soup to synthesize a better meat or hacks together an automated loom and the next day a whole class of newly Luddite workers is suddenly out of a job. Just like the horror stories we saw out in Craigslist District. It’s like technological revolution day, every day.”

Sergio was right. Whole swaths of sellers were going under and winding up debt slaves in the human power plants, a new army of obsolesced souls: I was hanging by a thread myself.

“And like I said, the game is rigged. The decks are weighted in favor of the Ibayzaar Inner Circle, the fifty frat brothers who pull all the strings, own all the prime real estate, hog the “premium seller” list. Even if you resurrect an amazing tech or invent a new product, they just rip off your idea, use their size, wealth, and slave-labor advantages to undercut you and drive you out of the market. So you see, we need to horde all the technological Edge we can get our hands on, keep it close to our chest, lest the competition steal our Secret Sauce and make us irrelevant.”

“Walk with me,” Sergio motioned. At the back of the lab Sergio slid open a door-sized sheet of aluminum, barely perceptible in the matte grey expanse of wall. We stepped through the portal into the murky catacombs of some kind of pre-Disconnect drainage system. ‘Sewers’ I think they were called. The panel shut with surprisingly little noise, and this side of it was painted to perfectly blend in with the red brick of the arched chamber walls. It smelled wet and old, like geologically old. Older than the surface Necropoli of brushed chrome, poured cement, and designer glass. I’d only seen stuff like this in Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones.

“Where are we going exactly?” The sound seemed to carry for miles, like webcam microphone feedback back in the Vault.

“My place. Now which one was it…” We came to a four-way junction. Sergio tapped his fingers on the wall repeatedly in sequence, mouthing numbers, then shook his head in frustration and started again. It might’ve been an OCD ritual tic or a kind of touch-finger-counting kids use to solve addition problems in 2nd grade. Either seemed equally unfortunate at this point. I really didn’t want to be stuck in a dead civilization’s shit-tubes for eternity, least of all with a raving quixotic madcap.

“Here, this way.” We came at last to… a segment of sewer that looked exactly the same as the others. Sergio pressed up against the brick, rapping on it with his fist then shuffling down a bit and trying again, till he struck what sounded like a contrabass steel drum. He slid open a camouflaged door nearly identical to the one we came through earlier.

It felt like I’d inhaled liquid tree sap from the initial strength of the woody pong coming from the door. The room had a high ceiling, filled with an unintelligible, yet somehow organized intestinal tract of industrial machines. This latest Wonder of the Old World was an even more archaic archaeological find than the cobblestone Euro-sewers. This was something not seen in the Youessay in eons: a manufacturing warehouse.

“Holy shit, I thought they moved all these to China and Africa then turned the buildings into 3D IMAX VR movie theatres and geek conference halls before the Youessay was subsumed by Guugol?”

“I guess the IP Wars started before they could convert this one, or maybe they just got sentimental.” Sergio smiled, patting a humming tuba of industrial metal like it was the last specimen of an extinct species of whale.

In one corner was a pile of logs. A woman and a bunch of Hispanic-looking kids that might have been Sergio’s siblings were busy making sure the logs fed evenly into a wood chipping device which in turn emptied via conveyor into a digester. She was leading them in a song in a language that sounded like a creolized Spanish as they worked. It struck me as simultaneously heartwarming yet alarmingly dangerous, having kids around giant tree-eating blades. So this was where they made the paper. I mean Static Screens.

“Wow, man. I’m really impressed. Seriously. You really know what you’re doing, looks like.” I said.

“Yeah, I learned mostly from a Discovery Channel Youtube video on how grain mills work.” Sergio seemed genuinely proud of this answer.

“Um, yeah. Grain mills.” Wait, weren’t we making paper here?

“I mean they’re basically the same thing, grinding up some plant matter, stuff kinda moves around on conveyor belts, throw in some chemicals and stuff. I filled in the gaps with instructional articles from an old site called eHow.”

“Of course, of course. So, can I see some of these finished Static Screens?” I suddenly felt that sinking feeling, like discovering a mechanic had plugged the wrong tubes into the wrong places while reassembling your car engine, and now smoke was coming out of the hood as warning lights screamed at you.

Sergio scratched his head, “Well, I haven’t quite worked out all the kinks in the pipeline…”

I walked over to what had to be the end of the assembly chain. There were barrels, marked with batch numbers and notes like “30% alcohol, oak”, “400 degrees, palm & redwood mix”. There were several dozen batches of what was supposed to be paper, most of these full of a dried mush like hashed potatoes, a few full of brownish liquid, and one a pile of ash.

“Tell me you’ve actually managed to pump out at least one sheet of paper.”

“There was one that held together for a good fifteen seconds. We had to keep it stored at three degrees Celsius but-“

“Jesus, man, what was all this talk about the business ‘going Friendbook’, you don’t even know the process for making this ‘Static Screen/ stuff, let alone have a business model figured out. You think people are just going to start buying blank paper and pens and not want access to the printing press?” A log got stuck in the grinder, which started smoking. The kids climbed up and jumped up and down on it, trying to get it to budge

“Jericho, listen to me. I know in my heart that we’re just days, maybe weeks away from a breakthrough. I can feel it. This sodium hydroxide stuff is the key, someone mentioned it in the comments section. This is the secret, it’s in The Order Flow-“

“Look, will you just shut up about the goddamn Order Flow bullshit.” I snapped. Sergio’s mouth closed, finally. The corners of his lips quavered, and I could tell he was more than a little hurt, like someone had stepped on his favorite toy, or informed him of the truth about Santa Claus. I suddenly felt guilty, telling the Emperor of his own little Wonderland that he was naked. I told myself he was an annoying stuckup exagerrating twerp who deserved it, but perhaps I was subconsciously jealous, that I could not share his naïve enthusiasm, that I hadn’t come up with the idea myself, that it wasn’t me leading the way to this entrepreneurial future. But even if he was a batshit kid who didn’t know what he was doing, who was I to shut him down? Hope was a rare and precious commodity in our world.

“Hey, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean that.”

Sergio turned, head lowered. He dipped his hand into one of the barrels, pulled out a gob of slough like bad oatmeal, stared at it. Threw it back in.

“Listen, Sergio, just tell me what it is you need from me, ok? Just be straight with me. If we’re going to be partners, we’ve got to trust each other. We can’t be holding stuff behind our back, keeping our dirty laundry in secret compartments. We need to communicate.” I said, feeling suddenly lighter. The truth will set you free.

Sergio remained silent for a time. The log eventually unjammed, the woman opened up a panel, whacked something with a hammer, and the smoke cleared.

“I need your help with some old Guugol Vault tech.” Sergio admitted softly.

“Ok, anything else?”

“And… If I could borrow the oxephant it would do miracles for the supply chain.”

Ah, that could be tricky. “Why don’t you just talk to Farjadeen, work it out with him directly?”

“I tried that already. He’s a great guy, Farjadeen but-“

“But?”

“But he just doesn’t have the sense of vision I need in a partner.” Sergio turned around, his eyes were glassed red but the clouds were clearing.

“Or the knowledge, or the skills. Syn has told me all about you.about your life in a real network-nation Vault, Jericho, about your experiences out in the Wasteland, about being a most-wanted suspected Digitant terrorist, captured and tortured, and lived to tell about it. Man, you’re like a legendary hero! I guess I just got carried away. I know I’m not always ‘all there’, that I don’t always think things through. And I’m sorry I wasn’t totally straight with you up front. I’ll work on that. I know this Static Screen thing is looking a little shoddy right now, but I honestly think I’ve.. we’ve got a shot at making this work. I’ll understand if you don’t want to, but I would be honored if you would be my partner in this venture.”

I wanted to believe Sergio was completely real about all of that, that he was not just having a brief breath of lucidity before diving back down into the depths of borderline-insanity. I still had my doubts about whether this paper 2.0 enterprise could ever come together, literally. I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the Derelict Shipster underground labs and the hermeneutically sealed labyrinths of the past. Was it even within the possibility space of human social organization to have a truly open and level society? Were we doomed to arms race with stick and stones then bombs, then factories, then information, and then finally our own relationships, till we were each left in our own one-person underground lairs, cold, alone, paranoid, with only our edifices of technology, of machines and electrons and wires to hear our regrets? Perhaps some secrets had to be kept, for security, for the greater good. Perhaps the underground was just doing what it had to to survive, and crime was just the continuation of economics by other means. But at some point, we’d all have to leave our Vaults, let someone else in. Or else all we were doing was surviving, not living.

I reached out and shook Sergio’s hand, clumps of wet tree bark and all.

***

“Fantasteek!” Violette exclaimed, giving me a very big, very kissy hug, going from her frighteningly serious legionnaire-resistance leader to cutesy flirty French Maid in a millisecond.

“Yep, we’ve got ourselves a real live Vault Dweller on our side.” Sergio gave me a firm slap on the shoulder, careful to avoid pressing the button again.

Mere moments after the Lady Lala’s storeroom trap door closed, the two Mothers Against Cannibalism protesters stormed in from the kitchen, sundresses and sweaters, signs still hanging from their necks. Holding Glocks. And badges.

“Ibayzaar Bureau of Investigation, IT Division. Hands behind your head!”

“IT?” I whispered.

“Illegal Technology,” Sergio informed.

“You are under arrest for possession of unregistered technology under article 271 section 13a of the EULA.” They held up one of the bags of yellow powder. The Sodium Hydroxide. They had to have been listening the whole time, pretending to be a bunch of loonies. They knew everything.

One of the undercover agents opened a ziplock bag. Sniffed it. Dabbed it on her tongue.

“Custard powder.”

“Way more dangerous.” Violette winked.

The Silence Part 10: Armatures

2011-02-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

The Silence: Armatures

2010-11-20T23:47:00.000-08:00

It was tough at first in Ibayzaar. We were the detritus at the nadir of a ruthlessly competitive commercial food chain, trophic nobodies. For most of our lives we’d been living in a cushy electromagnetic pulse/atomic shelter for Coogol VIPs. One of many secret gardens that sheltered moguls of the internet-nations whose wealth made Bill Gates look like a starving post-print journalist. We had hydroponics, clean water, a self-repairing 10 MW geothermal plant, everything a post-apocalypse puppeteering enclave needs. After leaving the vault, we took up the default mode of survival in the wasteland; scavenging. Relying on the kindness of long dead strangers. But in this burgeoning little patch of New Sumeria called Ibayzaar, we were just another couple soot-faced orphans of the failed experiment known as Modernity 1.0, just gravel on the once-paved road to “progress”.

In order to open up shop in Ibayzaar, you had to register as a seller, which involved a border-line extortionate fee in ‘Ebucks’. For primer real estate near the front entrance you could pay a few extra arms and legs. The only asset we had in our bank account was a patina of fear and loathing sparked by our unwarranted arrest under suspicion of being robo-terrorists. The unfortunate media event spread dark clouds of negative press like an old-world American political smear campaign. We were broke, and squarely within that dank, interstitial crevice of trashcan meals, cardboard housing, and unsavory sub-floorboard work, that limbo between “unhirable” and “frowned upon by society”. Fucking society and its facial expressions. Some days I can see why the affluent ancients had a tendency to come down with Rousseau complexes, feel the need to run from their $10 lattes and quarterly meetings into the proverbial log cabin deep in the wilderness and paint avante garde pictures of bees.

I sold our police special pistol the second night, after sleeping in a wooden crate that smelled badly of non-GMO humus and dog piss, then upgraded to the imperial suite at the Chateau du Hole-In-The-Wall. The Chateau consisted literally of a swiss-cheese apartment complex of holes in the gigantic thirty foot security wall of a former gated community filled with the remains of McMansions erected during the second housing bubble that blew up in 2015. We would’ve stayed in the houses instead, but the developers had used the cheapest, flimsiest parody of wood to save on construction costs, and so the homes had decayed, even before the world went belly-up, into 10,000 square foot piles of rotten particleboard, now pushing weed and daisies. Microcosms of their time, of the Delusion Economy.

Entry level jobs were rare in Ibayzaar, and generally paid in scraps of mystery meat or free living space in a broken refrigerator, or iffy sexual favors. The first gig I scored was shoveling oxephant shit for Farjadeen Bollywood (his last name, yes, really), the owner of the bovine-elephant towed U-Haul caravan we met our first day at Ibayzaar, who asked about my NeuroArm. (The cyborg’s outstandingness is simultaneously his greatest boon and bane: metal limbs are awesome conversation-starter networking tools, like a shoulder-mounted business card, but also tend to attract the laser scopes of bigotous anti-robot siliconists.) Arresting, the amount of waste an oxephant can produce. I think I could see sea levels rising every time the lumbering behemoth passed a thunderous methane-rich ball of flatulence. For my hard and unsanitary work I was rewarded in boxes of military sporks as my first paycheck. I was too put off to ask Farjadeen where he found the hybrid utensils or why he bothered to take so many, although he muttered something about a spork saving his life once. He was often muttering, often in half-Punjabi, about how his parents had fled the United Aggregation of Eurasia when the Silicon Curtain fell, rifting the once global internet into multiple separate network-countries, each charging their own citizens “premium internet fees”.

His parents landed, just months before the EMPS went off, in the megacity region of New California to find custodial work deleting negative comments from ratings sites, and to build better net-lives for their children. Farjadeen believed that we in the post-Disconnect world have entered Naraka, something like a Hindu version of purgatory, a barren and difficult life of suffering and no internet, where we are being punished by Yama, Lord of Justice, for squandering our potential as humans. “One day I will achieve mukti, liberation, and will be reborn redeemed in India, as an Indiatube movie star.”

Still, my job beat the pseudo-legal slavery most Ibayzaar noobs ended up in; peddling a stationary bike hooked up to a turbine generator ten hours a day as one cog of hundreds in the human power plants keeping Ibayzaar lit. There were some functioning photovoltaic panels around, sure, but that wasn’t enough to meet peak demand of an operation the size of Ibayzaar, so of course they ended up in-sourcing their own literal “sweat shops” which smelled notoriously of human grease and unwashed armpits. Couldn’t afford the seller fee to open your own shop? ‘The “Rags To Riches” loan program is what you need! No credit necessary! Just sign here, here, and here, and bike your legs off for a couple months and Ibayzaar will provide you with a $2000 Ebucks loan, enough for you to pay the exhorbitant entrance fee, open up your own shop and start your new better life living The Ibayzaar Dream!’ The poster ads depicting smiling business owners were everywhere, whole platoons of agents were dedicated to reeling in prospective loan/slave labor candidates. Of course, almost none of the wasteland immigrants read the fine print. The loan was only enough for one of the back-alley lots no one but rats and prostitutes visit, the interest calculation was an adjustable rate that jumped up usuriously after the first couple weeks, and the market was already incredibly saturated with struggling newcomers. Most applicants for the program ended up in a revolving door situation, back in the sweat shops within weeks of getting out, having to pay back unpaid debt with more cycling, finding themselves ever deeper underwater with little hope of escape. Like rats in cages racing on hamster wheels, chasing the perpetually out-of reach cheese, dangled by the Ibayzaar moguls, to power their machines and machinations. All that hungry yearning pent up in the hopeless post-Disconnect world, futilely misdirected to pursuit of happiness, hope, change, apple pie, and other recycled mythology of a long deceased nation, existing only in derivative red-white-and-blue Rags To Riches marketing pamphlets and half-remembered Disney movies excavated from abandoned iPhones.

It was by no means a perfect system; pyramid ponzi schemes, monopolies, wage arbitrage, “creative accounting” and the like were as common as frog flu. Smith’s invisible hand of the market tended to feel more like a crushing iron fist puppeteered by unseen economic Wizards of Oz most of the time, but still, it was better than the jungle-grade Darwinian hell hole just beyond Ibayzaar’s gates. Dystopia is relative, like that, and the blue bloods and management no doubt framed that mantra in gold, told it to themselves to rationalize their exploitation and get to sleep at night in their 40th floor Presidential suites.

***

I wanted to help shoe Cyclops into a job at the U-Haul shop so he didn’t have to pedal bike-generators for Soylent Green Energy Co. (renewable electricity made with people!) or hunt mutant rats all day, but Farjadeen was more frightened by Cyclops’ augmented eyes than my Terminator arm at first. Something about the way it covered Cyclops’ third eye apparently evoked Hindu-hued demonic mojo for the boss man. However, when he discovered that Cyclops could instantly inventory a spilled box of sporks (638), several crates of pork n beans (1,183), and several barrels of evaporated sea salt, in pounds, nearly to the atomic weight, Farjadeen had a change of heart. “You have the vision of Brahma, you see the divine essence of all things!” And hired Cyclops as a stockboy-slash-accountant. A case in point that economics trumps belief systems every time.

Thrift was a non-word, the wrong side of a duality, like “communism” in the old YouEssAy. The Scarlet “T”. As saving money was frowned upon in the nascent Ibayzaar culture, spending was viewed as a golden virtue, the gateway through which one could ascend to the ancients’ capitalist nirvana of “Having Tons Of Stuff”, and the duty of every Ibayzaar user in order to build The Better Future. “There’s no problem you can’t consume your way out of,” was a popular slogan. The purpose of discouraging frugality was threefold: it upped profits, swelled the ranks of debt-slaves, and pre-empted new immigrants from reaching the critical financial velocity necessary to implement a business plan, mount any real competition against existing, well established central nodes of commerce. Selling yourself into labor camps where you built crap in order to borrow money to buy the stuff that you built, but couldn’t afford. It was pure unadultered genius. The ghosts of the old world Financial-Cloud Lord tycoons smiled with pride from their WiFi-ether, I’m sure. As Ibayzaar outgrew its shell of the Futureland theme park, expanding beyond the kitschy neo-Gernsbeckian walls, cheap debt-slave-made plastic crap and vice-pit watering holes of sex and drugs came to dominate a substantial portion of the market, the latter largely a result of the swelling ranks of poverty . Apparently, the end of the world had not shaken the laws of physics nor Sturgeons Law: 90% of everything was still crap.

Still, I did my best to save up, pinning our own particular Ibayzaarian Dream to the inside of my forehead, focusing on it each paycheck, taking my caches of sporks and hunks of gecko jerky to the bank. It helped that Farjadeen approved strongly of my zealous squirreling of savings. “You do well to grow your rupee karma, Jericho (Jaayreeko)”. Yes, the money karma is strong with me. My dumping of payment into a sock always elicited a smile and sometimes another story of humble origins of pre-Disconnect poverty hardships, told with a nostalgic lilt; an underclass pidgin camaraderie that reached across civilizational epochs. What little disposable income I did use generally involved “junkets” indulged down in Derelict Town.

Derelict Town was the lively, dangerous, and grungy compost heap of the New World 2.0 or “The Reborn World” as some denizens called it. A “city within a city”, Derelict Town physically consisted of the slowly disintegrating remains of a half-beached Coogol supercomputer barge. The upturned bow, bearded thickly with rust and bleached barnacles, had long since cracked and hung down with a broken majesty, like the lowered head of a 20th century military general. Settlements had sprung up within the behemoth’s corpse like lichens upon a fallen sequoia. Derelict Town’s relationship with Ibayzaar was often strained and the settlement modulated in upper management’s view between property-devaluing eyesore and necessary interzone. A relief well for the growing resentful underclass, so as to prevent it from spilling over into the front yard. Most of the time they simply turned a blind eye, as dealing with Derelict Town would require the Ibayzaar heads to accept that their system as it was was chewing up and spitting out the majority of its users into the garbage heap of history, leaving them nowhere to go but underground. And that reality was unpalatable and inconvenient. Especially given the Ibayzaar leaders’ high-fallutin and self-congratulatory self-image as saviors, revolutionaries of the wasteland.

The first and eponymous squat in Derelict Town was “The Derelict”, a bar and strip club that wanted, however schizophrenically, to be an art center. Particularly, the crowd-appointed spiritual leader / poet laureate / Social Worker in Chief, Burroughs Klein, wanted The Derelict to be an art center. And Burroughs tended towards schizophrenic, as is often nature’s genetic fee for endowing one with unusual innate creativity. Propensity for making connections traded for coherency.

For me The Derelict was a detox from shoveling toxic oxephant feces all day, via intoxication, a sort of sensory and mental exfoliant. I loved Gulliver, I did. That mammoth elephant-cow thing was the nicest twenty ton marvel of pre-collapse genetic engineering I’d ever met, after the dangerous courting phase that resembled playing matador with a very angry, horned eighteen-wheeler. But really, some days I literally just couldn’t take any more of his bullshit.

I was introduced to The Derelict through Farjadeen’s daughter, Kalki. She helped her dad out around the shop during the day and made an unbelievable curry, considering the less-than super market quality of the goods. (Veggies were from the Tree Dwellers and the genesis of the meat was rumored to be stem-cell cultures of organisms that once might have been chicken, grown in vats by a group of former scientists who managed to get a fast food “Country Fried Chicken” plant up and running.) I preferred the madras curry myself, always up for a good mouth-nuke, plus the spice overpowered any of that clone-y, vatty taste.

“Don’t let the machine weigh you down,” Kalki said, fiddling with a skirt “grown” from bacteria in-vitro, topped by a hemp halter-top that was saying something in some dialect of Derelict “shipster” fashion that was a foreign language to me. Her dusky Indian complexion framed by wild mid-back tresses looked ‘good’, that’s as far as I got.

“It’s just not really my scene.” Was this a date? I tried to remember a web fossil I’d read, some bit-rotted 10-tips gossip site article on the “Dating Scene”, something about “embracing your inner weird” and not going for the four star restaurant on the first date. The closest thing to high school prom I’d experienced in the Vault was EMP strike emergency drills, giving CPR to the Yawpper CEO’s daughter. Stumblingly roleplaying foggily recollected narratives of Old World romantic comedies. Was the kiss before or after the date? Will this jeopardize my job? Damnit, I can’t do this.

“You go on, I’ll just be a third wheel,” I said, dumping my feces smeared firefighter turnout coat on a metal rack.

“That ‘get out of having a Life’ card doesn’t work with two people, Jericho. Oh come on you square, seize the day for a change, enjoy the little things.” Delivered with a friendly irony, the default undertone in the new world. But after a chance moment of self reflection, I discovered that she was kinda right. “Enjoy the little things” had been my mantra out in the wastes. And now, having become so focused on a new sense of a Better Future, on any future at all, the ‘joie de’ in life seemed to have shifted from The Now to that mythical anglo-saxon perpetual “Later” that permeated the WASP nest of the Elysium Enclave. Some imagined ethereal reward delivered on a golden platter by angels in return for hard work and colorless existence. Waiting for Rapture. Had I forgotten to stop and smell the roses of finally living in something like a society? There was also of course the not illegitimate excuse that my branding as a robo-terrorist after my very public detaining and imprisonment had not yet faded from the public imagination, and thus I had developed a certain fear of publicity.
“It’s ok to be you, there. We’re all rejects together. An assemblage of misfits, an anti-social network.” The re-purposed paleogism sold me.

In my case, choosing an outfit was about finding the least shitty and least shitty smelling set of hashed synth-cotton and pleather in the same muted grey hue. The lesser of two olfactory evils. Not caring what others think really goes a long way, until you interact with Others and realize that you actually do kind of care. Not caring is a luxury of hermits and sociopaths. Kalki jumped in as my fashion guru like in those age old reality TV “Female Eye for the Bomb Sheltered Guy” shows. She hemmed, hawed, had me spin around, put stuff on, take stuff off.

“So, you ever been to a concert, or is that a stupid question?” Kalki asked, fixing the collar of a polo shirt splashed with the logo of some prehistoric Web 4.0 startup, did that nose wiggling thing she did when something wasn’t working.

“No. I mean, no, it’s not a stupid question. I virtualled lots of concerts back in the Vault. We had the best of Lady Gaga, Bob Dylan, Justin Beiber, Sex Pistols, we even had holographic reconstructions of Woodstock based on cultural reverse-engineering by the best ethnomusicologists-“

Kalki tinkled laughter, “That’s not what I meant. Watching a pre-recorded rock concert on your fifty inch nanowave screen in the comfort of your living room is not the same as being at the actual event in person,” she explained.

“What’s the difference? You get near-flawless reproduction of the sensory lifestream with Virtu-sperience. Audio, visual, even olfactory sims of alcohol and marijuana, moshpit contact replication. The Ancients stopped going to meat-concerts it was so good.”

“Well ‘The Ancients’ were hollow shells, spiritless homunculi, who totally blew it and who were fucked up on more levels than a skytower elevator directory. It’s just different, the anticipation, the adrenaline, the people, the energy between the band and the audience. Just being ‘There’ fully in the moment realizing that anything can happen and that this moment will never happen again. Maybe that fact makes it more precious, more intense, more real, or something. It’s hard to explain, you’ll have to just experience it for yourself.” She flashed a smile, patted me on the cheek, and I caught a glimpse of dried tempera under her fingernails from painting. She went to rummage around in a MegaMart shopping cart full of beat up outerwear.

“Is your dad ok with you going there? I mean, I just don’t want to get flamed out for my implied condoning of this by tagging along,” I tried to look as unsheepish as possible. Her shoulders stiffened momentarily and she continued sifting.

“First of all, I think I’ve just found the perfect fit for you. Second of all, my dad can try to firewall me all he wants, but I’m not his little child “Bollywood Star” anymore. He is not my CEO and I am not his personal android-doll to be molded however he desires. So, hey, don’t worry about it, ok? I’ll deal with it. Consider the disclaimer signed, terms and conditions agreed to.”

She turned, presenting an old Coogol corporate fleece jacket, riddled with bullet holes and blood stains, Klein blue knitting gone the color of rotten steel girders. “Now this, this is totally you.”

***

Farjadeen was not ecstatic about his daughter hanging down in Derelict Town, but he was also relieved that she was no longer “love-hating” her ex-boyfriend, Chupa, a mako-dog fighter and hustler and rumored to be the dethroned descendant of an old world Mexican drug lord. “You ever make-a-kissy with that boy again, I will have Gulliver stomp his shit hole face into the ground,” were Farj’s exact words.

Friday night, the ship’s bow of Derelict Town lit up like a half-eaten birthday cake, as if a 90’s cruise liner, after dinner party in full-swing, had sailed into the Bermuda Triangle, its bow surpassing the event horizon of the Triangle’s warp gate, to be severed off and dropped through a wormhole upon the black asphalt-sand shores of post-Disconnect Bayeria. The marine tang of sea salt and rust blew in waves from the still-warm ocean. They used to be colder, the oceans.

Boarding the supercomputer barge up a creaking old metallic ramp, the raw uncensored poverty and hardship, hidden by Ibayzaar’s whitewashed postcard entrance, was fully exposed. Thin, withered souls in the neon orange jumpsuit uniform of Ibayzaar human power plants shambled about, knees quaking arthritic from months, years of peddling the bike turbines in debt-slavery. Drug eaten shells of former humans twitched insectile, slumped against trashcan fires clutching morbid black forearm veins, telltale signs of the final cycle on a downward spiral. Hooded spaz dealers striding with a reptilian paranoia. Massive, anatomically incorrect muscles of biohacked meatheads sprouting like thewy tumors, the unstable lab rats of maladroitly recovered old world biotech. Gunshots resounded through the reinforced aluminum hulls every minute, punctuating a new statistic.

Yet, amongst the pain and despair, there were rays, saplings of hope, of the possibility of change, the downtrodden rebuilding themselves anew from the wreckage. Here, an art gallery selling metallic sculptures made from salvaged Derelict flotsam. There a one-legged street performer juggling for a raggedy gang of dirt-caked children. And there, radiating in the distance was The Derelict Art Center; the Ark, the Nexus of solace, art, culture, of real hope for the disillusioned. Not the imagined mythical American Dream Future, but of a livable spiritually fulfilling now, and a direction to move in, a lower-case “future”. At least that is what it aspired to be, most days.

“Come on Jay, my band is on in five!” Kalki towed me by the wrist through the thickening clouds of people like a favorite toy. I brushed up against throngs of humanity in dirty burlap and a material Kalki explained was extruded hyper-thin plastic made from melted-down digi-phones. Kalki and I joked that the artist-thug chic was in this season. A look that suggested individuals who conducted flash-muggings as a form of performance art, or fenced drug money within caked layers of paint on cubist-revivalist portraits. Or she joked, and I conjured polite chuckles pretending to get it.

“Estraven, thought you was still turning tricks down Server Side?” Someone said, aimed in my direction, but my brain crashed attempting to crunch the meaning of the sentence.

“Shut the twuck up Bander you Shmitthead,” Kalki return-fired. Shmitthead, I think I got that one. The CEO of Ibayzaar, one Bill Shmitt, who had generally fucked over many a Derelictan, ergo Shmitthead = insult. I felt like an Asperger’s nerd struggling to decipher human interaction, trying to claw back social-brain tissue hijacked by number theory and Star Wars minutiae.

“Come here, ho.” The dark, horse-mane mohawked bouncer wrapped Kalki up in a hug. Huge arms like the Derelict’s hawser cables caused her torso to completely disappear for a moment behind a shipster tattoo-collage of urban fantasy surrealism, de-signified Asian characters and the logos of dead corporations. I stood there.

“Bander, this is my good friend Jericho, works for my dad.” Kalki made a mock-graceful “voila” motion, like one of those Old World discoball-gowned gameshow girls presenting a new prize.

“Hey boyfriend. First time in Derelict Town?” Bander asked, waving in a posse of cosplayers dressed as the characters of this late-2010s space-pirate 3D TV series I vaguely recognized; papier mache tri-point hats, bioresin cast blasters.

My first hit was, “How can you tell it’s my first time?” But that would be embarrassing and weirding.

“Yeah, it’s great. How do you know Kalki?” Bzzzzzt, too clingy insecure sounding. Thank you for playing.

The bouncer laughed like a subwoofer. “That’s the wrong question brother, how does anyone not know Estraven? She’s the salt of the sea of D-Town, she’s the Buzz. She’s like the sister I never had. Also the stripper I never had.” Bander laughed again and Kalki punched him in the arm, making a sound like slapping a ten pound steak with a ruler. I made a mental note to ask Kalki about this “Estraven” alias later. I think a passerby tried to sell me spaz or a hot night of meat-sex in the red light district but I couldn’t decipher the verbal steganography and waved them away.

“So what’s the feed on Johnny boy? Heard he’s been rolling serious bankster downtown.”

Bander crossed his arms, shook his head, a clutch of septum piercings chiming together like jingle bells. “That fool thought he could get ahead with that evil evil evil Rags to Riches loan program. Told me he ‘had it all worked out’, connections with the scav teams, Tree Dwellers for raw material, designs for t-shirt lines and that shit. Needless to say, his pipe dream scheme got totally BPed, his products were undercut by the Ibayzaar Big Box Boys with their slave labor. Ultimately, his ‘business’ went underwater, they wound up hijacking his designs, and he ended up in the poetically unjust place of sewing his own damn clothes for a dollar a day to pay back his usurious debts. On top of that, he owes money to some pretty mean trolls on this particular block from whom he borrowed startup capital.

“But enough about him. How is the old Farj doing anyway? Status update says he’s looking to expand.” Bander asked.

“He’s always looking to, bit by the money bug. But you know my dad, selective seeing and Indian astrology all the way down. Not dumb or desperate enough to fall for the Rags to Riches scam yet, thankfully. But hey! I’m gonna miss my girls’ big night!” Kalki tapped an imaginary smart phone screen, the residual universal sign language for ‘I’m late’.”You keep it in cash, Bander. Stay odd, you big faggot. ”

The Derelict, located within a Coogol supercomputer storeroom, was like a wastelander attempt at a late-20th century art-house/nightclub/stripclub irreverently built on the “temple” of an ancient technologically advanced alien civilization – and the Old World in many ways was an alien civilization. The dormant obelisks of processing cores were spraypainted in neon hues of urban neo-tribal post-apoc expressionism. Like hieroglyphic creation (and destruction) stories painted on the dust-obscured catacombs of a slumbering pyramidal mothership, patiently awaiting return of the godfather race. Or thinking, “Good riddance.” Derelictians were certainly less anticipating the return of Hale Bopp messiahs, more dancing on the grave of selfish idiotic parents who’d wrecked the homeworld. And was there ever dancing. It was packed like in-vitro sardine flesh; a wet, hot, undulating serpent of humanity lost to the moment, to the encompassing boom and flow of edgy djing.

“Sup ‘Straven, check it out. Tomorrow night, Happy Hour at eleven. Nice arm candy B-T-W.” An elfin girl in a bikini emblazoned across the breasts with two pictures of random faces labeled “human” handed Kalki a flyer and a digital pendant of some sort. Apparently the supercomputer’s crystalline memory modules were being removed, strung on necklaces of copper wire, given as party favors.

“What’s with the swimsuit ‘human’ pics?” I puzzled.

“Enviro-striptease. Trending big time before the collapse. When unemployment hit 50%, the greenies had to suss out a way to win the bread and win hearts for their eco-causes. So they came down from hugging trees, started hugging poles, slapped pictures of newly endangered species where they knew they would get eyeball-time -- their naughty bits. And it worked, for the most part, at least till the bot factories started pumping out new android strippers who put them out of a job again. We hairless monkies are the latest species on the endangered list.” Kalki backstoried, punctuating the punchline with a coy smile.

Kalki towed me over to the dance floor, a raised chrome platform consisting of toppled server towers, circled by a stonehenge of blown-plastic sculpture. Polycarbonate statues, grotesque but poignant. Blackstripe suit-and-tied busts of Ibayzaar leaders donned with the heads of snakes, rats, leeches. An anemic Atlas in chains struggling to support a fractured, crumbling globe. Sentinels keeping silent watch over the roaring ceremonies.

Buried in a flux of flesh and sound, I gave up to the beat, moved my limbs in awkward patterns that might pass to the casual observer as dancing. Kalki didn’t seem to notice my holistic lack of skill either, and caught up with me on a zephyr of movement interpretive and vaguely vedic. Awkward limbs; I just realized I had not received a single disparaging remark, fearful glance, spiteful sneer, or death threat cast at me because of my machine arm since I’d come to Derelict Town. No one even seemed to notice. Maybe Kalki was right, maybe this was that freeside, that Temporary Autonomous Zone bohemia, that anti-social network wherein I did not need to airbrush my frightening, deviant or undesirable blemishes, a place where I could truly be myself. “Be yourself”, I think that was high ranking advice on the list in that old Dating-Tips article.

As we danced, I felt some dense primal knot of Darwinian jungle-tension between my shoulder blades begin to melt. Kalki and I traded giddy smiles. So this was “having fun”. I replayed old world dance scene lines in my head, trying to think of something appropriate to say that meant, “I like you,” but hip-ly. I think I ended up saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid”. It made Kalki laugh out loud, and she patted me on the cheek again, whispering something to the ecostripper elf-chick who laughed too. I’m pretty sure I did something right, maybe.

The lighting began to phase shift aquarium like, pulsing glows emitted by gene-modded Biolum ™ algae, ensconced in clear plastic Aqua Arctica bottles. “Those bottles once contained water collected from these massive continents of ice called glaciers, a favorite drink of the ancients.” Kalki informed me with wide, sooty eyes. Glaciers are gone too. Woulda been nice to have them around to cool the oceans off.

The music shimmered out on an ebbing tide of synthetic cymbals as the DJ high-fived his way across the crowd and off the stage to thick howling applause. The godfather of Derelict Town and house MC, Burroughs Klein, strode up to the stage, snatching up a microphone. A cadre of onyx dreadlocks flowed over either shoulder, reflecting random flashes of the subaquatic blue bioluminescence like glimpses of a sea serpent in moonlight. His posture and cadence was deliberate, denoted a veteran honing of a certain commanding urban stage presence, the physiological finesse of the spoken-word. The crowd hushed to a reverent silence as he began to speak.

“Friendsters, Remans, postcountrymen, sons and daughters of the new end, the New Derelict, how high do we fly tonight? We gather here, today, within the silicon belly of a fallen Behemoth to celebrate, to Face2Face, to friend one another, to see third eye to third eye. We celebrate our survival, against stacked odds, individually and as a species. For what is humanity but a fragile twig hanging by a thread from the primate branch on a Tree of Life blown by the gale-force winds of change? And we celebrate, above all, in the face of silent oppression, unmitigated suffering, broken promises: the survival of our spirit. Something the ancients failed to maintain, their ghosts now lost to their machines.” Burroughs began to pace the stage, lighting evolving ethereal, throwing shadows like fire against cave walls, congas rumbling awake, fingered bass playing out the heartbeat of a way-back-when dreamtime.

“Once, late 20th century corporations waged marketing branding campaigns, clashed with lawyer knights and finance wizards. In the 21st century, internet corporation-network-nations recruited whole armies of starving journalists and writers jobless from mass ebook pirating, turned them into tech-evangelists, some in the form of bloggers, self-purported "geek gurus", demagogic sci-fi writers. The tech evangelists were paid to profess the glories of “open source”, “user empowerment”, “crowd wisdom”, “open web”, “decentralization” even as the central nodes themselves, Coogol, Friendbook, paradoxically became the most powerful and remained the most closed. Big Brother spy services holding their lucrative closed-source data mining algorithms and collected private information tighter than the RIAA to copyrights. Cloud Lords scooping up the content and personal data of the starving digital peons, scraping pennies off decaying robot-overtaken remnants of the economy as they spiraled downard in a game as self-destructive as subprime financial derivatives. Not so different from our own overlords today, my fellow Derelictians.”

“Before the Disconnect, Cyber Navies outnumbering in tonnage and vessels all warships deployed in all World Wars were launched to serve as data centers for search engines, social graphing, advertising. The supercomputers themselves were the size of oil tankers, cooled by deep-sea water and powered by wave-spun turbines. The supercomputer barges so densely populated either seaboard that they surpassed the Great Wall of China as most visible feature from space, became pejoratively known as, “The Great PayWalls of Coogol”. The United Aggregation of Eurasia soon followed suit, and all the worlds’ continents became ensconced in mega-server tankers the density of Cold War naval blockades. Unspeakably massive fleets fighting invisible wars of network lock-in and arms-races of privacy-invasion, fighting not for land or freedom or religion or oil or capitalism or communism but for online eyeballs to advertise at, to become the most central nexus of search, of social networking, of computer-dominated finance, the uber-aggregator through which all must pass, vying for the mapless territory of cyberspace that was nothing yet everything. They lined the geological fault lines, and being the fault lines of the digital, they were first to fall under waves of electromagnetic pulse. And as the digital had come to govern the real, when the cyberquakes shook the Ancient’s ‘internet’ to pieces, so the real world followed suit. The Ancients, so convinced by their own ideologies, failed to see their own false armatures, failed to see themselves, and ultimately failed themselves. And failed us.”

The dreamtime gave way to the present, percussion and bass rushing forth, joined by xylophone and keyboard, misty haze snapping back into bright, stark white daylight. Burroughs animated fully, fist to the sky, no longer recalling but declaring with full force, to self to audience to Ibayzaar to all, as if sending a flare of truth out into the dark universe.

“I have seen the best minds of a generation disintegrated by a user-friendly madness, eating their own hands in search of the Wired, starving in naked hysteria. I have seen the worst minds flee the 404ed world to the gated shadows of New Mexico night, riding birds of steel. I have seen the brightest torch carriers of a species tarbabied into hearts of darkness within the soul erasing mires of rejungled concrete. Orphans of the orphaned, the lone among lone wanderers tracing songlines across the ash gardens of the new Dreamtime, searching for reasons to keep searching even as their feet bleed and tears turn to dust. And I have seen those greatest dreams ground up, granularized, diced like collateral debt obligation nuggets, McChickened into the dark smothering heat of slave ship basements, cogs powering power machines, to be eaten alive. Well I say to you, friends: let the naked lunches be served.

“And who better to serve it up than this our next group of cultural and sonic WMDs, the powerhouse seductresses of Derelict Town as sharply dressed as they are tongued. As your ship’s captain, speaking, we ask, nay, declare that you unfasten your seatbelts and prepare for the mass boat-rocking turbulence that will shake even the distant corporate towers of the Ibayzaar Czars. I give you The Horsewomen of The Apocalypse.”

“Here they come!” Kalki squealed in an alarmingly out-of-character teeny girl voice, hopping up and down. As Burroughs ducked out of the spot light, the DJ’s ovation was overshadowed by the thunderous wave of screaming incited by the introduction of the next act.

The lead singer of The Horsewomen of The Apocalypse pounced the stage, a look channeling Marina Kovanovich, mainstream zombie movie starlet and cover girl for the apocalypse. Literally, the actress had been a Vogue model and spokeswoman before The Disconnect. Black bandage dress beneath a scarlet slip, volumetric auburn curls flaunting a physics-defying supermodel bounce, smashing black Prada kneehighs that had become ubiquitous since home clothing-printers. She was an apotheosis and parody of the insipid, shortsighted, shrinkwrapped future-fetishism of the past. A severely ponytailed Asian brunette in a business suit and black wireframe haute nerd glasses and covered in golden glitter snatched up a guitar, checked tuning. The bassist was a tall black woman rocking what appeared to be a pearl white Ibayzaar official dinner jacket, but on closer inspection consisted of a hemp shirt with the bleached bones of small mammals glued on. As the guitarist and bassist quarterbacked some last-minute chord-change audibles, the drummer spiraled down one of the stripper poles. Covered in only a diamond swimsuit bikini – valueless as Prada since diamond fabrication went cottage-industry -- and fishnets laced with dollar signs, topped with a Maxylyn Morrow wig, the infamous speed-dialed schoolgirl escort model for the President of the United Territories of Coogol.

Each persona was a meticulously sculpted epithet, a stanza woven with sentences of restored pre-Disconnect apparel. Together, completing a poem written in a language as old and as deep as cities, revealing truth dislodged and accessible only in the critical moment of their collapse. From the ground zero of World 1.0 shone forth these fragments juxtaposed, flourishes of fossilized fashion. Like the intricate trajectories of subatomic particles blooming in the instant of supercollider destruction, Rosetta Stone glyphics revealing the deepest secrets hidden beneath the operating system of the world that in the everyday remains as invisible as air or gasoline or an electronic financial transaction.

The audience was foaming, Kalki was locked deep in some internal fan bliss-state, eyeing the lead singer in particular with a singular fervency.

“Good evening my fellow end-users of Ibayzaar! Comrades of Derelict Town! I’m your host and inappropriate service provider, iVangelica, and these are my lovely associates, Exuberance on guitar, Improvidence on bass, and Syn on drums. Together we are, as of this moment, The Four Horsewomen of The Apocalypse. On behalf of all of us I’d like to thank you for choosing to meat-stream us to your ears. In lieu of the lack of working cameras and internet, we’ll be handing out cardboard smartphone replicas with which you may film us incessantly, ruining the concert experience and missing the moment while attempting to preserve it. Sharpies and posterboard Friendbook “walls” and Yakker “Feeds” will be provided at the rear of the club on which we encourage you to physically comment and tweet about us to your friends every few seconds in one hundred forty character sittings, further alienating you from the event and providing us with free marketing. We sincerely hope that you have a pleasant evening, thank you.”

iVangelica threw her head back, sending plumes of red hair like the bloody headshot of a network CEO assassination.

Silence stole its fifteen milliseconds of fame.

A nuclear flash of a scream stunned us, disarmed and unprepared for the boom of a twenty kiloton bass kick followed by the blast wave of a power chord that nearly blew the rusting walls out of The Derelict. And possibly the eardrums of collateral fools in the kill zone of the speakers. I was instantly sucked into the slipstream, along with Kalki and the rest of the crowd, howling choruses of fangasm fighting the sonic firepower of a refurbished Marshall quadstack. The initial minute-long detonation and repercussions dissipated gradually into the snowing ash of a finger plucked lament.

“Let’s hit the Big Time / Load up on funds and bring your friends,” the languishing siren’s voice was melting ice cream. The crowd swayed in quiet reverence.

“Everyone loses / When it pays to lose and to pretend,” syncopated downtempo percussion rode in on a brief tide of echoed guitar embellishment, fading like daydream.

“Oh God, we’re surrounded / By thieves and their undead,” the singer explored the stage. Scaled, then perched atop a titanium server tower doubling as a monitor speaker cabinet, sapphire eyes set ablaze as they offered a fearful lover’s gaze to the celestial embrace of the spotlight.

“Aim for the head now / This is the last chance we’ll get,” The delicate drizzle thickened to strummed chords, Impatience feeding off Exuberance, swelling bass lines sweeping the crowd up into dance, snare drums hits like the thunder snaps heralding an oncoming storm.

“Mama said that I was so exceptional / But the bigger you are the harder you fall”

iVangelica leapt from her pedestal, no small feat in high heels, her three fellow horsewomen of the post-apocalypse joining her in the air. We shivered in terror and ecstasy waiting for the whirlwind, the end, for the wrath of gods.

“No there’s no more Armageddons / Cause it’s the end of the line / No there’s no more Armageddons / And it’s payback time” The flood gates opened, a wall of ear blistering post punk sound and fury. Mosh pits, riots broke out on the dance floor, people howling, laughing, crying all at the same time. The guitarist bassist and drummer played as though possessed, heads and limbs flailing in a controlled spasm. The singer belted the words as though they were her last. She became a medium, an effigy, channeling and embodying pure, unbridled outrage, the blood sweat and bile of a million disposable souls pouring out of every fiber of her being.

The Horsewomen of The Apocalypse played another six songs, each time it seemed impossible to rock harder than the previous number, but then they would do it, break another sound barrier. They played one cover, a song called “A Town With No Cheer” by some pre-Disconnect vaudeville reenactivist guy named Tom Waits.

(Continued in next post)

When it was over, I collapsed onto a barstool, dizzily scooping ricebowls full of kava to my mouth from a community donation bowl.

“Wow, I never imagined in my wildest Virtu-Sperience™ concert sims it could be like that. I know this is my first real concert but I have to say that was completely off the hook, huh Kalki? Kalki?” As iVangelica weed-whacked her way out of a kudzu patch of crazed fans, Kalki flying-glomped the singer, then kissed her, hard, on the lips. Then kissed her, hard, on the lips. Wait, what?

My brain sprained itself tripping over the cognitive dissonance. Maybe it was just a cultural thing, some girls do that right? But no, the super model model and my cute if bacteria-wearing date were definitely into each other at tongue-depth. Scarlet and ocean-blue lipstick mixed violet as they caressed and dipped each other like some wanton tempoless tango. I was just waiting for the hundred violin orchestra or uplifting 80’s ballad rock to cue. They were strutting over to the bar now, and I tried to stop my mouth from rapidly opening and closing like a stunned aquarium fish.

“Hey Jericho, this is my girlfriend iVangelica, or just Iva.” Thanks, thanks for letting me in on the loop on that little bit of non-obvious gossip.

“Hey Iva, great show. You guys are great.” I made rocker horns with my free hand as I downed another bowl of kava. I wiped a tan rivulet from my chin. Feelings of misplaced, irrational animosity. Damn her elegant Slavic bone structure and freshly kissed lips. Maybe if I had a vagina…

“Thank you. So Kalki tells me this is your first ever live show. What an honor it is to pop your concert virginity. I hope we didn’t disappoint,” Aha, ha, ha. Not the music, anyway.

“Oh, no, it totally blew my mind, on a whole ‘nother level. I was thinking about ‘here’, but you guys were like way out there, past the ceiling.” I illustrated their level with vigorous hand motions, accidentally half-karate chopping a creepy green mohawked guy, bumbled apologies.

“Jericho cleans up after Gulliver for my dad. He’s such a monk usually. But I totally knew he had a wild side bunkered down beneath that straightlaced corporate front, I’m so glad I had him tag along with me,” Kalki patted me on the back. ‘Tag along?’ What was I, a pet cockerspaniel?

“Yeah, woohoo!”

“You see what I mean!? Well, Iva and I are going to go unzip in the ambient room. You’re welcome to come if you-“

“No, no, you two go, I’m just getting started, got all those years of straightlaced corporate front to make up for.” And I don’t want to be a third wheel. I barely managed to bite my tongue before saying. I smiled and nodded my head along to the next band, “The Disintermediators” or some other pretentious shit.

The girls bounced off in the direction of a smoky, glass bead shrouded doorway, leaning against each other, swallowed by a school of pink haired cosplaying schoolgirls. Lesbian, of course.

Now that I wasn’t distracted by having to pretend to be cheerful, my heart was free to sink, fall out of a hole in my sole, roll like spilled change, get stepped on by a random high heeled dancer, before picking it up, dusting it off and squishing it back into my chest. I wasn’t sure if I was feeling more stupid, pathetic, or hopeless, at that point. It had been a rough first date.

But had it even been a date? Kalki had never actually mentioned the word, I had interpreted it. Had it all been in my head? Had I been subconsciously spinning the events of the night into some preconceived, conditioned narrative, an armature of cinematic plot points, the end trajectory of which was supposed to be… what, a cutely awkward goodnight kiss and the promise of a second date? Coming to mind was some half-remembered koan spouted by a ranting academic about cultural brainwashing by the media. Duped, like shirt-sewing Johnny Boy, like all those poor saps who fell for the Ibayzaar scam, like the ancients who fooled themselves into believing a fake American Dream, blew it all to hell in a cloud of smoke and mirrors and subprime derivatives. What made it sadder was it wasn’t even media of the present but the artifacts of a long-dead world that were screwing with me.

I needed a real stiff drink, industrial strength, a neuron killer to wipe the episode away from the RAM before it went to ROM. I hailed the bartender.

“Global Meltdown On The Beach, on the rocks, please.” The ‘keep filled a glass half full of vaguely vodka-esque synthehol, pureed some canned peaches, a GMO spliced Applorange™, and a gob of gelatinous matter that resembled cranberry, shook it up with two cubes of ice.

“Make that two Global Meltdowns,” a voice like two AM, marinated in Rohypnol, female. I turned. Brilliant platinum hair I immediately recognized as the Four Horsewomen’s drummer. She entangled her legs around the barstool, she’d taken off the Youessay dollar sign fishnets but was still in matching platinum platform heels and the diamond bikini. From this distance I could tell they were real 24 karat diamonds by the kaleidoscopic, almost painful amounts of light her sparse coverings threw off. I became conscious of the fact that I was staring at her parts and looked away, took a sip of Global Meltdown. The synthehol had that ozony, whitewashed lab flavor and the cranberry-analog definitely wasn’t grown in ocean water, but it took the edge off the night.

The drummer pulled the wig off, set it down on the lacquered heat sink that served as a bar counter. In that context, the wig looked like some new canine gene splice created explicitly for dog fashion shows. She shook her hair out, messy waterfalls of jet black, and an inch or so longer than the faux coiffure. A third of her Global Meltdown was gone after her first long swig. She let her platforms dangle off, to clunk on the ridged metal, stretched her toes.

“Pass me that coaster? Hi.” It sounded like she’d noticed a friend in the middle of asking me for the coaster till I saw her focus lingering on me, anticipating. I slid over the foam disc, then said ‘hi’.

“Hey, you guys did really great tonight. I feel bad for these dudes following you, ‘The Disintegritaters’ or whatever.” The band was ‘VJing’, throwing up random mashed-up, bit-crushed images from old world movies and teevee, a chaotic lazer light show filled with arrhythmic bleeps, bloops, and sandblasting white noise that was supposed to be some kind of postmodern art. Not enough signal, too much indecipherable chaos, wankery.

She put on an amused smile. “Thanks. If we can con at least half the audience into believing we’re real musicians, we call that a successful night.” I laughed a translucent pink bubble into my cocktail. She uncurled her legs from the stool’s metal limbs, wrapped them around the other way.

“I saw you strut in with Estraven, you know her?” She asked.

‘Do I know her’? I came in with her, of course I know her. Was this sarcasm? Some hidden subtextual joke? Another flare of Derelict shipster lingo sailing over my head? She was looking at me again with those big, raven-shadowed eyes, either she had impeccable deadpan delivery or was serious.

“Uh, yeah. We’re co-workers. Well, I work for her dad, ‘Farjadeen’s Wasteland Emporium’.” I tried to deliver the message through the blizzard of sound that was the noise band inserting a microphone into a blender set to frappe, then dodging the incoming missiles of synthesizer divebombs like psychotic THX movie intros.

“Did you say you traffic uranium?” She yelled back.

“What? No, no. I work with Kalki at her dad’s shop. The one with the oxephant.”

“Oh, mhm. The armored truck towed by the mutant cow.” She finished up the rest of her drink, called down another Global Meltdown. The Disintermediators shuffled off stage to a roar that was half applause and half pained moans, paroxysms of joy that they’d finally stopped the ear drum holocaust.

“So what’s your source?” She asked.

“Sorry?”

“Where are you from, originally.” She stirred her new drink with an inch long silver fingernail, licked it.

A slightly unusual question, given that most people under the age of thirty who didn’t wind up dead generally didn’t have a “hometown” in the sense the ancients used it. Most people were rootless wanderers since the day they were born. Not out of some personal love of travel and freespirited globetrotting, but out of the simple necessity of having to find food, and trying not to get killed. Hunter-gatherers. Well, many were more like opportunist-scavengers, bottom feeding sharks in a violent sea, but no one likes a nitpicker.

In my particular case, though, I did have a home. However, I was wary about who I shared that information with, as there were some people who held quite serious resentments against the superpower network-nations, who blamed them for the world falling apart, and especially those who’d burbled up from their VIP’s cozy legendary Vaults. I wasn’t getting the violent fanatic vibe here, though. And maybe I unconsciously wanted to make an impression on this woman.

“I’m actually from a subterranean compound.”

“No shit? And I’m from Alpha Centauri, funny we never crossed paths-“

“I know, it sounds like a joke, right?” I spun in the stool, pulled the collar of my jacket down, touched the nape of my neck and switched on my Coogol VM (Valuable Meat) HRFID Tag. Subdermal, blood-powered holographic, virtually unfakable, the implant projected the deceptively innocent playschool Coogol logo through my dermis into the air.

“You needed one of these to get into a Coogol bunker, and no one but top executives, non-expendables, and their immediate family members were ‘stamped’. And the non-expendable list dwindled constantly as machines did more and more of the jobs people used to. At least, back when there was a world to have such a job in.”

She leaned over, clearly fascinated. Startled me with the grazing of an acrylic index fingernail at the nape. A waft of synthehol and lavender fluttered by.

“So why would you leave? I heard the network-nation vaults were idyllic paradises. Pure H20, hydroponic caviar, penultimate Coogol library-cache of every video book and lolcat ever made, Jacuzzis, eighty one virgins, seventy two angels blowing golden trumpets.”

“Well, I didn’t want to, I had to leave.” I deferred with a stoic glance and a mouthful of poison. “What about you?”

“I’m from around these parts. Bayeria Waster, represent,” she made an awkward mockery of some archaic ‘gang’ hand symbol. “A little settlement a ways north. Was no plush underground heaven, but it was better than trying to fend off the bumps in the night on your own. More of a halfway house really, I don’t miss it.” She swirled her glass creating a hurricane of carmine ice, sipping the eye with a clear straw.

“I know, how cliché, right? Country girl comes to the big city seeking reality-tube stardom and fortune, winds up in 9-5 debt slavery, drowning her disenchanted dreams in pools of booze and the sweat of strangers. So what’s your calling, exactly? Here in the ‘Bazaar,” she asked.

“Let’s just say I’m the lead engineer of waste management.” I drank to that, ordered up another one myself. I mean, I shovel shit.

“Wow, sounds challenging.”

“Yeah, well, it’s better than peddling like a machine, being a human battery down in the power plants,.”

A dark look folded a complex topology of ridges and valleys, casting shadows across her made-up China dollish face, it evaporated smooth again a moment later.

“How about you, what keeps your boat afloat. Oh and uh, sorry, didn’t catch your name? I’m Jericho.” I asked.

“It’s Syn. Yes, it is a stage name, but it’s a persona that’s become more real to me than any of the other empty people that I’ve been. And seen. If you can understand that.”

“Sure, it makes sense,” I nodded making good and convincing eye contact, unsure if it did make sense.

“And to play along with your game of cryptic euphemisms in a desperate gambit to dodge questions, let’s just define me as an ‘entertainer’.” She stabbed at the floating bodies of ice in the red liquid with a toothpick umbrella. I went quiet, an awkward ringing silence filled the space like tear gas. It was broken by the first bass thump of a trip-hop/dance track. Clearly I’d ‘griefed’ her, but couldn’t figure out how.

“Hey, you want to play a real game? It’s a fun one, I promise.” Syn shifted to face me, putting on a too-big smile. “It’s called ‘Fifty Two Line Pick Up’. It works like this: you use a pick-up line on me to try to get me to have sex with you. You get fifty two chances, and if you win, we have sex. Ready?”

“Syn, I’m, I mean, I didn’t-“

“Just shut up, Jericho, and play. Pickup line. Hit on me, now.” Syn sucked the last puddle of liquid out of her glass and gave me this blank stare, crossing her arms across her jeweled swimsuit-clad chest. I didn’t see any lifeline out of it. My head was starting to swim, although that could’ve been the alcohol.

“I’ve been scavenging all my life, but you’re the first diamond in the rough,” I cringed, the words tasted like motor oil and tanning spray coming out of my mouth.

“Fuck off, asshole.” She snorted. “That’s one, fifty one left to go.” Her hands remained firmly under armpits, countenance closed.

I felt like an idiot, dowsering my brain for come-ons, it was like dragging my psyche through radioactive mud. “Look what you’ve done! You’ve metled the ice caps of my heart, and now I’m gushing.”

“In your dreams, creep.” It stung, the way she spat it with a practiced smirk, even if it was a game that I didn’t understand. I decided I was done entertaining her and let the weirdness bloom again, searched my glass for answers. I’d had enough emotional flogging for one night. A minute passed, she eventually turned back to face the bar.

“Why are you wearing that stupid corporate shirt anyway. It’s full of holes.” Syn muttered, softer, cooler. I wasn’t sure whether it was the fact that it was a Coogol employee shirt or the fact that it was full of bullet holes which was the problem. The shirt Kalki picked out for me, “It’s so you” I could hear her chiming. Why the hell was I wearing this old rag anyway?

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time,” she said. I glanced down at the Coogol corporate fleece jacket, torn and frayed with bullet holes drooling deltas of brown blood stain.

“This is what I was wearing the night… The night Elysium Vault was breached, when it was destroyed, when we had to evacuate. This was all I had time to take, my clothes.” Each tear, each yawning hole was a hyperlink opening up a story – the shootout with the raider netfreaks, a narrow run-in with a lionraptor – a tale of survival, of our journey since.

“I hadn’t even realized I’d kept it, till now. I guess maybe I just wanted to have something to hold on to, a token of home. Maybe it helped me to imagine that the Vault wasn’t completely destroyed, that it was just… sunken. Like that sunken city, Atlantis. That it wasn’t really dead, just submerged, and that someday it might resurface again. It’s silly, I know.”

“I’m sorry. And no, it’s not silly.” Syn slid sparkling crescent toenails beneath the sparkling straps of four inch heels, stood. She approached the threshold of my personal bubble, but hesitated, instead lay a hand on mine, a brief but firm squeeze. “I’ve got to get back to my dayjob. I’ll see you around, Jericho. We should do this again.”

A few minutes later, Syn was called up to the stage, to perform a strip-tease, wig back on, diamond tresses shimmering like a mirage. Telling lies in flesh and curvature, becoming the clay lonely men laid upon the armatures of their fantasies, animating them with each undulation of a hip, each flex of a calf.

I think, for perhaps just a moment, I understood why Kalki had chosen this shirt, what she meant by “being more real”. Why the ancients’ sawdust mansions lay as ash and why the sparkling Ibayzaar corporate towers were as tall and as empty. Why I would find myself returning to The Derelict, night after night. Then I smothered the thought in another Global Meltdown.

The Silence: Blade Running

2010-08-03T00:01:00.001-07:00

It must be a forest fire or stars reflected in a lake or some visual hallucination induced by too much radioactive rat meat. Because in the distance, hovering in the night is a town’s worth of lights, like a mirage of pre-Silence Vegas. If it’s real, this is by far the largest settlement Cyclops and I have seen since leaving Elysium Vault.

“Cy, please tell me you’re seeing this.”

“Two thousand six hundred eighty four discrete points of visible-spectrum light?”

“Let me see the map.” The X is marked in #2 pencil just past Exit 76b off the interstate. I turn around to squint at the rust-rashed traffic sign with a big seventy six on it. This has to be it, has to be.

“Holy electromagnetic winters, Cy, I think we’ve found Ebayzaar.” I feel simultaneously like crying and falling asleep forever. We’ve been trekking the wasteland so long I’d almost forgotten Ebayzaar might be a real place and not just a vague direction to head in, a hope maintenance mechanism. Cyclops headbutts me in the solar plexus with a hug.

As we draw closer, it becomes apparent some of the lights are moving, in a circle.

“What is that, looks like a chandelier rolling on its side.” Cyclops rubs his glass face with a piece of shirt.

I know this shape. Memories are unearthed, of watching pre-Silence movies preserved in dad’s prehistoric five hundred terabyte thumb drive. Giant glowing bicycle-wheel-shaped vehicles that went nowhere. People eating this fluffy candy like pink and blue clouds in spinning tea cups, guys slamming massive rubber hammers to win stuffed animal prizes for their girlfriends.

“Ferris Wheel, I think it’s called.” It was in one of my favorite DivX vids, Zombieland, where a motley crew of survivors sought out an amusement park sanctuary in the undead infested ruins.

I have a sort of love-hate relationship with those post-apocalyptic flicks. On the one hand, they’re broken, lonely worlds like my own, and I can relate to that. On the other hand, they have the stupidest plot devices like some brain-eating megavirus or cataclysmic comet collision or 2012 pop-superstition nonsense. Everyone knows it was none of those things, but people relying on their super-smart technology till their brains atrophied into uber-stupidity that caused The End Of The World As We Knew It. The ancients were silly like that.

Ebayzaar, or at least the entrance thereof, is the cyclopean love child of a sci-fi movie set, the Vegas MGM Grand, and a marine corps base. An EBAYZAAR sign rivaling the Hollywood billboard blazes high and proud in differently colored neon that looks stolen from a dozen pre-Silence restaurants and night clubs downtown. The entrance is a hyperbolically elaborate icon of some long-forgotten, decaying Futureland theme park; a faux-basalt stargate etched with glowing circuitboard-pattern runes surrounded by rusting chrome spires serves as the “portal”. Ebayzaar logos are emblazoned over the patched-up flags waving high on the walls, themselves painted over in the primary-based Ebayzaar color scheme, giving the aura of an abandoned seashell, squatted by smaller creatures who wish to think of themselves as the fallen giants before them. Welcomers in white dinner jackets greet multiple long queues of travelers on pilgrimages like ours. They are flanked by mercs clutching AK47s and fifteen foot reinforced chain-link fence fanged with multiple sets of razor wire pocked with dried blood and torn bits of clothing. This quietly but efficiently qualifies the hospitality with a, “Fuck with us, and die.”

We get in line, behind a caravan consisting of a UPS truck towed by a gigantic lumbering oxephant. I’ve spotted a couple in the wild. Once saw one flinging around the lifeless bodies of raiders stupid enough to attack it, eight foot horns mopping the highway with a bloody ragdoll. But this is the first domesticated oxephant I’ve seen. Like a Texas Longhorn bull the size of a shipping container. There’s a rumor they’re cattle mutated from radiation left by the Intellectual Property wars, another that they’re bovine-elephant gene splices engineered by big agriculture for increased beef yield . Some say they’re actually a species of prehistoric mammoth, resurrected from DNA samples locked in glacier ice. Taxonomy in the post-cyberpocalypse wasteland is a gnarled Gordian Knot of a problem approached more like a storytelling contest than anything resembling science.

“Can I touch it?” Cyclops stares at the creature, full of that twelve year old sense of wonder.

“Best not. It isn’t a petting zoo.”

Behind us is a party of Tree Dwellers wrapped up in hemp and leaves, some wearing only the proverbial fig leaf. One woody-blonde’s hair is done up in a bird’s nest, literally, with eggshells and a sparrow nestled inside. We hold our breath as the wind shifts bringing odors preternaturally strong for a bunch of naturalists. They eye us and our cybernetic limbs and vision with all the self righteous disdain only a cult-nurtured pack mentality can provide.

“Crimes against the Earth Mother,” Bird Nest sussurates. I can almost hear the vitriolic reverberations of the echo chamber as her posse joins in on the sneering shaking of heads and snide sniper comments on my robotic arm and Cyclops’ digital vision.

Cyclops’ brows cloud and his posture is shifting like he is going to say something so I grab his wrist with my metal and nanocarbon fingers. “Forget it, man, they’re just a bunch of greenie loons.”

“Fuck you too and the recycled antediluvian ideology you scampered in on, Bird Brain,” I refrain from saying, forcing it down into subvocalization. Despite the intensity of my desire to enlighten our fellow Ebayzaar patrons on the irony of naturalism purists relying on the most “criminally” technological trading post when it is convenient, Cyclops and I really don’t need to start making enemies before we’ve even gotten in the door.

At last the Oxephant caravan lumbers through the gates, the footsteps of the colossal beast felt more than heard.

“Next.” We’re waved up. The maitre d’ of Ebayzaar is wearing the cleanest, brightest clothing I have ever seen, like, actually washed with detergent and bleach. Dark hair slicked back, with an almost neurotically even caterpillar mustache. Unusually fair skin, teetering on effeminate, the soft youthiness of a man who has not had to trudge out in the sun-baked carcass of the fallen world for his keep. Not for some time, anyway. As he flicks his wrist to jot something down, my unconscious snags on something troubling that I can’t name, some marking emblazoned beneath his long, starched sleeves.

“On behalf of all of us here at Ebayzaar, I’d like to welcome you and thank you for making the difficult and potentially lethal journey to our humble establishment. I am Alistair, head of public relations and master of ceremonies. We hope you have an enjoyable and productive stay here at Ebayzaar, and remember that with your help we are rebuilding that cornerstone of civilization – an economy – one auction, one trade at a time. We ask that you register any weapons: firearms, knives, explosives, electromagnetic, chemical or biological-“ He abruptly trails off, mid-sentence, as if he’s seen a homicidal Coogol Advertiser bot.

“Circuit heads! Guards!” Alistair screeches, jabbing a crooked, accusatory finger in our direction.

“Circuit heads? What-“ I instinctively close my mouth as around twenty 7.62 mm fully automatic rifles snap their business ends onto Cyclops and I.

“Check them for IEDs,” Alistair flags four of the mercenaries toward us. The jangle and clatter of metal equipment surrounds us, one of the men spits on the ground just missing my tattered shoe. The back of my right knee explodes with pain and I’m forced to the ground in a random act of unnecessary violence, followed by Cyclops. Confusion and anger battle in my head. The cold barrel of a gun at my temple interrupts.

“I’ll blow your CPU out all over your friend, you move. Fucking robot.” The merc strips me of my Reebok knapsack, pats me down. Robot?

“Robot? We’re not robots, we’re humans!” More heads turn, and I’m rewarded with an industrial-heeled kick to the back, knocking the wind out and leaving my cheek mashed to the ground, blowing plumes of dusty gravel. That familiar bitter metallic taste of dead Earth.

Alistair comes down from his pedestal, pressing the cap of his Mont Blanc fountain pen beneath my chin to tilt my head up, to meet eyes like howling caverns of ice.

“And I suppose this, ‘appendage’, is just this season’s hinterland-chic, then?” He taps the titanium alloy of my right tibia with the pen. I turn to look at my very robotic looking Neuroarm, frantically trying to spin together my defense.

“That is just a prosthetic. I scavved it off one of those android clerk things you see in all the old-world stores. We’re a hundred percent womb-grown human.” I use a trick I learned from a black ops guy back in the Vault, focusing on a point just to the side and behind my inquisitor’s head to keep my delivery as calm as possible.

He smoothes over his dainty little charcoal strokes of mustache with thumb and forefinger. “I see. And your friend?" Cyclops lets out a yelp as one of the guards backhands him across the face and yanks his camera-glasses from his head, exposing the thimble-sized neocortex jack between his brows like a digital third eye, torn from its socket. At this moment I wouldn’t mind performing a tracheotomy on Alistair with his snobbishly over-crafted pen.

“He’s my brother. He was born blind. It’s just a vision mod that bypasses his retinas so he can see.”

“Interesting. And where exactly did you two have all these advanced augmentations installed?”

“At a Flamestone Hardware & Body, downtown. We got a package deal.” Alistair frowns, gesturing to one of the mercs. He plants the barrel over the socket in Cyclops’ forehead, cocking the gun.

I’m expecting the interview to hit this line of questioning, but it still gives me pause. I decide it doesn’t matter much at this point if they know the location of the Elysium subterranean compound, but I’m not gonna spoon-feed. “We’re from a military base up north, about eight hundred miles. It’s gone now, though, ran out of food, water purifier went down, we were overrun. That’s why we’re here.”

He puts his hands together in a golf clap, teeth white as bleached bones. “Really now! We haven’t been graced by the revenants of the United Territories of Coogol security forces in years! How positively anthropological. We only hope our humble enterprise can aspire to a fraction of the greatness of that aggregator of the world, the ultimate corporate-collective. It would be my very personal and extreme pleasure to offer you a timeshare in Gates Tower, our finest hotel.”

I find myself wanting to reel out a novel’s worth of stories about our old home in the vault now. Thank the Ancients for Superpowers.

He touches a soft hand to my chest. “Ah. It *would* be my pleasure to do such, if I in fact believed your entertaining and superbly clever, but ultimately nonsense cover story. You circuit head terrorists have really outdone yourselves this time with this model, very convincing. Rest assured your ingenuity and initiative will be noted in your file.” The last bit he adds with a pat on the head and that same calculated political smile he offered as we arrived. He turns on his heel, snapping his fingers. “Guards.”

“Wait! We’re human! What do we have to do to prove it to you!” The mercs come up behind and begin dragging us away. I dig my heels in but it’s no use.

“That’s just what a robot would say if it thought it were in trouble. You need to work on that glitch in the programming.” Alistair resumes his post, already waving forward the next party in line.

“Look, why would we show up at your front door with exposed bionic limbs if we wanted to sneak into Ebayzaar? Wouldn’t we just come fully disguised? If we are human and you prick us, will we not bleed?”

“Tell it to the water-boarder. Next!” Alistair ignores our pleas. I’m envisioning some Kafka-esque horror movie scene where our bodies are autopsied under harsh fluorescent light as we look on wide awake. This can’t be the end. Surviving for months out in the wastes, barely slipping through death’s bony grasp how many times to finally make it to the supposed Promised Land just to be police brutalitied at the door and hauled off to some whitewashed lab, or worse.

But hey, we made it in, even if it’s with our hands wrenched behind our backs and people staring at us like we just blew up a building. Or their economy, whatever.

Ebayzaar from the outside is impressive, maybe even majestic, at least relatively speaking. But inside the gates it’s overwhelming, overloading. The first thing I notice is the crowds. Since leaving the vault, Cyclops and I have been lone wolves, like everyone else, and any time there has been a public assembly of more than four, things turned into a nasty, brutish, and throat-rippingly short resource war. But surrounding us now are hundreds, thousands, a teeming sea of instances of my species, so many we actually bump into each other occasionally. Out in the wastes, I’ve evolved a layer of agoraphobia out of necessity and try to keep my distance instinctively but here it is impossible, and I have a little panic attack before beginning to readjust to the social thing.

Wanderers of every age, gene-splice, and shade of rust walk easy, hunting and gathering bargains on reinforced hiking boots and solar-chargeable flashlights. Countless rows of tents housing merchants auctioning everything from mutant rat-kebabs to the latest in hemp waste-wear to synthehol-tap dive bars to “happy massage” parlours. The schools of Tree Dwellers flock about, peddling anti-radiation hummus and statues of Al Gore, “Buy it now! Five Ebucks”. Techno-rapture cults in silver-painted cardboard stands shaped like giant robots sell the re-animated fossils of smart phones and AR goggles as souvenirs of prehistory, flashing and ringtoning uselessly.

Caravans, performers, preachers, magicians all join in that endangered ancient dance of value and exchange, supply and demand. These fellow humans who would’ve been tearing each other apart for the smallest scrap of food just beyond these kitschy barbed-wire walls are magically exchanging goods with ‘please’ and ‘thank you come agains’, having beers together.

It reminds me of an image captured of our planet from space by an astronaut in some kind of flying ship, back in another epoch where people dreamt of exploring space. “See that tiny blue sphere hanging there? That’s Us,” dad explained.

That little fragile blue dot hanging in infinite blackness? That’s what this society thing is. A tiny miraculous fragile anomaly of emergent peace surrounded by an endless black abyss of survival instinct and warring feudalism. Balancing always on the knife-edge of collapse from environmental catastrophe, war, economic meltdown, constantly destabilized by the shifting playing field of ever accelerating technological change. I savor this instant of gleaming light before descending back into the night. Even if it’s proven to us to be as uncivil as it ever was, some kind of civilization has taken root in the wastes. I hold the thought in my mind like a talisman, maybe the thought will be enough to get me through what’s to come.

I am booted, literally, out of my omphaloskepsis and into a cold, dank room that smells of mulching paper. Cyclops lands beside.

“Fucking circuit heads.” The gun-for-hire guard is eyeing us with this sort of vacant raging disgust, like he is debating getting in a good beat-down on us before the pro CIA types show up for the by-the-science info extraction techniques. I ball a deadly titanium-alloy fist behind my back, waiting. I know resistance will be futile in the long run but the hell if I’m going to get fucked up by some stupid raider bigot and not do anything about it. He settles for shooting another big green ball of vile spit into our cell, slams the door shut. “Antifreeze for breakfast huh, metal freaks?”

The room is filled with an ambient decaying clutter of business Ikea furniture and paperwork dying the slow death of a thousand cuts that is water logging. There is a leak somewhere, but we can’t locate it. Still-rolled Persian linoleum lies canted against the wall, next to a huge mildewed canvas sign that reads, “Futureland Grand Opening!” With subtext, “E-Citizens of Squaker or Friendbook network-republics get 50% off!”. Using my limited sociological skills I gather this Futureland park enterprise was a startup that was attempting to take off, just as the Great Web 4.0 Tech-boom went bust. Well, just as The Future went bust, if you want to get rigorous.

The poster artwork consists of several panels labeled “today” and “tomorrow” like a popup cosmetics ad. In the “ today” shot are gleaming towers faced in sustainable foliage and solar panels. “Tomorrow” the solar panels have been replaced with holographic AR projectors displaying Friendbook updates and ‘Youstream’ eye-cam life-streams of the user’s friends. “like!” buttons and reputation systems surround everything, popularity of objects and people color-coded, the entirety of real-space blanketed over with chat-boxes, multiplayer games, and social media.

“Today”: a man giving oral directions to a self-driven car while trying to post on a message board. “Tomorrow”: a flying car driven by an android chauffeur clone of the “most viewed” pink-wigged pop star who “intuits” his destination. The man uses an evolutionary algorithm based “argument-maker” program to think for him and compose his forum responses based on a few key words, thereby able to win many internet arguments at a time and climb in popularity and reputation ratings.

“Today”: A robot sits at a cubicle desk working and making phone calls as a father holding his head in his hands explains to his family that he’s lost his job. A wildy fluctuating red richter-line in the foreground symbolizes constant economic crisis. “Tomorrow”: The father prances through the streets of a virtual world loving his new employment; a Coogol-subsidized ‘money deliverer’, spreading virtual Friendbook currency and gold-mined Tolkienbucks like a flower girl to starving jobless journalists, musicians, programmers, and construction workers. He quickly gains thousands of Friendbook friends and a headstart into the social economies.

Cyclops and I roll out three layers of the unused corporate linoleum on the dry side of the room into a sort of giant futon. Another layer serves as a blanket. One tube we leave unrolled, using it as a pillow. Cyclops laughs as he lays his head against the carpet-pillow.

“What?” I plop down next to him, beat the dust out of the ‘covers’ and pull it up. Surprisingly cushy.

“I was just thinking. We’ve been making our own beds, a different bed every night, for a while now. It’s kind of like, poetic, or something, that this the most comfortable bed is found when we’re in prison.”

I laugh too. “Shit, you’re right, man.” Poetic injustice. I think about the Futureland poster, of the ancients who handed their minds, their freedom, their lives over to machines and machinations in popularity games, and Cyclops is right. We are most comfortable imprisoning ourselves.

The other deep end of the knife-edge.

“Jerry, what’s going to happen to us?” Cyclops says just as I attempt to drift off to sleep, failing.

“Don’t worry about it, Cy, we’ll sort this out. The important thing is that we *are* human. There’s got to be someone around here with some sense who we can clear up this misunderstanding with.” In my head I’m just as frightened as he is. We’re caught in the middle of some kind of witch hunt, from what I can tell. People are angry, frightened, paranoid, out for blood. Then again, it’s easy to misdirect angry, frightened people. “It’s the number one move in a politician’s playbook,” dad would say. Maybe the way out is in.

I try not to let the image of Alistair’s sadistic indignance surrounded by men in white lab coats dissecting my brainpan looking for “the motherboard” taint the settling pool of my consciousness as I begin the descent through deeper layers of sleep.

“What’s a ‘waterboard’?” Cyclop’s question pings off the insides of my skull, the word ‘waterboard’ becoming a surfboard, and now I am surfing this waterboard down the razor-thin face of a gnarly wave of light named ‘progress’, trying desperately to stay in the cusp of the wave without falling off into a dark sea of cannibals and raiders on one side and the robot-popstar on the other, smiling plastically, arms extended with a feeding tube in one hand, a diaper in the other. Sharks in white tuxedos and black mercenary gear chase from behind, but if I can just hang on a little longer, I’ll make it to dad who waits on the shore of Elysium, and Cyclops and our ratburger stand, and mom will be alive, and dad’s eyes will fill with pride and joy and relief, and our tears will wash away the many fallen decades as if they’d never been, like the headlines of a long-dead newspaper, mulching in a storm drain.

***

The first night passes uneventfully. In the morning a “corrections officer” offers jumper cables instead of stale bread and high rad-count water or whatever it is they feed prisoners. We refuse, and the guard says it’s “cute” how we’re starving our capacitors of electricity in a futile attempt to appear human, and he brings some oatmeal-ish goup. Luckily, we’re used to eating 10% of our Daily Recommended Dietary Allowance, generally in bland morsels of age measured in geological time. We survey the room again, slog into Achilles-deep muck on the far side of the room, search for any structural weaknesses or useful items, find none.

Occasionally one of the Ebayzaar guards walks past, rattling down the cells with a rifle butt or a studded Louisville Slugger serving gruesomely as a rapid containment baton. I recognize him as the one who detained us, long bad scar twisting up from brow to scalp. A few times a yelling or moaning echoes up the hall. Something about water. After one particularly loud eruption, the guard stamps past. There are two voices screaming, then thud, thud, crack, silence. The next day, there’s screaming again, this time a woman, and nearer. It goes on for several minutes, more like half screaming, half crying and pleading, and I think I can make out the rattling of a door. Her voice goes hoarse, but the rattling is still there a little while. The guard walks by again, zipping up his fly.

This isn’t a guard, this is a jackal in guard dog’s clothing. Wildmen forged in the cutthroat wasteland, playing at civilization. Ex-raider, I could tell from that hungry look in his eye first time I saw him. He’ll be first to die, things get iffy.

Another day slips by, starting to blend together. Have they forgotten about interrogating us? Cyclops and I have been preparing mentally for the “interrogation techniques”, and it is aggravating, hanging here in suspense. This whole operation seems kinda haphazard behind the scenes, it’s not implausible.

The next day Cyclops helps me make playing cards out of rectangles of Futureland poster, mimicking the visuals from an old virtual solitaire game we used to play on our phones back in Elysium. This is the first time we’ve actually played with real cards, well, cards made with real paper anyway. Totally different beast, playing poker with everyone physically present, a weird psychological art. I think this physical-poker will catch on. Cyclops is unfairly good with his shade eye-cameras and his lack of emotional response to visual cues making him nigh impossible to read, damn his cortically circumvented amygdale.

Later that day I hear some tapping nearby. At first I just assume it’s the guards being assholes again, but there’s something different. It’s gentler, not the brash banging, and it has structure. Morse code, perhaps? No, it’s a rhythm, a musical rhythm, one of those songs you know, almost subconsciously from old people whistling and references to it, but no one ever sits down and listens to it for pleasure, like some kind of timeless cultural superspirit. Something about the times are changing. Cheap acoustic guitar, harmonica, and a shit vocalist.

I approach the jail bars, which consist of the grille of a Chevy Vega retro-electric welded into the door.

“Hey,” I call out. The tapping is gone. No one answers. I call out again, this time I get yelled at to shut up addended with a robot slur by a guard. Am I really at the point of hallucination already? I have to pry my inner detective off of the mysterious tapping, dismiss it, to avoid hastening isolation madness.

One morning we hear three sets of footsteps approaching. The most crowded it’s been yet, my renewed agoraphobia reminds me. When they stop in front of our doors, I close my eyes. This is it. I grab Cyclop’s hand.

“I’m scared, Jerry.”

“We’ll be fine, Cy, just remember what we rehearsed.” He squeezes back. I tell myself I am ready for this interrogation, whatever there is in store. I tell myself that we’ve been fighting for our lives for the past how many months, but my palms are sweating and my heart is galloping. I am hoping for the best, that they’ll see the truth, but I know that there is a chance we could die down here, and if that’s how things are going to go down, I’m going to make them wish they *could* just pull out my batteries.

“Ok circuit heads, time for your drive defragmentating.” Slash-head leads the pack, twisting my wrist behind my back and cuffing me.

“I hear they’ve got a new data-mining machine. You’re gonna have a whole lot of fun, kids.”

They take us to a room heavy with that ozone smell of fried electronics, tainted with the reek of blood and cleaning solution. There are several disturbing implements on a table which I try not to look at. I think I spot a clump of hair and scalp attached to a shard of metal skull dangling with bits of neural processor, but that could just be an anxiety hallucination. In the center of the room is a metal chair, and a small platform made of an old oak door, tilted down at a slight angle. There is a matte black mechanic’s tray beneath the end of the door. I’m guessing this contraption is a waterboard. Not quite what my subconscious cooked up.

The room suddenly goes black. Perhaps I *am* in fact a robot, programmed with artificial memories of a past in a military ‘vault’ that never existed, my entire life a lie, carefully crafted, like the doomed protagonist in some existentialist Philip K Dick novel. Perhaps they’ve just hit the off switch and are now dismounting my “cortical stack” memory with a Philips screwdriver and anti-static gloves to prevent a discharge tainting the “enemy intelligence”. Except there’s this ringing, getting louder and louder, coming from everywhere. My vision fades from black and I realize that ringing is a new and terrible pain coming from the back of my head. Just as I discover my hands and legs, pressing up from a cold hard floor, my stomach explodes in pain and I’m sent onto my back.

“And that’s for Snake!” As I wipe the warm, red liquid from my blurry eyes, I see the face of the prison guards, an ugly sadism, bloody vengeance in their eyes. I’m guessing at least a few of these mercs have seen one of their friends killed by robots. I try to remind myself that they are just doing their job, but it’s a tough sell at this point as I’m hacking up food that doesn’t exist from the stomach-punt. Unlucky for them, they failed to realize that my cybernetic arm can dislocate easily at the wrist, and I’ve since wiggled it free.

“Fucking machine, this is for screwing our whole world up!” a sharp kick to the small of my back shoots lightning up my spine. One of the three guards, younger one, doesn’t join in the violence, just looks onward in dismay, torn, unsure whether to stop the flash-mob beating or fit in socially and go with the “wisdom of the crowd”. Eventually the others push him and call him a “robot lover”, and he gives in and begins pounding on me too. They start laying in heavier now and I think my bombarded brain is having trouble figuring out how and where to render the pain nociception. I go fetal. We’re about to be waterboarded whatever that is, and these assholes are taking out their symbolic revenge on me and I’m not even a goddamn robot. I’m not winning a robot civil rights PR war by drawing out this hate crime, I’m not finding meaning, a higher purpose in the suffering, just a whole lot of senseless hurt. I think I’m all Ghandi’ed out at this point. Fuck flight, fight time. You want to play barbarian? Let’s play barbarian.

The next kick comes rushing towards my kidney, but I’m ready for it, and I bring my NeuroArm up like a shield. I can hear every little crackle and crunch of tibia as the guard swings his leg full-force into the reinforced alloy of my appendage, like a thick shaft of dry sequoia shattering, and it is a deliciously satisfying sound. It takes Broken Leg a second to switch out of hate-gear and into howling agony mode. When he does, his fellow ultraviolents are distracted from the task at hand, trying to suss what that jagged, crimson-streaked ivory twig is sticking out the shin of his pant leg.

I haymake the next nearest guard with all my bionically augmented might in the solar plexus, doubling him over. The Third Man, who happens to be that serial abomination Slash Face, has his bejeweled baseball bat ready, taking a vicious swing for my back. The shattering clang mutes my left ear for a second as I just manage to deflect the blow with my arm, swinging up a roundhouse kick counter that causes my Rodney King’ed abs and obliques to scream in protest. The blow lands in Slash Face’s ribs, if half-heartedly. I’m balling my chrome hand, getting ready to finish this rapist-sadist opportunist excrement, sweet dopamine licking every fiber, a heady tide of self-righteous feelings of moral outrage called justice and the pure hot reptilian bliss of watching a rival male’s face explode under my fist.

Two pairs of hands ensnare both my arms, and instead I end up taking a pop-art war mace to the gut.

“I’m take my time with you, circuit head. You may be all processors and carborators, but I know you have a breaking point, cause all your kind broke once before, took everything with you. And you’re not going to fuck with our new set-up here, you hear me, tin man?” He presses the edge of the bat up under my sagging chin, I spit bloody rivulets of saliva on it, stare back into hollow eyes.

“You’re just as broken as every dust-collecting machine corpse out there, just as broken as the world. You think you’re the epitome of modernity just cause you’ve put on some fancy hand-me-down clothes, found yourself a class of outcasts to call ‘enemy’, to throw stones at, define your ‘priviledged’ group identity against? It’s a joke.”

He raises the bat to silence me.

“Hang on a sec.” A figure in an oilskin duster and a black felt cowboy hat steps into the room. For a second I feel like I’ve gotten accidentally stuck in some sort of revisionist 20th-cen reenactors’ comedy sketch spinoff of the Lone Ranger. The mercs holding us don’t seem to be finding it very funny, though, and instantly let go of me.

“Sheriff. These robots are in the process of being questioned.“ Slash Face says, trying to look professional, dropping the back conspicuously.

“Yes, yes I heard. I’m sure you’re all doing some brilliant cross-examination. I’d like to ask a couple questions myself.” At this distance I can see the sheriff’s hands are meshed with scars. Long, grainy silver hair, as if the old gray sleep that shrouds the buildings of the necropolises has seeped into the very strands. The sheriff looks up and I see she is a woman, middle aged, face starting to crease like a road map but somehow attractive, in that handsome, seasoned way older women can be. For several moments she interrogates us with eyes only, eyes that have seen too much yet refuse to look away.

“Perhaps elsewhere, this room is giving me a headache. I bet you two would like to see some daylight after all that time down here. And it’s a beautiful day. Walk with me.”

We head up out of a basement through a fire escape, elevator obviously long defunct. The guards reluctantly at first escort us up, but Slash Face stays behind.

“What compound were you boys stationed in?” She says at last.

“We’re from Elysium vault. Sub-sector of Coogol Ad-verse, omnipresent marketing r&d.” I feel unable to lie to this woman. Then again we were about to be ‘disappeared’ and now we might get to feel real ultraviolet Sol on our skin.

“What’s the United Territories of Coogol Anthem?” She asks as we exit the office building into high noon sun and bustling Ebayzaar crowd.

“’Don’t be evil unnecessarily / Information wants to be free / Content wants to be given away / So that advertising can save the day’” It’s kind of a twee indie-techno anthem so it just repeats those lines endlessly in an autotuned Icelandic manwoman-voice over massive kickdrums and new age-y rock guitars. It wasn’t really my style.

A hint of a smile tugs at the corner of her creased mouth and eyes, stretches the toes of her crow’s feet. Fades. A hand reaches into her duster, reveals a seven inch nanocarbon combat knife. Oh God, I must’ve forgotten the last few lines of the anthem’s snare-rush coda. Cyclops squeezes my hand and I squeeze back. An AWOL humanoid robot butler must’ve killer her parents and we’re about to become sacrificial lambbots in the name of her symbolic revenge-killing catharsis. This was a mistake.

“Give me your arm. Your ‘meat’ arm.” Her eyes reveal nothing. I hesitate a moment, but calculate the odds of survival to be greater if I cooperate with the commanding woman with the giant knife.

She turns my arm palm-up, places the blade in the center of my forearm, and all I can think of is bleeding to death is less painful than a stab to the pancreas. Civil, even. She draws the knife like a violinist across the strings of my blue veins and the pain sings briefly, quickly attenuates. She collects a puddle of my blood in a metal spork. Wipes the blade down with a rag that she offers as a bandage. At this point the two mercenaries are looking as befuddled as Cyclops and I.

The door we just came from opens, and there is Alistair, as if on queue, in the same bleached white jacket. The guards appear to grow nervous, glancing back at Alistair, but the sheriff seems to command an almost palpable respect from them.

“Sheriff Kane, what are you doing? These robot terrorists must be taken back to the interrogation chamber immediately. Keeping them here is a security liability.” Tremulations in his voice suggest a controlled rage.

“Not now, Alistair,” she says just loud enough for him to hear. I make a highlighted mental note of this air of a jurisdictional wrestling match, pocket it for later use.

Kane cooks the spoonful of my life juice with a Zippo lighter flame that smells of synthetic alcohol, xenthenol by the flame’s blinding, flash-white hue. The blood boils, and for a second I entertain the idea that she is an exsanguinate junkie who is going to shoot up my blood like heroin, like some kind of over-literalization of the vampire metaphor.

Fantasy Personality Disorder is common in the wasteland. We run into Billy the Kid wanderers in palm-weave cowboy hats and Princess Leias in slave bikinis fashioned from gold spraypainted chain link on a fairly regular basis. Just before The Great Disconnection, the ancients were said to consume upwards of ten hours of escapist movies, TV, and games per day, and decking yourself out as your favorite fictional character was socially acceptable as business attire. Of course, the majority of the society was unemployed after the abolition of intellectual property combined with computers and robots wiping out almost all jobs from construction to design to health care, so business attire became something of a retro period-style in and of itself. It’s a different sort of escapism now, but the concept is similar.

But the vampire scenario falls apart as she dumps the spoonful of boiling blood and repeats the process on Cyclops. He handles the knife really well, doesn’t even wince. Guess a little prick’s not so bad after you’ve been shot at as many times as he has.

“They’re human. Let them go.” Kane wipes the knife and spoon, puts them away.

“Kane, I don’t know what sort of new-tribal voodoo you’re trying to work here, but these are dangerous machines which must be isolated immediately. Need I remind you how many innocent people lost their lives last week? Or more importantly, the serious blow to Ebayzaar’s public image as a safe hub for business transactions, and the resulting trade crash? Guards, escort these prisoners.” Alistair’s caterpillar lip quivers with chagrin, droplets of sweat forming beneath the thin line of fuzz.

The two guards blink back and forth between the clashing superiors, like dogs caught between the calls of two owners. The sheriff raises a hand.

“Innocence was a luxury of our privileged predecessors and their Pax Moderna. There is no innocence in our world, you of all people would know.” The sheriff and the ‘head of public relations’ share a long beat of silence rich with speculation of onlookers.

“I took out a hostile humanoid bot just a few days ago, incendiary grenades were involved. Their blood turns blue when heated. They haven’t got the capability to synthesize true human hemoglobin, just cheap corn-syrup props.” Kane offers up the spoonful of cooling blood. “And their story checks out. I have heard of this Elysium.”

“That is an order, soldier! I said take them away at once-“ Alistair barks, causing more rubberneckers to turn toward the scene. The neo-hippies have joined the audience, waiting for the spirit of Gaia to possess the mercenaries and exact divine retribution upon us.

“I don’t think Mr. Schmitt would appreciate knowing that legitimate clients are being taken into custody and ‘interrogated’. He might not find such rumors to be conducive to Ebayzaar’s ‘public image’.” Kane crosses her arms, flicks the pre-posthistoric lighter open, closed.

The maitre d’s blue eyes have gone red. He opens his mouth and looks like he is about to snap, but the sheriff gives him a threatening look, and he closes it again, recomposing himself. The guards exhale a heavy gust of relief.

“You know what? Fine. But these two are *your* problem, Kane. Anything goes wrong, this is on you. It’s your crucifixion.” Alistair storms off, tagging out the second-string white tux at his entrance kiosk.

It looks like we’ll be living after all. I take deep gulps of dusty air that never tasted sweeter.

“That was real brave of you. Guess we pretty much owe you our lives, sheriff.” My arm has stopped bleeding, the cut calculatedly shallow. The clot of onlookers has dissipated, and it’s back to business as usual. Or unusual, as it may be.

“Forget it. Just stay away from that man. And stay out of trouble while you’re at it, we’ll call it even.” The Tree Dweller clique skips past and we’re caught in the wake of their stench and lingering disdain. I mantra ‘stay out of trouble’ to myself.

“I’m guessing we should catch up on current events around here, Ebayzaar’s been having some problems with, ‘robots’?”

“The SDC.”

“The what?”

“Sapient Digitant Collective. At least that’s what they’re calling themselves. If you ever run across one of them, they prefer to be addressed as ‘digitants’ or ‘post-biologicals’. The robots are from every walk of Pre-Apocalypse machinehood. Unmanned automated mailmen, e-scientists and virtual doctors, even those retail CLERCs that you gleamed that shiny new arm of yours from. Unlike most of the other robots, they seem to act at least partly human, definitely afraid of getting their circuits fried. We’re not sure where they’re coming from or who or what is creating them, but when you question them they just talk this metaphysical babble about ‘their information has been freed’ or some such nonsense.”

The mental image of Cynthia riddled with bullet holes, stumbling around a city of collapsing towers, searching for her lost arm jumps into my mind’s eye. I shove it aside, but that Fortean chill remains. Had she been standing there in the ruins of a Starbeans, feigning stasis in that utter stillness only a machine can achieve, listening to me joke with her, watching me steal her arm, like all the other CLERCs, waiting patiently for the right time? The right time do what? My inner realist instantly dismisses the notion as vanishingly improbable. But something about the world is deeply wrong, aside from the fact that we blew ourselves back to the dark ages.

“Ok. But you mentioned something about ‘problems’?”

“Well, see, the robots aren’t allowed to trade in Ebayzaar. Ebayzaar only officially recognizes Homo Sapiens Sapiens -- womb-gestated -- as legitimate endusers, free to participate in auctions. The CEO, Mr. Schmitt along with the board members decided that machines, however seemingly intelligent and human-like, are still non-sentient and therefore do not qualify as a ‘person’ under the terms of the ‘Ebayzaar End-User License Agreement’. Or whatever that high-fallutin 20th cen thing is called.

“And do you agree with that assessment?”

“Ok, granted, some of these machineheads are barely an evolutionary step up from an e-book with a voice emulator and some canned philosopho-wankery lines about their ‘self-awareness’. But I’ve seen some of them, I could barely tell them apart from biologicals. I mean, humans like us. They laugh, cry, beg for their lives, the lives of their friends. Tears, facial tics and all. Either it’s real or they should all get one of those ‘Oscar’ golden statue trophies cause they’re the most brilliant method actors ever. They’re a little slow sometimes, get especially confused on metaphors and complex topics like politics, which is a shame, given their insurgent status.”

“So the ‘post-biologicals’ are resentful they don’t get to carve out their share of the pie, so they’re taking a dump in the filling?”

“Essentially. Occasionally one of these digitants goes off their rocker, or off their subroutines, I guess. Sometimes they get violent, become a ‘freedom of information fighter’. Like last week. It wasn’t exactly unprovoked, some of our killers-for-hire masquerading around as “security guards”, they don’t take too kindly to the silicon-types. There’s a lot of heresay and mud-slinging as to who exactly started it, the guards or the robots, and I’m trying not to let them suck me into their bullshit blame-game. But you know how it is out here in the Wild Barren West, things can escalate quickly. And similarly, Cold Wars can quickly become hot, so I’m trying to keep the digitants away from Ebayzaar at least for the time being.”

A high pitched bleep interrupts the sheriff and she reaches into her duster, pulling out a device like a giant phone, but there isn’t even a keyboard, not even a video cam attached. She presses one of the two buttons and voices come in loud and static-ey.

“I’m on my way.” She responds, bleeping it off again with the shortest ringtone I’ve ever heard.

“Sorry boys, gotta keep them doggies rollin’.” She tips her hat in a self-deprecating nod to pre-Disconnection Spaghetti Westerns that says she’s aware of her tacky costuming, but also aware it’s in the job description. The cowboy thing is a necessary tulpa, a short-hand for law in a shrunken world, embedded deep in the residual collective culture, a universal semiotic beacon of justice and security, constancy that forms the substrate of social contracts. Or at least the appearance thereof, which is all that matters.

“I’m Jericho, and this is Cyclops, by the way. Sheriff Kane, is it?”

“’Morrigan’ will do. I think cutting you with a knife to weigh your humanity was an intimate enough experience to put us on a first-name basis. I think that should even the balance.”

“Everything is balancing on a knife edge out here, Morrigan, keep your wits about you.”

“Every day.” She winks knowingly, disappearing into the fragile dance of commerce.

The Silence: The Ghosts of Cloud City

2010-06-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

The Ghosts of Cloud City

“Don’t get your head stuck in the Clouds,” my dad used to say. I used to think that was why our home was miles below the Earth’s surface, cocooned down in the mantle, the warm bosom of Gaia. I thought dad kept us down there to keep us safe, away from the pollution-sickened silver nitrate skies on the surface. But the Cloud was everywhere, no matter how deep you shoved your head in the sand.

Cyclops and I bunker down behind the counter of a Starbeans Coffee, getting a nose and mouth full of dust and cobwebs. The cold is chewing its way to my bones, my empty stomach is eating its way out, and my arm is killing me. Figuratively of course; the 9mm round lodged in my tricep we can dig out, and granted it doesn’t infect, I’ve got a good chance in this hell of surviving. My NeuroArm, on the other hand, is literally and definitely going to kill me, and is the reason Cyclops is fishing for bullets in my nature-issue flesh arm with a long-nose pliers. It’s been acting up lately, started glitching spastic while we were in a shootout with some raiders. It’s tough to hit anything when you’ve got cybernetic Parkinson’s disease.

The metal slug squishes out of me with a nauseating movie-quality slurp. My vision fuzzes white with pain and I hold back the scream, clenching my jaw so tight I feel it pop. We’re pretty sure the fucks who attacked us lost our tail but we’re not taking any chances. Cyclops douses the gory hole in my arm with hydrogen peroxide, and the bubble of sizzling white foam and syrupy red blood on my tan skin makes me think of strawberry pancakes. This pisses my stomach off more, on top of the peroxide stinging like a centiscorpion. Getting shot sucks.

“We should get you to a doctor,” Cyclops finds a tray of non-recycled napkins, dyed brown to appear eco-friendly, back when such things mattered to anyone. He tosses off the top dozen moldy sheets, and uses a fresh napkin to dab at the injury.

“It’s just a flesh wound, I’ll be fine.” But not if we don’t get this AWOL prosthetic fixed, I subvocalize. Cyclops appears unconvinced.

“We’ll be at Ebayzaar in a few days if we make decent time. They’ll have a doc there for sure.” I reassure.

The peroxide we scavved up from the carcass of a MegaMart. Most the aisles were picked clean as the ribcage of a dead whale, so we were surprised to find the bottles of disinfectant floating in a mud puddle in the pharmaceutical department. As hazardous and unpredictable as they are, you can always count on raiders and cannibals to fail to think things through. Guess you can’t blame them, they are mostly the descendants of the infamously infantile Chattering Class that went extinct when the internet and everything else went bye-bye.

The MegaMart had completely computerized self-checkout registers with RFID and biometric scanners for security purposes, having decided to do away completely with human clerks just before the world went belly-up. Now, I’m no urban archaeologist, but I heard that before The Silence, the MegaMarts sold cheap, Earth-killing, slave-labor goods to people who didn’t have the economic luxury of superficial presentation, so eventually they thought why bother with the flair of a human clerk?

Starbeans, on the other hand, was targeted toward the spoiled upper classes who sipped over-designed cups of this stuff kinda like weak stims in liquid form called “coffee”, while checking their “Twitters” and “Portfolios” and discussing “The Teabaggers” and “Fawksnews”. Not that the Starbeans’ supply chain was any less karma-negative, but patrons were paying for the feeling of sophistication and moral high ground. Fancy names like Cinnamon Dolce Crème Frappacino, fancy cups. They needed this thing called “experience” or “story”, which I could never understand no matter how many times old-timers explained it. I have plenty of experience, lots of stories to tell, nobody ever paid me. Sometimes I think The Ancients were all insane, maybe that’s what dad meant about getting your head stuck in the Cloud.

But the primary reason we’re in Starbeans is every Starbeans, unlike MegaMart, had several humanoid robots. Part of the simulated cafe ‘experience’ was having a human barista mix your ten dollar chai latte, but I guess the profit margin was much better if you didn’t have to pay real people once the robots got convincing enough. Lucky for me, the CLERCs (Cyber-Linguistic Empathic Relations Colleague) all come with the same line of robotic NeuroArms as the one attached to the stump where my right arm used to be. It’s a long story.

There’s one CLERC face down in the store room. It’s corroded and covered in silt, a rats’ nest lined with shredded napkins and artificial sweetener packets is carved out of the android’s stomach cavity. Another is at the cashier counter, standing, hand outstretched as if patiently awaiting payment or a Starbeans Rewards Card. Frozen instantly, along with all other robots and androids as their CPUs were fried by EMPs in the Intellectual Property Wars decades ago.

Her synthetic skin is dusty and slightly sallow, but remains remarkably intact. Her face is locked in an eternal smile of a lightheartedness utterly alien in the wasteland. Creepily ironic how the only remains of the real humans, including her customer, are heaps of rag and bone on the floor while this replicant appears she might resume her conversation any moment. A fossil token of a vanished culture, caught in the amber of electromagnetic pulse. Her name tag reads, ‘Cynthia’.

“Hello Cynthia. Yes, you can take my order. One Venti Mochaccino, made with those Urban-Aggro beans please. A name for the order? Make it out to ‘Jericho’.” Cyclops laughs at my little skit even though he’s seen it before. I like to pretend. Maybe it’s my way of thanking them for letting me use their limbs. Besides, you’ve got to learn to enjoy the little things, even when you’re being pursued by psychotic sub-humans for your flesh, water, and ammunition. Otherwise what’s the point, right?

Cynthia’s ancient sleeve comes apart like tissue paper.

“Do you want the dermis too?” Cyclops holds up the naked arm.

“Fuck no. Just help me cut it open, funny man.”

Cyclops slices around the upper arm and down the length with an Xacto, pulling back like that scene in Terminator, except there’s no blood, just rubber and metal skeleton. I don’t need a womanly hand with candy apple red nail polish, and the cyborg look tends to frighten the dumber malicious riff raff. Mosquito repellant. Her NeuroArm looks factory-mint, she was probably on the job only a few months.

Cyclops unbolts it, unbolts mine. My prosthetic comes off, and there’s that disorienting feeling of soul-vertigo, that phantom-limb sense of deep wrongness. The feeling vanishes just as soon as the new arm clinks into place, somatosensory cortex settling down to luxuriate in the newfound sensory input. My personal bioelectric patterns are stored in a motor neuron implant that transcodes directly to the Neuroarm, so the new limb is operational instantly. None of that myoelectric stuff, painstakingly shrugging your shoulder, twisting your neck and squeezing your ass just to signal to your prosthetic to pick up a damn bottle.

“Better. Very much so.” I windmill the arm a bit, test the fine motor responses, pull the rifle from my backpack and take aim at the center of the peeling ‘S’ on the cracked glass storefront of the Starbeans. No jittering.

“It looks good, Jerry,” Cyclops says, putting away the Xacto and pliers.

He’s lying, of course, being a good brother. Cyclops doesn’t see the world like most people do. His eyes are blind as a cave shrimp, but he’s got some brain mod that pipes electromagnetic radiation directly into his frontal lobe from his shades, like some kind of third eye. Seriously bleeding edge tech, just before the world fell off the edge. However, a side-effect is he definitely can’t tell whether my new arm looks, “good” or not. But it’s the thought that counts.

We search the Starbeans for anything else useful but it’s been cleared out long ago. It’s not worth it to dissect the other CLERC for the extra arm, besides the fact it’s covered in rat shit, these Starbeans are so goddamn abundant. I mean there’s one right across the street, what is up with that?

We pop open the Reebok knapsack, empty it out on the ground. A small can of pork and beans, a twisty-tied packet of a dozen raisins. It’s almost comical, except starvation has this peculiar way of filtering all the funny out of the world, especially when it comes to food. Cyclops’ , head and thin shoulders slump, the skin is draped loosely over his emaciated bones like sheets over old furniture. A gust of cold evening air blows daggers and Cyclops starts shivering, so I shake the dust out of an Armani suit left in a booth next to a briefcase and wrap him up in it.

“We’re not going to make it this time, are we?” He stares at a raisin in the palm of his hand, shriveled and stale to the point of petrifaction. Closes it.

“Hey. Hey, look at me.” I squeeze his hand tight over the raisin. “We are going to make it, I promise.” He is suddenly so small and fragile. Everyone grows up so fast out here, there are no childhoods in the wasteland. It’s easy to forget he’s just a fourteen year old kid.

“But you said it’s a few more days if we make good time and we’re stuck here with no food, and it’s cold and those raiders are out there-“

“We’ll make do. We always do. They’ve got more food than you could ever eat at Ebayzaar. I hear they even have ice cream. You remember ice cream?” The corners of his mouth pull up, and I can see the episodic memories of birthdays back in the vault spooling through his mind like a freshly opened bag of candies. The smell of icing and melted wax, adults in labcoats and military brass serenading out-of-harmony, no bed times for one night.

“Remember that time dad got me a bb gun and tried to teach us how to shoot cans in the generator room?”

“Yeah, I was still crap at using my vision mod and kept shooting you guys in the butt. At least I couldn’t shoot an eye out.” Cyclops taps his bionic eyes and we both laugh.

“Remember how he used to tell us those crazy bedtime stories when we were real little?”

“I always liked the one about the people who built their city on the Clouds.”

“They forgot about the real world down below. One day the Clouds evaporated, and they came crashing back down. ‘Their ghosts still haunt the surface to this day.’”

“I miss dad.” Cyclops pulls his knees together and the Armani suit tighter around him. His machine eyes lack the tear ducts to cry, but I know him well enough to tell when he is crying inside.

“Me too, Cy.” I gather up his Italian wool swaddled body in a hug. I’m lying, about us making it. We’re at least a week, maybe two from where this Ebayzaar “Mecca of the Wastes” supposedly is located, according to an X on a map we plucked off a vulture-pecked body in a ditch on the interstate. For all we know, Ebayzaar is a ghost town, or worse, and out here, the universe’ dice are weighted towards “worse”. Maybe we’re the ghosts, haunting the city that fell to Earth, their streets, their steel-girdered castles, their simulacra of ‘the real world’ run and barista-ed by robot actors. Maybe we’ll fade away, at last, like the faux finished signs on storefront windows.

Desperation is an acid that will eat you faster than any cannibal.

And aside from the vague glimmer of someday finding our dad, Cyclops is all I’ve got keeping me going out here. So I lie, because I am a good brother.

Cyclops’ heat-seeking eye-voodoo susses out a couple rats hiding out in the chest cavity of the CLERC and we snare’em, which puts a damper on our food crisis and provides a much needed morale boost. We empty out all the money from the cash register onto the ground, pile on tooth picks and splintered Starbeans chair legs, start a fire. There’s a chance the raiders are still out there but it’s much slimmer at this point. Plus it’s night, now, so the smoke will be less conspicuous and we’re freezing our asses off and there’s no fucking way we’re eating raw rat meat.

We warm our hands, or hand, by the fire, pour the pork n beans in a coffee pot, shishkebab the rat meat. The raisins we save, they’re so hard and far past the expiry date we’d probably get more food trading them as handgun ammo. The rat and beans taste like New York steak and melt-in-your mouth golden mashers when you haven’t eaten anything in days.

“Man, I haven’t been that stuffed in… I can’t remember.” Cyclops flops back on a pillow of dish towels and clothes.

“I say we open up a restaurant when we get to Ebayzaar: ‘Cyclops and Jericho’s Ratburgers and Beans’.” I rub my swollen belly with my steel fingers.

“I like the sound of that.”

We kick back around the fire and blue-sky our entrepreneurial future in the culinary arts, talk old times till the embers burn down to a puddle of ash pocked with rubies.

“Ok, who wants to take first watch. Cynthia?” I hand the one-armed CLERC a SWAT M4 assault rifle.

“I’ll go first, I want to enjoy the sensation of having stuff in my tummy as long as I can.” Cyclops takes the gun.

I pop open Armani Man’s briefcase, it’s full of spreadsheets and large packets of paper thick as money. They bear titles like, “Re-imagining The Internet: The Cloud 4.0”, “Cost-Benefit Analysis of Converting Cities to PDMMS (Permanent Digital Massive Multiplayer Societies)”, And “Social Medianomics: How Individuals Selling Their Social Lives Can Overcome the Displacement of Middle and Lower Class Jobs by Robots and Computers.”

I flip through some of these papers, half the words I’ve never even seen before and it’s like reading a newspaper from an alien planet, but I get the overall impression this was a guy on a mission, trying to affect big changes, probably just stopped here for a latte on his way to a big ‘conference’ thing, when the shit hit the fan. I figure he’s not so different from us, we just stopped in for some rat-skewers before we’re on to bigger and better things in the new cradle of hopefully more civil civilization. I go under dreaming of re-imagining our future in Ebayzaar, running our restaurant in striped suits, Cynthia waiting tables, Cyclops doing cost-benefit analyses of using rat versus mutant rattlesnake in the burgers, veritable captains of post-Silence commerce.

I’m about to take a bite of a juicy ½ lb rat burger when it vanishes from under my teeth. I open my eyes, rub the sleep out of them, Cyclops is prodding me with the handle of the rifle. “Your turn.” I take the gun, check the chamber. “Sweet dreams, man.”

It’s colder than a mutant girl’s tit out here, and my breath is blue opaque clouds in the half-moonlight. I really need to take a leak for the first time in two days, perfect timing, so I find the deflated tire falling off the rotten husk of a car, which strikes me as ridiculous just as I start pouring steaming golden streams down the rims. You can piss literally anywhere: in the street, on the windows, whizz on the biggest desk in the tallest sky-tower in the world, no one will give a shit. Maybe it’s one of those DNA memory things, pissing on tires.

Just as I’m thinking of more evidence to corroborate my tire-peeing gene theory, I hear a sound like a rat going through a trash can. I turn in the direction it came from, squinting, and I’m thinking about waking Cyclops to help capture this rat take-out for tomorrow when the rat explodes with a reverberatingly loud crack, and something whizzes past my ear. I splash urine all over myself as my brain puts the evidence together and realizes I’m being shot at, and I’m still peeing as I dive back through a spiderweb-fractured window of the Starbeans. Glass is still trickling down in sporadic cracks as I get behind the counter, making my adrenaline soaked nerves jump every time. Caught with my damn pants down.

“Wake the fuck up, Cy, we’re in some shit.” I shake him up and he’s got drool matting his hair, mumbling some dream nonsense, but he knows the tone in my voice and immediately stumbles over for the knapsack, pulls out a 45 ACP pistol. I have him run to the back to make sure the employee back door is locked and we take cover behind the counter.

“You little fuckwits are so dead, and you so fail at pissing, lol.” I can hear their raucous stupid laughter and hi-fiving so they can’t be very far. I white-knuckle the SWAT rifle, these Chattering Class spawn may not be very bright, but they are amazingly aggressive and ruthless, and we’re outnumbered. And they’re really out for blood after the one I took out when they attacked us a couple days ago at a gas station.

“Cy, are you getting anything on the infrared?” I scan wide eyed, but it’s so dark everything is just a gradient mush of blue and black and I can barely see a damned thing.

“Nothing, they must still be out of range.”

A burst of automatic gunfire hails into the Starbeans and we dive for cover. Fluff from booth seats explodes like blown dandelions, the cookie display windows shatter, and I hear the deep crumps of bullets impacting the front of the counter followed by a rain of coffee straws. A broken Frappe blending container falls on my head a second later.

“Head, fuck!” We take deep breaths. Remain calm, strategize, take it step by step.

I peek back through the gaping hole, fire off a few rounds on a murky shadow that appears to be moving, hear a satisfying, “Shit, WTF?”

“Wait, I think I see something. Over there, by the e-newspaper stands. It’s… little, though. Weird signal frequency. It’s… Metallica?”

Another peculiar little quirk about Cyclops’ vision system upgrades. He’d always be bursting out with nonsense out of nowhere like, “Who is Charlie Foxtrot?” and “But I don’t know where Defcon 4 is.” We thought it was just another few screws that came loose when they installed his audio cortex implants. Till one day, we were listening to some ancient band our dad liked called “The Velvet Underground” on an ePod. When we asked Cyclops what he thought, he said, “It looks great!” At that point we discovered he could not only see infrared and ultraviolet, but he could also ‘see’ radio and cell phone signals, wi-fi, practically the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum like some kind of human antenna. His brain had re-plasticised to interpret these incoming visual signals, allowing him to “visualize” the information embedded in the communications, like those splashy graphic visualizations you get with media players, except far more vivid and detailed. He was ‘seeing’ transmissions from radios within the base, and not only that, since the data was flowing directly into his brain – the ultimate pattern recognition system -- he could detect patterns in any encryption system in a few seconds as easily as we recognize faces in clouds. He would’ve been the ultimate Natzi code-buster in that Global War II thing. He liked The Velvet Underground, said they looked like red and black paint splattered on walls and volcanoes erupting.

“Definitely Metallica. It’s coming in faint in the gigahertz spectrum, but I’m seeing For Whom The Bell Tolls, unmistakably,” Cyclops pointed directly at the source.

“One of those raiders must have an ePod on him. Where the hell did he get a working- nevermind.” I can’t get a good clean shot from where I am, and from the way they’re spraying lead like a firehose, they’ve got a lot more ammo to play with than we do, so we’ve got to make our shots count.

“Ok, here’s what we’re going to do. Cy, I need you to grab the CLERC and shuffle her up towards the condiments area right when I give the signal OK? And let me know if those bastards change position.” He nods, not entirely sure what my plan is, but he knows I’ve got one. Another salvo of fire takes out the last remaining Starbeans Window and paints a little dipper of bullet holes just above my head in the “Happy Hour! 3-5 PM” sign.

“Shit, give me some cover fire.” Cyclops plants the .45 on the counter, firing blind in the general direction of the raiders, but it keeps them down. I dive into a tumble, ending up under the table of a booth on the opposite side of the room. I concentrate on breathing and wiggle the NeuroArm fingers to make sure it’s not gimping out on me at Crunch Time. I’ve got to nail these shots, the first time, otherwise- well, I can’t think about otherwise. I’m just thinking about all the delicious ratburgers we’re going to make when we get out of this.

Cyclops signals to me that ePod Guy hasn’t moved, I signal back “Now!”

A second after the robot passes in front of the tip jar, there’s an absolute shitstorm of gunfire so loud I can feel my brain rattling in my skull, but I block it out, focus. I pop up, there are sure enough two firing uzis full-auto from behind the e-newspaper stand, one with a pair of white earbuds on, both with drooling homicidal grins on their faces illuminated by muzzle-lightning, slightly caved-in foreheads characteristic of Netfreak descendants. In my peripheral I spot one behind the car that is covered in my still-warm pee, wearing a necklace of human teeth.

I aim, breathe, let off a burst once for each raider behind the stands, the NeuroArm thankfully eliminating muscle tremor and providing parasympathetic subroutines that auto-compensate for the rifle’s recoil. Metallica Guy’s head pops like a cherry bomb in a ripe melon, blood streaking down the white headphone wires as his body collapses. The other raider lets out a choking shriek as he catches one in the arm, whipping it back in a puff of red mist. Feels good doesn’t it, fucker.

The one behind the car screams something about ripping my head off and shitting down my neck and I duck just in time to feel his bullets parting my hair. The bullet blizzard abruptly haults, followed by clicking and smacking, and “WTFBBQ!?” and angry cursing. A beat later, I hear sprinting and peek over to see this charging lunatic foaming at the mouth, waving a tire iron around like a medieval mace, headed straight for me. Cyclops fires first, getting him in the upper thigh and shoulder, at which point he lets out a non-stop, vocal chord-tearing scream but keeps coming, from the look in his bloodshot eyes he is jacked up on spaz. I unload the rest of my clip on him, checkerboarding the chest of his black trench coat with red, which reduces his momentum, but his body remains in a drug-induced denial of how fucked it is. I deflect the tire iron blow with the NeuroArm, using his momentum to flip him over my shoulder in a Mountain Bomb throw. He crashes, back-first, onto a table strewn with coffee cups and long-defunct laptops, which collapses. The body spasms insect-like.

“Drop the gun!” The hoarse voice makes me jump, but in an instant I realize I don’t want to turn, knowing I’ve fucked up.

I turn to see the limp-armed raider, a giant rusty kitchen knife in his good, if twitchy hand pressed hard against Cyclops’ throat. This one looks older, wirey grey hair on his head and the tell-tale raccoon-marks around the eyes where permanent computer interface goggles once clung, ensconcing rapidly darting, distracted eyes of a pre-Silence netfreak.

“I said drop it you fucking troll!” I’m perplexed at first, then assume this insult is some sort of artifact of the Chattering Class. I’m under no illusion that this shit will slit Cyclops throat as soon as he sees his chance, possibly sooner. But he also looks like he’s about an inch away from cracking and the shaky knife hand pulls tighter, causing Cyclops to let out a whimper. I spot blood on Cyclops’ neck, and I decide to drop the gun, kick it aside. I’m sorry, bro.

“Now you’re both fucking dead!” His hand starts moving.

“No! Wait! I…” I’ve got about four seconds to think of something, and I think like our lives depend on it, which they do. I look down, spot the blood-soaked laptops and it clicks.

“I can get you some internet!” It’s so utterly ridiculous I just barely manage to deliver the line with a straight face.

“What? Where?” The look on his face is some mixture of junkie glaze and a child on Christmas morning, and for a moment I feel a twinge of pity, which quickly passes as I realize he was just about to kill my brother. He transfixes on me, and the knife falls away from Cyclops’ neck. Cyclops makes a break for it, and by the time the raider realizes what’s happened, he’s too late, completely missing Cyclops with his wild swing and throwing himself off balance. I take the opportunity to rush him, grabbing his knife hand in both of mine and drive it as hard as I can into the pit of his stomach. He staggers back, wobbling on his feet, then reaches his hand out towards something only he sees. “Internet…” he mutters, crestfallen, then falls.

In the morning we pack up the food and weapons, search the bodies. A couple Coke bottles filled with water, some bits of mystery meat, pack of cigarettes, no ammo left. Guess you have to give them an “A” for effort. Cyclops lingers over Metallica Guy. The white headphone wires are covered in bits of brain and black coagulated blood like Pocky sticks.

“I kind of want the ePod. I wonder if it has any Velvet Underground,” He finally says. Hey, that’s totally fine with me, I’m not cleaning that gore off.

Cynthia is a complete wreck from when we used her as an artificial human shield last night, uniform torn to shreds, metal showing everywhere, her one remaining arm hanging by a thread at the elbow. I almost feel bad for her. Her face is still caught in that bright, old-world service industry smile though her right cheek is falling off and her left eye is a black socket. A true professional to the end.

“Really sorry about that, Cynth. It’d probably never work out between us anyway, this town isn’t really me. Maybe you can come visit our place in Ebayzaar some time?” I duct tape her cheek back on as a token apology.

We follow the boulevard south through the ruins of windowless, slouching skyscrapers, picking up the journey to Ebayzaar. Cyclops finally manages to scrape most of the gunk off the ePod with the help of the Coke bottle water, plugs in to watch music. With the raiders gone, we’re walking lighter, freer, like a weight lifted off our backs. The ghosts of the Cloud City are left to rest in peace. The new captains of industry have a future to build.

The Silence: Mr. November

2010-05-11T00:10:00.000-07:00

Mr. November

Turing extracted himself, limb by sticky limb from his cyberJesus Tron suit, let sheets of hot water cocoon him into that liminal, bodhisattvan state of not-unconsciousness where the world becomes for a moment just the fluctuation of wet thermal gradients on naked skin. For a moment, the withering wasteland and the homicidal apparitions of the old world and the fanatic techno-messianics were like half-remembered fragments of a science fiction novel.

It was always the end of something. Even before the world had pretty literally ended, there had always been millennial cults, 2012, nuclear apocalypse, the rapture, the end of civilization. The notion of going on indefinitely, churning away the same unmagnificent routine till your bones ground away like plastic gears in a cheap soulless toy - it was terrifying, that unbearable continuity of being. ‘Mid life crisis’ the ancients called it. You’d be lucky to live beyond that midpoint in the post-Silence world, even if you were one of the vanishingly few individuals inhabiting the leisure-class in The City.

His thoughts turned to Haley, inevitably. She was bright, spirited, very much on his level. Damaged goods, but then who didn’t come off the trainwreck people-assembly line of the cutthroat Wasteland unflawed? But there was something dark beneath Haley’s relaxed flip posture. She was a blast furnace, smouldering away inside, and the bitchy external persona was but the thin layer of dross veiling all that volatile magma. Turing had encountered it once, when he’d asked about her mother. He was more than a little surprised to discover Haley’s father was in fact Bishop, whom she regarded shruggingly as an overbearing, nuts, albeit generally benign old loony. When Turing naturally shifted the subject to Haley’s mother, though, she darkened, quietly whispered that her mother was dead and fucking just leave it alone. It scared him, frankly, he had never seen her so sincere, so bereft of the insulating layers of irony, peeled away to reveal that terrible core.

His daily H20 allotment was temporarily doubled, a congratulatory initiation gift, which Turing savored to the last drop, but alas, the LED gauge dwindled down to zero and the spray abruptly halted. Toweled himself off, waved his hand before the tirelessly staring infrared eyes of his workstation terminal, a holographic workspace triangulated in the cyber-ether around him. His lower-right quadrant was bombarded with myriad lime green Wastebook messages and friend requests with gushy subject titles, thanks undoubtedly to his newfound microcelebrity.

“An adventure is something terrible that happens to someone else,” Turing reminded himself. He sampled a few fan mail, started feeling queasy, programmed an inbox filter hunting for ‘congratulations’ + ’initiation’ + ‘friend me’ and/or ‘can I have your love child’, made a junk folder marked “ego boosters”. He swept the messages into a virtual pile with hand gestures, dumped them in the junk bin like bales of raked autumn leaves, let the mail compost.

Next most obvious item was an e-sticky with a memo beamed over from the Sand Scorpion’s onboard computer reading, “Update Plasti-Deagle blueprints.” He winced, recalling the gun exploding in his hands as he was going toe-to-tentacle with the Advertiser. A two-finger ‘peace’ sign over ‘Plasti-Deagle’ highlighted the text, a tap brought up a search of the most recently accessed files with that tag in the Deus Ex Machina servers. A double tap maximized ‘Plasti-Deagle Version 2.134’ to a rotating cyan semi-opaque Desert Eagle pistol surrounded by context-sensitive schematic details and developer notes, revision history arranged by co-author. Thumbs and indexes framed the gun, magnified till the spectral pistol was the size of a tractor tire. He located the intersection of steel and plastic denoted in the barrel map, expanded the territory of steel across the plastic down to the trigger grip. Popped up a developer note next to the grip with indicator arrows, “Heterogenous plastics in grip and trigger guard undermine stability. Fabricate from single plastic source if possible.” Saved the updated file to central database, waved it away.

The Sand Scorpion AI was begging for tweakups in the corner of Turing’s eye as well. Some serious finite state machine psycho-therapy was in order after the Scorpion went AWOL, identified Turing as a hostile and nearly took his head off in a blaze of 0.50 caliber, schizophrenic catastrophe. But there was not the time, nor the energy nor the psychological headspace to hold all that complex heuristic code in his tired neocortex at this time of night, and Turing had a reception-function-whatever to be fashionably late for.

“Sorry old friend, good things come to those who wait. Hold down the fort.” Turing patted the 3d ghost of the Sand Scorpion before slinking it onto the digital backburner of a virtual shelf marked ‘GetAroundToMe’. A far more difficult, perilous quest lay ahead of him than any he faced before; mingling.

***

“Oh my Guugle, it’s him!”
“I heard he fended off a dozen killer Advertiser bots with his bare hands!”
“I heard he programmed a humanoid that could fool the Voight-Kampff test!”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“I don’t think so, he mostly hangs around that bulldyke Haley. He might be gay.”
“I call dibs on his bff.”
“I’m so getting a Turing plush printed up. Nom.”
“Get’em while they’re hot: Turing action figures complete with miniature Sand Scorpion vehicle and post-human accessory pack.”
“Can you please sign this? My son is going to tantrum me to death if you don’t sign his cyberspace deck.”
“Hey Turing, need a plastic scavenging partner?”

Turing followed the roaming quadruped punch table around like a cleaner wrasse, sucking down mouthfuls of saccharine red water hopefully not red from radiation, deflecting incoming fangasms with awkward smiles and sentence particles trailing into chuckles. Occasionally chomping appetizers of thinly sliced coyote ham and sixty-year-old canned vegetables dunked in a zealously healthy hummus dip traded from the Tree Dwellers. The Deus Ex Machina cloister was lit up like a Christmas tree for Turing’s initiation celebration, packed physically with people and aurally with loud conversation. DJ Apocalypse was spinning “The Top 100 Mashups of The 2010’s” on a vintage iPod Macro. Brain-rattling dancehall aberrations of Beethoven’s 5th laced with endlessly repeating four-word samples of Bob Dylan songs boomed from PA speakers hefted about by Armitage mechs.

A fab-blonde in perilously high cut shorts and an ‘I’m not hardcore, I’m Turingcore’ t-shirt sidled in under Turing’s radar and would’ve knocked him completely off guard if it wasn’t for the ridiculous slogan.

“Wow, gush alert!! I’m totally hyperventilating here. I’m like, your biggest fan, this is so crazy! I’m Lindsey, and this is my friend Christa. Christa, get over here and take this pic. Do you mind if we get a picture with you?” Turing suddenly discovered his left and right side smushed firmly against female body, mind clouding over in an umbra of lavender perfume and assorted fruity alcohol breath.

“Um, hey. Yeah, sure, pictures. You want the Rat Pack or the The Scream pose? I’m all out of the Bond and the MySpace pic.” Turing took an angled stance, tilted his chin strategically down to keep the camera from sneaking in an extra twenty pounds on him.

“Hahaha! What? Ok, one, two, three, Singularity!!! No, it’s the other button, Christa.” The girl-sandwich tightened in on him as they battled for camera space next to his face, making kissy pouty lips. Turing tentatively put an arm around either girl. Maybe this fame thing wasn’t so bad.

“Oh, this is totz going up on Wastebook. Wait, I think I kinda look like a ditz in this. What do you think, do I look like a ditz?” Lindsey held the photo out for critic circle.

“Uhh….” Turing ellipsized.

“Lindsey you look amazing. I think I’m giving off a balloonfish vibe on the other hand though,” Christa reassured.

“Oh-em-gee Christa you look fabulous here, silly girl. Hey, so anyway, Christa and I and some of our friends, we’re gonna have this thing back at my quarters. You could like, you know, come, if you want.”

Turing sputtered fruit punch in a mist cone of pink, thankfully a narrow one. Half a dozen voices went off in his head(s), some screaming ‘HELL YES, SEX’, some protesting, ‘Really not a smart move, champ’, and everything in between as his inner lawyer was swamped trying to post-facto rationalize for each and every party. In that moment he knew, viscerally, the meaning of “Gridlock” as described in old-world democratic governments like the Youessay. His nubile fanclub increased lobbying pressure for the Id party with literal pressure on his chest and neck.

Then Turing thought of Haley, and she vetoed the Get-Turing-Quintuple-Laid Act. Where was she anyway?

“Golly, there goes Mr. November, carried in the arms of cheerleaders. That’s the Turing I know, never lets his fans down.” Haley stood there as if on cue, brow quirked in caustic appraisal. Turing’s moral dilemma was overjoyed to see her.

“Haley! Oh, sorry Lindsey, Christa.” He gave them both girly tappy-hands hugs. “It was great… impactful, meeting you guys, I think we all learned a lot today, we’ve really grown (ahem) from this teaching moment. But I kind of like, have this Thing I need to get to. It’s a really thingy Thing, you know how it goes. So, thank you for the photoshoot, don’t forget to drop me a friend request, maybe we could try for next initiation ceremony reception?”

The pair of girls got the deer-in-headlights syndrome, blinking dumbly for several seconds. They gave Haley the customary ‘mmmHMM’ once over, then shrugged, swiped a couple shots from a passing server bot, downed the liquor. They skipped off towards a cluster forming around a performer juggling virtually-projected augmented reality machetes.

“I see you’re adjusting well to your new found celebrity.” Haley nudged an empty plastic cup under the red waterfall emitted by the blindly spraying punch dispenser bot that was glitching out and soaking the table.

Turing winced, “What, them? That was nothing, they were just geeking out and collecting some souvenirs to show their friends. Your dad requested I make an appearance, milk the crowd. Just a little photo-op. It’s good PR for the cult, and all.”

“Uh huh. I doubt Bishop requested that.” Haley pointed to his cheek. He rubbed it and his fingers came away smudged with clove flavored lipstick. Where the hell did those girls get clove flavored lipstick?

“What- Oh. Hey, come on, that’s nothing, give me a break. So they were a little drunk and friendly-“

“I see, keep digging.” Haley crossed her arms, her lips pulled into a thin red line. Turing marched across it.

“This is ridiculous, nothing was going to happen. What are you anyway, my mom? Patron Saint of Wasteland Co-eds with Poor Judgement?” Turing angrily chewed a vegan cracker lathed in dry coyote meat till it held the consistency of krill paste.

Her mouth opened, closed. “I just can’t bear to see you sinking to this level, is all. It’s beneath even you, Herr Lothario.”

“Sinking? Is this too much ankle for you, Queen Victoria?” He shrouded his leg with a tablecloth. “I can’t have a little fun before dying terribly in a raider attack on this fucked scorched Urth? I’d think a rock star could score at least a sample of the requisite hookers n blow.”

Haley hmphed and turned to face the statues of the three Digital Wise Men. “You’re not just some famous playboy, you’re the Chosen One now, you represent the Deus Ex Machina. I don’t want to have to damage-control your philandering.”

Turing spat the meaty cud on the ground, half out of spite and half because of the disgusting taste. “Can you hear the words that are coming out of your mouth? I’m not running for President of the fucking Youessay, I just dug up some cracked giblet of abandonware, brought it back and have been reluctantly crowned Master of the Universe by a bunch of Wasteland loonies, Guugledamnit.” A frolicking woman with matted hair and a talisman of sequined USB drives stopped by and asked for Turing’s blessing. He made a halfhearted ceremonial uploading sign, tried to keep the pity from showing up in his smile.

“Jesus, do you ever think of anyone but yourself? Who you’re going to freeload off of while spitting on today? How you can waltz in, take advantage of a community’s traditions to score some ‘perks’? What wet hole you’re going to stick your dick in tonight?” Haley was glowing red in the cheeks, shoulders rising and falling in staccato motion from ragged breath.

“You… I was thinking about… You can be a real fucking bitch, you know that!?” Turing grasped her by a bare milky white arm, squeezing it firmly. It felt like someone had overturned the easel of his psyche and all the bottled emotions were spilled and running together at once.

“Let go of me!” She smacked him, hard, and he saw random snippets of code spinning around his head till reality decided to fade back in. Her Machina ring caught him on a molar, cut the inside of his mouth and he tasted tangy copper. But she wasn’t pulling away now. His other hand found its way behind her neck, pressing beneath her tiered faux pearl choker made from recycled, acrylic painted Chinese plastic, to feel the soft, rarer thing beneath. Gazes locked, time and history fell away as the empty space between them began to close…

“Ah, Turing, there you are.”

History came to. The two decoupled, each regathering their composure, straightening out their evening wear. The endorphinal heat cooled, emotional belongings shelved. Planets disaligned.

Bishop stood there smiling in his best white dinner jacket, looking positively 20th century, federal.

“I trust you’re enjoying your celebration, my boy? It is most… what is that recently resurrected morsel of Old World colloquialism the kids are using nowadays. ‘Banging’.” Histrionic guffaws issued from Bishop’s grin.

“Sure, it’s a blast.” Turing replied while signing someone’s action figure of himself.

“Haley, my dear. Please give our most esteemed new member and I a moment, if you please.” Haley, still flustered and in a weird headspace after being interrupted, bowed out quietly, went off to find some water.

“Walk with me, Turing.” Bishop led him across the crowded cloister courtyard strewn with confetti, cups, and other trash being gathered by janitor bots to be taken back to the plastic refinery for smelting. They entered the lighthouse, and the cold silence within was emphasized by the phantom ringing tinnitus induced by the ear-splitting onslaught of the party. As they ascended, each metallic footfall and its descendant repercussions were distinguishable as they reverberated throughout the hollow chamber.

A brisk, Oceanic wind played across the gallery of the light house, washing away the heat of the intense social engagement.

“Beautiful sky, tonight.” Bishop rested his elbows on the aluminum railing, head canted back against his shoulders. His thin spider-silk hair powdered pale blue by moonlight. Turing went to lean there as well, but reconsidered as he noticed boils of rust forming on the support beams connected to the railing.

“Ah, the Big Dipper, there, you see? And Orion’s Belt.” Bishop’s slight stature and posture gave him the appearance of a very old child as he pointed. Turing nodded.

“You know, the night sky was one of the first things we drew when we big-brained monkeys discovered art. Whole maps of the heavens were found in cave paintings from the time before the last great flood of ice cleansed the earth. Civilizations throughout the ages looked to the stars for answers, from the outcomes of wars to our romantic affairs to where to put our life savings. The origin of Buddha to Alexander the Great’s conquests to the First World War, these all were greatly influenced by astrology in one way or another. ‘The stars above govern our condition,’ Shakespeare said. Youessay President Theodore Roosevelt kept his horoscope mounted on a chessboard in the oval office.” The wind gusted and howled, breakers crashed and fanned plumes of glistening blue spray upon the cliff below.

“Do you believe in fate, Turing?” Bishop said, almost to himself, the words spoken softly into the wind to be blown out into the Pacific, but Turing caught them.

“’There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.’” Turing responded, folding his arms into the synthetic cotton of his shirt to warm his chilled hands.

Bishop held his chin, considering, brows creasing like rain clouds. “Who is that, Cicero? Kant?”

“Sarah Connor.”

“Hmm…” Bishop receded into thought again for a time. At last he stood to his full posture, hands grasping the fluted metal railings of the lighthouse like the helm of a galleon ship. “I do believe that we, you and I, are meeting here now for a reason. Perhaps only the mind of a Singularity could reveal that reason, but I believe there is one nonetheless. Towards the end of the Anthropocene, just before the world as our ancestors knew it was destroyed, this sky we see now was invisible. The guiding stars and constellations that humans had sailed by for millennia became shrouded in a poison fog of our own making. The pollution -- smog, hydrocarbon, neon light -- blotted out the sky, and people could no longer see the stars at night, could not see their destiny written in the heavens. The clear, vivid visions of the future of the 20th century, the ‘science fiction’ as the ancients called it, filled with flying cars and crystalline towers, and even the dystopic worlds of Big Brother and the Brave New World, these all but vanished from the collective dream-skies of humanity by the beginning of the 21st Century. At the start of this new millenia, the future became clouded, murky, ever more uncertain. We lost faith in The Future, and The Future lost faith in us.” Bishop gazed out towards the collapsing remains of the sunken skyscrapers ensconced by a floating graveyard of plastic and silicon detritus.

Normally Turing would nod and grunt monosyllabic signals of attention till Bishop’s ranting burnt itself out. But something about the events that had just transpired, some unconscious resentment of Bishop’s interruption stirred Turing to respond.

“So people stopped daydreaming Gernsbeck utopias, stopped envisioning where precisely they were going. But with environmental, financial, social, population perils lurking around every bend, things could only end in tears, so why bother looking? So disaster films, where humanity’s virtues overcame our weaknesses as we ‘joined together as one’ to avert doomsday scenario X, waned, replaced by the post-apocalypse, where the story began after the end. Maybe the reason was things just weren’t looking so hot for us super-apes? Not to say that they didn’t try to steer the ship away from the rocks, but they wouldn’t bet their 401k on it, no pun intended. Maybe it wasn’t a zeitgeist of pessimism so much as a sober realism? Maybe people stopped staring open-mouthed at the sky awaiting supergenius godfather aliens to swoop down or flying cars and ivory towers to dazzle us or whatever perfect ‘future’ to appear because, well, the evidence just wasn’t coming in. You can only fiddle anthems for so long while the fires are spreading throughout Rome before you have to wake up, pick up some pails of water, get your hands dirty, and deal with reality.” Turing found his hands flailing about to illustrate this speech from nowhere. He felt a lot better having finally gotten some of it off his chest although he hoped he hadn’t pissed the Big B off too much.

“But is it not true that even with good will and hard work, one might still be dashed upon the rocks without vision?” Bishop turned to regard the light house lantern.

“Some vision is necessary, sure. But it needs to be tempered by the Visine of realism, or you risk chasing pipe dreams and Sirens and winding up in the same place.”

“Touche.”A pearly crescent glowed on Bishop’s mouth in the shape of a grin, a rare display of genuine delight. He patted Turing’s shoulder with his soft old hand. The wind picked up again as Bishop withdrew inward, as if considering the best way to reveal the next card.

“The real reason I wished to speak to you is that I fear that our little oasis here, the Deus Ex Machina, may not last much longer.” Bishop leaned back over the edge of the lighthouse, to observe the party below, colored strobes flashing, distant throb of bass drum like the heartbeat of a child. From the perch of the light house, the sanctuary seemed so small, so fragile, a tiny bubble of light in the cold, savage emptiness beyond.

“What do you mean?” Turing drew closer, grasped the railing beside Bishop.

“Our scouts in Feenix City bring reports that The Intellectual Proprietor suspects we may have artifacts of great power obtained from Red Crater. His suspicions are of course true, in the sense that great power could be generated from the data stored within the relics of the Great Guugle, such as the chip you returned to us.”

Bishop was not one often regarded with descriptors like, “level headed” or “grounded”, to put it mildly. To put it frankly, he was a hysterical nut who would take a word processor spellcheck as a sign of imminent utopia or a rainstorm to signify the end of the world. Turing would have dismissed this ‘fear’ as just Bishop’s paranoia attacks getting the best of him, again. But the mention of Feenix changed everything, and definitely not in a happy way. This was serious as drug-resistant tuberculosis. You did not fuck with Feenix City or you would soon find yourself turned into scorched earth and a cautionary horror story told by a toothless old man to children around a campfire.

“Are you certain of this?”

Bishop nodded solemnly, painfully. “Sadly, yes. It has been confirmed by multiple agents. Several of our brethren have been killed in the line of duty to bring us this information.”

“Turing, I have seen the most terrible things in my life. People treating each other in ways you would not believe us capable of. People standing idly by while…” Bishop trailed off into some dark corner. Returned, “I cannot believe that this is our fate, that the Vision of Deus Ex Machina would end this way, that The Singularity 2.0 was never meant to be, that utopia will be nipped in the bud a second time.” Bishop’s fanaticism shone unbridled in his reddened eyes now.

Turing took a step back, as if he had just discovered an early sign of some terminal and infectious disease on Bishop. He did not at all like where this conversation was going.

“I know that you have history in Feenix City, Turing, although the exact nature of this history is not known to me, nor do I expect you to tell me. You have shown yourself to be not only one of our best machine inventors, but your courage and resourcefulness are rare indeed. But most importantly, you have the best chance of infiltrating Feenix, planting evidence to throw them off our trail, and retrieving that one vital element that could help us gather allies to our cause and hasten the coming of The Singularity 2.0 by many orders of magnitude. The Pedia.”

No, this was wrong, this was all wrong. Turing’s hands unconsciously gestured the command for “undo”, “undo”, “exit program”, but there was no reboot in the machine of reality.

“You want me to go to Fenix, perform counterintelligence, and steal the Pedia from The Intellectual Proprietor? Ok Bishop, that’s hilarious, I give you props for that one, haha.”

“I’m quite serious about this, Turing.” Bishops eyes were scary serious.

“Bishop, first of all, I am definitely not the superman you’re making me out to be, and second of all, even if you were Superman, that would be impossible. Feenix is the most heavily guarded, heavily surveillanced place in the universe, not a fleck of dandruff falls to the ground without being accounted for, not a bit of electromagnetic transmission goes unsniffed. It’s just-“

“It is an extremely dangerous and difficult task, I know. But if we fail, it will mean the demise of Deus Ex Machina and all that we have worked to accomplish. We will give you all the support you require and reward you any price, but at the end of the day, you are in the best position to accomplish the mission. ”

The old fool was wrong about a great many things, but Turing hammered, crash-tested every junction of Bishop’s logic and found it to be sound in this instance, and Turing hated him for it. No one else in the Deus Ex Machina had an in with Feenix City but Turing. Anyone else stood a mutant rat’s chance on a shishkebab. Turing considered suggesting Bishop hand over all the Guugle artifacts to The Intellectual Proprietor, but Turing knew that Bishop would get himself and all his followers killed before he would give up on the Singularity 2.0. And even if Bishop did give up the chips, Feenix might destroy the Deus Ex Machina just for getting in their way.

If only he could’ve fucked up the spirit quest. If only he could’ve not mentioned his Feenix origins that one time he got drunk on poker night. LEAVE NOW, a voice alarmed in his head. ‘Think of all these people, think of all your friends here, think of Haley,’ whispered another. If only he could’ve not wandered into this Wasteland shanty town full of delusional idiots and tar-babied himself into these stupid emotional attachments, this ‘caring’ thing, it infuriated him. Now he knew why in pre-Silence movies the Lone Wanderers were Buddhist monks who always moved on to another town every episode. Because all the ones who stuck around eventually ended up giving in to some hackneyed suicide mission.

“I’m not used to having all this greatness thrust upon me. I think I need to sleep.”

“Of course, you must be exhausted. I am truly sorry to have to ask this thing of you after you have just accomplished so much for us and risked yourself in the process. If there was any way at all it could be me instead of you I would go.”

“Mhm. Goodnight.” Turing kicked off the light house railing, descended the staircase. His initiation party had ended though the last embers were still stumbling about the garbage strewn cloister: the DJ trying to untangle scary snarls of cords, a cluster of drunken teenage boys fucking with one of the Armitage mech’s programming to make it breakdance for lolz, random passed out bodies in the grass surrounded by friends trying to smack them awake.

Strolling across the courtyard, Turing felt a sudden, deep distance from everything, from these people, carrying on carefree in their little bubble, which Turing stood outside of now, carrying on his back. He felt cold, alone, and afraid. This was a mistake, a bad dream from which he would soon awake. They had the wrong guy. Turing was not the Hero, he was the runaway survivor who kept his head down and survived. He had never been responsible for more than himself and his vehicle, and now the fate of a whole group of people was in his hands. Turing wondered if this was something like what it felt like to be elected President of the Youessay afterall? To have all the lights and cameras on you, confetti sprinkles and motorcades, surrounded by cheering suits and blazers, casting on you hopes and dreams, but ultimately to be alone and terrified in the eye of it, knowing it is you alone who are responsible for so many lives, for history. He was indeed Mr. November.