Just looking for some C&C on this original fic idea. I may actually run a
amateur manga based on it once I get set up in college.
-The Reverend Prez
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Sweetness Rendered in Light Sea Grey Cyberhue: A Cyberscape Short Story
An orginal fic by Presley H. Cannady
I.
"Man, I didn’t catch a single word you said."
"Really?" What the hell did I say? At the time, it sounded like
something a real badass might say. Repeating myself, I quickly decided,
would work against the mood I was trying to set. Instead, I simply jabbed
the butt of my rifle in his side again. Sonny went down. I suspect that
wasn’t his real name--after all, I made it up. Still, it wasn’t a good time
for me to go about getting personal. Sonny had something I needed.
Fortunately, I came up with another sharp witticism righ then; maybe this
time he’d catch my drift. I leveled my rifle on his temple and held it
there, watching his pathetic sobbing through my eye-sight.
"Listen, shit-stain." Sonny eyes lit up like the Fourth of July as they
seemed to pull out of their sockets, peeling towards the left side of his face
just to catch a glimpse of me. I could clearly see I had his complete
attention. "Now let me introduce you to my friend here. Mr. PKG-88A1--Mr.
Needler for short. Mr. Needler fires two-milli’ flechettes at hypersonic with
accuracy up to a kilometer, and that’s the basic package right outta the box.
No telling what Mr. Needler can do now...except one thing, that is. Anything
Mr. Needler touches turns to a slump of flesh, cracked bone, and a whole lotta
blood. Now I’ve been having this tense muscle problem in my fingers all this
week; I don’t even know how angry I have to get before..."
I whipped the needler rifle away from his temple. My eye-sight homed in
on a paper weight sitting on Sonny’s desk. I squeezed off a three-round
burst. The paperweight disappeared into a mist of shimmering, glassy
particles and shattered the window behind him completely. It would continue
to fly out at deadly velocities until it hit something with enough stopping
power. I realized then that if Sonny forced my hand, and if I had to shoot
him, then Sonny’s brain would simply distingrate in the flechette’s path.
Crucial scenario.
Then again, Sonny was on his knees, and the flechettes would pierce
through the floor, and anything beneath the floor, until it hit the thermo-
crete the habitat tower rested on. We were on the fifty-first floor. That
would make for certain problems.
Sonny was crying out loud at this point; he obviously had come to terms
with the gravity of his situation. Too bad, I thought later on, it came too
late.
I never did get what I wanted out of Sonny, and I contented myself with
standing him next to where the shattered window once was, watching three
flechettes tear through his head and midsection before he dropped like a stone
into the misty, purplish haze. I wouldn’t see him hit the ground, but someone
sure as hell would. I couldn’t dick around there anymore, so I cut out.
Never really good at math of physics, I snuck out of Sonny’s apartment
wondering how long it would take for him to hit the ground.
II.
They tell you on the way in that Neo Krysho is the Paradise of the Cassiopeia
Cluster. It would help, in the first place, if we were located in the
Cassiopeia Cluster--but no one cared about astronomy anymore. I used to, when
I was a kid on living in New York (they still call it New York). That was on
Earth though, and I didn’t know anything about astronomy out here--no one
did. That’s because people move through jump-points, and nobody knows where
the hell they are beyond a few of the closer ones to Sol. Neo Krysho,
someone said long ago, was in the Cassiopeia Cluster...ever since, it’s just
been common wisdom to say it is. But they don’t know for sure. They can’t,
after all. Simply because the stars look the same way as they would if we
were where that astronomy guy said we were--two hundred years ago--it
wouldn’t mean that we couldn’t be somewhere else. Maybe another galaxy,
maybe another universe ('cept the physics works the same, so they say). No
one knows for sure, because know one knows how jump-points really work--I
mean really, really work. We just use them.
My name’s Junko. It’s Japanese, but there’s no Japan anymore. I’m from
New York, although most of my family moved from Japan centuries ago--before
the Fifth Kanto Quake. When New York got to expensive to live in, they moved
out to the stars. The government was giving out free tickets to any colonist
risking to run through their new jump-points. They called them wormholes back
then, back when they called contrafermiobosidium ‘exotic matter.’ It doesn’t
matter, either way, because they’re dangerous. Before the Gates, jump-points
were random little things. They could leave within a space of a few minutes,
or stick around for thousands of years. I guess my great-great-whatever
grandparents found some of the permanent ones, and they ended up in Neo
Krysho. My side of the family wouldn’t show up for a few more generations,
and when they did, I came alone.
That was ten years before Sonny fell out of the window. I smile whenever
I think about that, although I feel like crying. Maybe I should, because I’ve
changed so much--this place does that to you. I suspect it’s like that on
other colony worlds; we’re all pretty poor except for the Corporates. If
you’re Corporate, then you don’t have to worry about being poor, or underfed
or without a comp--that’s short for computers, if you’re from Verbotica.
Corporates live big off colony worlds, selling back to those bourgies on Earth
and Nova Terra in the AC System. Out on Krysho, and Neo Krysho, people have
to scavenge for a life under the huge, low-income habitat towers and the smog
from the Corporate industrial plants. Then there’s Richtowns. Every colony
world has about a million of ‘em spread across the face of each planet. Those
‘cities’ are where Corporates set up their people, those assigned to work in
the Periphery. To enjoy the good life, you have to go Corporate.
For the rest of us, if you wanted it easy, you could always settle for the
life of a gangster, a Yakuza, a Triad, a DiFalco (Used to be called the Mafia
or something like that, before it lost its touch nearly a thousand years
ago--that’s what Kiichi tells me)--if you have the right stuff. I had the
right name and almond eyes.
They love it. They call me Sweetness.
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-----The Representative of the Everlasting Funk-------
--H. Cannady II>--
"Do not encamp on entrapping terrain. Unite with your
allies on focal terrain. Do not remain on isolated
terrain. Make strategic plans for encircled terrain.
On fatal terrain you must do battle...."
-- Wu Sun-tzu, fourth century B.C.E.
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