What a better way to see if we've been resubscribed to the Mailing List.
We haven't missed anything, have we?
-- Listar MIME Decryption --------------
-- Name : Farewell to Night City.txt
The place was Ninsei. Night City, some called it, after the creation
of some obscure fiction author from the late 20th. It was a garbage dump,
refugee camp, and rats' nest all along a single kilometer of ruined
waterfront where Aqua City had once stood - before the U.S.S.D.'s particle
beam satellites reduced it to slag, and sent it to the bottom of the harbor.
Priss Asagiri walked without fear through the broken, twisted main
drag of Night City. Even if she had been afraid to tread in the place where
no angels dared, she knew better than to show it. A trio of Engine junkies
crowded around a nearby trashcan fire gave her predatory smiles to emphasize
the point. Her eyes flashed in return with the trembling, dilated pupils of
someone hopped up on several *grams* of potent Brazillian-made Hype, her own
pearly whites glittering under the neon and the miserably strobing mercury
vapor arcs as if to say, *you assholes are welcome to try me.*
The three junkies caught the look and understood the implications of
her unspoken challenge. Priss continued on her way unhindered. In the
distance the wail of emergency sirens carried over the choppy water, and
echoed off the ruined hulk of Aqua City that still probed gaunt fingers
of blackened steel into the sickly orange haze of cloud cover and light
pollution that hung over MegaTokyo.
________________________________________________________________________
J. Austin Wilde and Fission Park Press proudly present:
BUBBLE GUM CRISIS:
FAREWELL TO NIGHT CITY
by J. Austin Wilde, K.B.C.S.
Super Critical Reactor Axe Man,
Fission Park Press
wildeman@psn.net
http://www.psn.net/~wildeman/
The characters and situations
of Bubble Gum Crisis are the creation
and property of Studio Artmic and Youmex.
--WARNING--
This work of fanfiction contains strong
language, adult situations, graphic violence,
and drug usage. Those with delicate sensibilities
are advised to go read a Hello Kitty fanfic instead.
________________________________________________________________________
~This is my first day -of my last days~
~I built it up -now I take it apart~
~Climbed up real high -now fall down real far~
~No need for me to stay -the last thing left~
~I JUST THREW IT AWAY!~
~I put my faith in God and my trust in you~
~NOW THERE'S NOTHING MORE FUCKED UP I COULD DO!~
~WISH THERE WAS SOMETHING REAL -WISH THERE WAS SOMETHING TRUE~
~WISH THERE WAS SOMETHING REAL IN THIS WORLD FULL OF YOU!~
"Wish," written by Trent Reznor,
and performed by Priss and the Replicants
(C)1992, 2018, 2035 TVT/NOTHING/INTERSCOPE
-CHAPTER ONE-
The bar had no name and was owned by a Serbian ex-patriate on the run
from war crimes dating back thirty years. His most prominent feature
outside of his squinty-eyed glare was an exquisite ruin of teeth shored up
with bits of rusty Polish steel -courtesy of the local dentist and friendly
Chop-Shop Doc. He watched Priss walk in under the pink neon light of an
Asahi Dry Beer sign over the door, and shook his head slowly with regret.
Priss nudged one of Trung Minh's working girls aside as she bellied
up to the bar. The chipped formica surface tried desperately to appear like
white marble, and had probably graced the counter of a Denny's at one time.
In spite of herself, her eye was drawn to the tiny scrawl of greys and golds
that patterned the formica.
"Christ, Priss, you on de Hype again?" the bartender asked ruefully
in Japanglish - the _lingua franca_ of the dispossessed in Night City.
She looked up quickly from the bar and blushed with surprise and shame.
Her preoccupation with the counter was as sure a sign of the combat drug
that burned through her nervous system as her trembling eyes.
"What of it, Ratz?" she shot back tartly.
Ratko 'Ratz' Krstic waved his hands in the air.
"You end up in wheelchair before you are thirty if you keep dat up,"
he scolded. Hype had a nasty way of breaking down the conductive elements
of the axions in nervous tissue with prolonged use. Paralysis was the
kindest of the consequences that followed. Grand mal seizures with fatal
instances of tachycardia and respiratory arrest were representative of the
other end of the Hype-abuse spectrum.
"Shit," Priss muttered contemptuously. "Fighter-jocks get the stuff
mainlined by the decagram. I couldn't score that much in a month around
here, even if I could afford it."
"And dey only got a lifespan of two minutes in battle," Ratz noted.
The expression on Priss' already sour face darkened.
"I should be so lucky."
Ratz reached into a polystyrene cooler and pulled out a bottle of
Crown O.B. lager. Priss winced at the sight of the sweaty brown bottle as
he popped the top with a flick of his wrist, and set it before her. In
spite of her Hype-dry mouth she hesitated to take a swig. Ratz was always
too cheap to offer up something other than the Korean beer.
The Serb stood behind the bar with his arms folded across his chest
and waited for her to drink.
At length her thirst got the better of her, and she managed a swallow.
"Damn, Ratz," she said as she set the bottle down. "How can you sell
this stuff?"
Ratz smiled. Priss wished he hadn't.
"You make news tonight," he said evenly. "Dey broadcast hit on Genom
development project in Shinjuku on de ten o'clock show."
"Wasn't me," she replied. It was a transparent lie, and the Serb
wasn't put off by it.
"Of course not," he returned. "You come in strung-out on Hype for de
recreational value it has."
Her hand clenched around the bottle tightly, and she threw it with a
shout over Ratz's head to smash into the back wall with a crash of glass
and sandy colored foam. The Serb watched her, impassive to her outburst.
Other patrons paused for a moment in silent analysis of the situation
before writing it off as nothing and continuing where they left off.
"Fuck you," she growled. "I *need* it. If it wasn't just me out there
I wouldn't, but it *is* just me, and I do."
She leaned in close to him, close enough for him to see her dancing
trembling pupils under the neon and the fluorescents.
"You wouldn't understand," she went on in a voice taut with fear and
self-loathing. "You've never fought a Boomer before, so get off my fucking
case about it."
Ratz nodded slowly.
"You are right," he said to her. "I never fight Boomer. Dat much is
true. Is also true dat you kill yourself more with each hit of dat junk."
"Like I fucking care!" she shot back at him, slamming her fists down
on the wobbly countertop. "Stop preaching to me like it's going to make any
difference!"
She whirled on her heels and stormed out of the bar - elbowing a patron
in the chest on the way out. Ratz lowered his chin to his chest and sighed
tiredly.
* * *
Home was a stack of rusty connex boxes that had once ridden the decks
of great container ships in bygone years of Japanese prosperity. Rickety
steel-tube staging and warped wooden planks served as catwalks to reach the
upper boxes. Night City was nothing if not a place of resourcefulness. The
sound of barking dogs and crying children filled the heavy night air as
Priss ducked under a makeshift clothesline to the connex box she called
home.
Most of Night City's residents were refugees from Genom's aggressive
"Urban Vitalization Project." That is to say they were people whose low-rent
government housing had been bought out by the collossal multinational and
leveled to make way for time-share high rises and shopping malls. Most of
the people had been decent hardworking poor, scrabbling to make ends meet
in a world where the haves and the have-nots were drifting farther and
farther apart. These people had not been part of Genom's new order for
MegaTokyo, and so they had to go. Where they went mattered not to a distant
Board of Directors with an obligation to the shareholders to look after,
and certainly not to the mandarins in the MegaTokyo bureacracy whose palms
were slicked with Genom's grease.
To Night City they came, and the only reason the diseased waterfront
hadn't been swept clear yet was that Genom had other plans that came first.
Priss knew it would only be a matter of time before the monolithic
corporation turned a sallow eye towards Ninsei, and drove them into the
sea.
She would stop them, of course. Or die trying. This would be the
third home of hers that Genom had destroyed, and it was going to be costly
real estate for them if she had any say in the matter.
"Priss!" a boy's voice cried out to her, interrupting her bitter
reflection. "Priss!"
He was about ten years old and small for his age. Dark circles under
his eyes pointed to a poor diet -high in sugar and low in nutrients. Sure
enough, she spied a spray-lined aluminum/paper can of Synergy in his hand.
The super-sweet cola was manufactured by a local Genom subsidiary.
"What is it?" she asked him.
"Feng Gui was asking about you," he said breathlessly.
Priss found herself hitting an even deeper level of darkness.
"What did that bastard want?" she asked.
"He wanted to know when you were gonna pay the rent," the boy said.
Rent. What an amusing term for what essentially amounted to protection
money. Pay your rent or find your place ransacked. Or firebombed. Maybe
both. Hope you weren't home at the time...
"He'll get his money when I do," she told him. "Until then he can kiss
my ass."
The boy took a sip from his cola.
"He says the Tokudas want to cut out the walls between your place and
theirs and move in. He says if you don't pay up quick, he'll let 'em."
Priss winced.
"Tell Feng Gui he'll get his money tomorrow night," she replied, not
knowing how in the hell she was going to manage it. She didn't have two
yen to rub together at the moment. The last of the cash had gone for the
score of Hype.
The boy nodded briskly and turned to go. Priss collared him and
knocked the can of Synergy out of his hand.
"W-What'd you do that for?" the boy spluttered angrily.
"That stuff'll stunt your growth," she replied.
His face scrunched up into a bitter pout.
"Bitch."
He scampered off into the maze of red, brown, and orange connex boxes.
"Little prick," she mouthed after him. She shook her head at her own
hypocrisy. Here she was lecturing a kid about taking care of himself at
the same time as a post-Hype comedown headache was creeping into her skull.
She wrenched at the heavy duty padlock that secured her home and
jerked the three meter wide door all the way open on squealing hinges to
air out the interior. A battery powered lantern hung from the ceiling. She
switched it on, filling the box with cold white light. The furnishings were
a mixture of stolen plastic milk crates, a large plastic cable spool, a
small thermoionic cooler in the far corner, and a hammock stretched out
between the walls. What passed for carpeting was a quilt of automobile
upholstery from a wrecking yard at the south end of Ninsei.
She settled down in the hammock, and pulled a filtered Yiheyaun from
a crumpled pack sitting on the cable spool. The cigarette was a little
stale, and with her mouth already dry from the Hype, smoking was a bit
uncomfortable, but the nicotine flow was what she really needed more than
anything else at the moment. She sucked in a long drag and held on to it
for a good while before passing it through her nose and out to linger
around her in the night air.
The Tokudas began screwing each other in the box next door. Little
doglike yaps escaped from Mrs. Tokuda, punctuated by mindless grunts from
her stupid and brutish husband. Their cheap box spring mattress creaked
and groaned loud enough to carry through the steel walls of their box to
hers.
Priss moaned ruefully.
"This is just what I need to listen to right now," she muttered to
herself. "One more reminder about how those two losers want to expand over
into *my* little dive." Her head began to hurt even more in spite of the
nicotine.
She remembered her stupid promise to get Feng Gui the rent money, and
realized that the Tokudas were probably *going* to expand into her little
dive sometime after tomorrow. She found the thought of killing the weaselly
bloodsucker to be satisfying, but ultimately futile. There were a dozen like
him waiting to take his place, and when it came down to it, she had lived
under legitimate landlords who were bigger scumbags than Feng.
"Fuck," she cursed softly at the magnitude of her misery. She tried to
think about places she could go after tomorrow. Raven's garage was right out.
Sylia would find out for certain - if she didn't already know about her
current relationship with Raven - and then she'd catch her right when her
resolve was at its weakest.
"No way," Priss said to herself as the Tokudas appeared to be close to
climax. "I'm not going back to that, and I'm sure as hell not going to do it
on my knees."
Leon was another zero option. The A.D.P. clown was probably the biggest
mistake ever in a long line of Priss Asagiri Fucked-up Relationships. How in
the hell had she ever stooped to sleeping with him, much less shacking up?
Linna? a part of her mind asked. She dismissed it just as quickly.
Linna was impossible as a roommate. She'd done it before when Genom trashed
her first place. If she felt like becoming a slave again, she'd go and get
a day job somewhere first.
Nene was out for the same reason as Raven's place. Too close to Sylia.
Too close to Leon as well for that matter. The little redhead was also just
too much of a geek to stomach for long.
"No thanks," she said. The Tokudas had finished, giving her a little
peace at last for further thought on the matter of her impending eviction.
She reached down into her cooler and withdrew her little cellular phone.
With any luck she still had a few minutes of credit left on her account.
She dialed up her answering service.
To her surprise, she had not one, but two messages. She keyed in the
first message.
"Priss? Linna here. I'm not sure how often you check this, but could
you give me a call? I swear it has nothing to do with Sylia or the group,
I just want to talk, okay? I'm at 2311.9900.0507.8882 in case you forgot.
Bye!"
Priss frowned. What the hell did Linna want? She didn't buy the part
about Sylia not being involved. Linna wouldn't go to the trouble of saying
something like that unless that was exactly what was going on.
Still, there was always the chance that it was legit, and it might
be a way to score a night's rest in the clean world, and get a shower and
maybe some real food for once - before she had to go back out into the
streets. She punched in the command to save the message.
The next message was an even bigger surprise.
"Yo, Priss! Give me a call. We've got this gig. A real joint, not
another hole in the wall. This is BIG. Later!"
Priss shook her head. It was Roy Batty, the lead axe-man for her old
band, the Replicants. She couldn't remember what they were calling
themselves these days. She could hear the pleading behind the easy-going
voice, and knew at once that their latest vocalist hadn't worked out -had
probably walked on them - and now they were left in the lurch.
They hadn't done very well of late, but that was their problem. They
dumped her, if she remembered correctly, for some squealing seventeenish
voxer in a tank top and miniskirt who better understood 'the direction we
want to go with the band.' That and she didn't object to giving the guys in
the band a friendly blow-job every now and then...
"Like you assholes had any idea where you wanted to go, much less how
to get there," she observed to herself as she sucked down another drag from
her cigarette.
Still, she relished the thought of them crawling back to her, even if
she wasn't interested in what MegaTokyo called a music scene anymore. It
wasn't everyday that someone else got to do the crawling instead of her.
The phone sat ready in her hand as she pondered calling Roy just to tell
him to eat shit and think about how they shouldn't have dumped her in the
first place.
The subject of Feng's money wouldn't leave her head, however. A gig
would mean cash, and if Roy wasn't just blowing smoke about the quality
of the venue (she suspected that he was), it could mean a tidy sum for a
night's work.
"Damn," she muttered blackly. "Ain't this a bitch. Whore myself out
to the band that dumped me so I can continue to live in this rathole, or
whore myself out to Linna as her live-in maid for a few nights on a clean
couch and three squares a day -and maybe put up with whatever bullshit
Sylia tries to lay down on me about Genom."
The lantern's powercell died as she pondered this, leaving her in
darkness. She didn't have another one to replace it.
"Screw it," she said to herself. "At least with the band it'll be
*them* doing the groveling."
She dialed Roy's number.
Author's Notes:
Despite its billing as "The Animated Cyberpunk Classic," I never saw
much cyberpunk in "Bubble Gum Crisis." For me it was soon-to-be-standard
Cute Girls In Mecha fare, with some mediochre J-Pop music, and a few obvious
references (visual and otherwise) to the movie "Blade Runner" for color.
It was enjoyable, but not what I consider cyberpunk.
I've often thought about doing a BGC fanfic, and I decided that if I
did one, I was going to write it in a truly cyberpunk vein. Something Gibson
or Sterling would write. A story that was dirty and mean, about a cast of
losers scraping by in an ugly world of fantastic wealth and hope pitted
against grinding poverty and despair.
Priss is, quite obviously, the central character of this tale for that
reason. I know there's a general dearth of 'fics that focus on Linna, and I
hope to address that issue in some small way in this story, but this is
primarily about Priss and how she deals with her life in a post Episode #8
MegaTokyo.
I know I'm going to piss off some of the core BGC fanfiction readers
out there with this story. Maybe not with anything from this Chapter, but as
you can see, I've just begun. Some of you will note that my characterization
of Priss is closer to what Adam (love him or hate him) Warren did in his own
BGC effort for Dark Horse Comics than the canonical Priss of the anime.