My Gift To You

Issue 002 - ein hast du
First Revision

[Note: All series references (cyberpunk, anime, or otherwise), music
lyrics, and other materials in this section are owned by their 
respective creators and distributors, as well as anyone I forgot who
stakes a claim.
This story's original elements, characters, plot, and locations, 
however, while incorporating copyrighted materials, are (c) 
No Tomorrow Productions
2nd Note: This is NOT an SI. Original Flavor, maybe, but no SI in sight,
kiddies...yet.]


	But yet another homicide - no matter how strange - wasn't all that was
going on in the city. Indeed, when the unknown Libertarian Deist
Commission took the reins of power amidst the chaos known as the 'New
Cold War' of 2003, they had already made plans for this city's
renovation. 

Much was going on in San Trin, that night. 

	In one unruly area of the great west coast city, for example, a fine
young man was dodging bullets.



	Rob ran at a breakneck rate, not even bothering to return fire as the
blasters, submachine guns, and various other ordnance exploded around
him. He quickly ducked out of the shooting gallery that Meph's Cantina
had become while Rob had made a phone call and taken a chance. Rob
sprinted to a side alley by the lot, and took cover. All the while, he
cursed silently, thinking <I shouldn't have come back.> 

He wasn't pissed. Not yet, at least. He'd have time enough for that
later. Right now, he was trying to stay alive.

It had been at least a year since he had returned to the nightclub. A
year since he had given up the business of being an E-Assassin; the few,
the proud, the netrunnin'-mindfuckers. One of Fire Ants, Inc.'s best. 

A year since he had met Emma. Around 365 days since their affair had
changed everything. 

But, as he had been told by the recruiter about 4 million years ago,
there is only one way out of the mob business, and it ain't pretty. So
much for the power of love, and other mass delusions... 

He had come to settle his business. Unfortunately, some people just
couldn't leave things be. No matter how long it had been...

When you were an electronic brain-fryer, your job consisted of finding
the target online, and then infecting their brainware in whatever way
possible. It was the worst(or best, depending on your opinion) kind of
hacking, really. Usually it was just a technique used to scare some
newbie off a board he'd been causing trouble on; but other times...Rob
had seen guys who looked like they had just undergone primitive
electroshock therapy; braindead, staring eyes bugged out, drooling all
over themselves, choking on their own bad smelling vomit, and other signs
of brain damage. Rob tried not to think about those net-heads often.
Like, say, when he was eating... 

The gun/laser/maser-fire pulverized the wall Rob took cover against. He
crouched against it stealthily, remembering the skills he had learned
from VR games and simulations. Rob wasn't used to combat in RL(real
life); he supposed that the fact he wasn't dead yet meant he was
competent.  

Out of nowhere, an invisible pain like a rug burn gashed the side of his
arm, ripping through his black T-Shirt's cloth and tearing the flesh of
his arm. He slid away from the edge of the wall, struggling to not cry
out in pain. He had been nicked by buckshot; not a grievious wound, but
still painful.

He pulled out the Zeta. A laser-sight, semi-auto handgun, straight from
the land of the rising sun. The trapped merc's spiky green hair was as
resilient as ever. Its laser flashed absently against the far, dead-end,
graffiti-infested wall, as Rob checked the clip with a glance, then
slipped it in. 
	12 rounds. It would have to do.

"C'mon, Otto, get over here..." Rob murmured as the hired guns stalked
closer...



	But Otto Matik was somewhere else. 

	Otto looked over the shoulder of his friend, who was slamming away at an
old-fashioned typewriter. His friend had a rather arcane way of typing
manuscripts; first, it would go through the ancient, carefully tended
typewriter. Then, it would be scanned into his mainframe, edited, and
re-printed. When asked why he did his typing that way, Otto's friend
Darren would shrug and reply, "The typewriter helps me get ideas," with 
a small smile. 

Darren was an aspiring writer, who worked at an art gallery part time. He
had been Otto's buddy since middle school; a really laid back guy, who
took things as they came and seemed really mellow, except of course for
his infamous(in Otto's mind, at least) crush on the 'weather chick' on
local FiberOptic DTV channel 9483. In truth, he was a very imaginative
person who liked to write bizarre 'furry' fiction and objective
biographies. So far, he had found no buyers for his stories. 

But, despite his prose's lack of popularity, Otto did have a profound
respect for Darren's talent. Here was a guy who could pound out pages and
pages with someone looking over his shoulder, which amazed Otto to no
ends with the openness expressed by that action. Otto knew he got
paranoid just sending E-Mail on a PubliTerm outlet with someone breathing
down his neck...

Otto heard a small buzz. He checked his pager. It read #$$911#. That
meant only one thing: Rob had f^cked up. Bad. Otto sighed at this. He had
expected it. <As if I'm not busy as it is...>

Rob was also a friend of Otto's; one with a knack for computer terrorism
that helped out at Otto's Garage, occasionally. Otto had asked him to not
go back to his former stomping grounds(at least not without backup), but
Rob hadn't taken his advice. Again.

"Listen, Darren, I gotta go; we'll talk later," Otto stated in his deep,
deep voice, which was nothing like his actual, dredlocked, SoCal-style
appearance(much like his name). He moved towards the door, but Darren
never even looked up. "Yeah, seeya," Darren said absently as his fingers
pounded the keys, making a satisfying, metallic sound with every click of
the spacebar.



	Things just got worse for Rob. At one point, one of the assassins had
run into the increasingly claustrophobic alley, screaming, "TIME TO DIE,
YOU $HIT!" Obviously a newbie, probably wasted on one drug or another to
reduce anxiety. Rob put a bullet in the would-be assailant's throat more
out of reflex than anything else; however, the attack caused another
flush of adrenalin to drip into his system. The nameless assassin hit the
ground in a red mist almost immediately. <What a waste of lead,> Rob
thought. 

He was anxious. Rob couldn't stay there much longer. And he was sure that
the guys trying to kill him knew it. He realized that they would attempt
to flush him out at any time. Frag grenade? Gas canister?
Whatever way it would be, Rob would have to act quickly to avoid it.
These men were of the type who would rip someone's face off and staple 
it back on, backwards. Rob knew this, because he had seen it done, a long
time ago. Just a simulation? Maybe, but that didn't make it any less than
another nightmare from the war which never really ended in his mind; one
that consisted of about 15 hours straight online, and around 30
terabytes. It had been a big day for his 'company'; they were 'cleaning
house'. That is to say, they were taking out as many of their marks as
they could, and ending up with a fairly high braindeads count. The only
problem was that each person had to dispose of whoever's body they'd
mind-wiped... That fun little marathon had been intense; one of the
reasons he'd been trying to quit.

Rob heard the guys in the suits come closer - at least 5, from the sound
of the footsteps. <Even Nys couldn't take on a wolfpack with less than
half a clip,> Rob realized. He was beginning to get nervous. Very
nervous. 
Scared, even-


	Otto was on his way, driving through the backroads in his old sedan. The
musty air seemed breathable and barren as it was sterilized in the car's
AC system. He had the radio on at a respectable volume, and it played a
rather irritated radio shock jock from one of the popular stations which
Otto barely heard as he searched for his friend.

Out of the midnight blue, a humanoid, dark shape flew past the car. Otto
cursed and swerved hard to the right, barely escaping a crash with either
the _thing_ which almost swiped him and the concrete wall. He braked, and
swore again, this time for good measure, and presumably directed at the
interloper; who must have been quite large, Otto realized. It was then
that he realized that the thing might have been a
rogue buma. And that it was set in the direction of the Cantina. 
  

And It was going in that direction; but only because of amazing
coincidence. Amazing coincidences were going to shape this night much,
much more before its end. It took large, flying leaps instead of steps;
not jumping rooftops, but very close to it. Its objective was near. It
had once had a name; Constructions Unit #00675-GHE/C. Now, however, It
had been given no name. A name was not required for what was to
come...not for a while, at least.

	It almost passed the Cantina without shedding blood, as it were. 

Almost.


	There were six of them - more than needed for the piece of trash, in
their leader Ayn's opinion. She was the leader of this little group, who
had been hired to teach this guy a lesson, one way or another. Rumor was
that this mark had fried the boss so bad he'd pissed his pants, but Ayn
didn't care much either way. What she did care for was offing this guy,
getting out of the cold, and collecting her dues. 

Dan had run in, stupidly, despite their warnings. When they saw his
carcass hit the ground, Ayn couldn't honestly say she felt any remorse.
Perhaps relief at one less drug-gorged gun-toting pathetic excuse for a
professional hitman to look after. 

Ed, however, was rather pissed at losing a comrade. For this, Ayn could
forgive him; Eduard was newer to this job than Dan, and was likely just
doing it to pay the bills(he didn't _look_ like he had some major,
costly, drug habit to feed, but you never know). Besides, Ayn rather
liked Ed in a purely non-professional basis, despite never telling the
kid(those sorts of relationships were usually fatal for newbies)... 

"Dammit!" Ed started towards the fox-hole which held the little rat they
had been trying to flush out.

"Ed, stop," Ayn warned him, as she put a hand on his shoulder. Her 
voice, while accented in gaelic(as irish-american was her nationalty),
also had a slight lisp to it. This was from her forked tongue, of course.
The story on how she ended up splitting the tip of her tongue into two
little sections was a rather amusing anecdote(along with her blood-red
eyes) - except to Ayn, of course, who remembered the blood, and chaos,
and the struggle to relearn how to speak that came afterwards. 
 
"C'mon, Annie!" This was Ed's pet name for her. If anyone else had said
it to her, she would have ripped out said person's trachea, deep-fried
it, and ate it with tartar sauce in front of them(though some
preparations would be needed for that exact scenario). But, as stated
before, Ed was new. And Ayn liked him; quite a bit. 

Eduard turned to face the blond hitwoman; the others just stood back,
observing whether or not the rumors were true and Ayn liked the guy, or
they were false and she would break his arm for insubordination. "Can't
we drop a frag grenade?" 

"What, and get the cops on our asses over just one man?"

"How about a flash grenade?"

Jason(no relation to the young man killed less than an hour before)
Arnlen, another member of their merry little party, spoke up. "I got a
flash grenade."

Ayn glanced at Jason, and took a little under a second to consider the
options.

Then, she replied, "Okay, let's do it," while pushing back a strand of
her dredlocked, strawberry blond hair. Ayn was more punk than pretty, but
somewhere under the flesh, there was more good than you would find in
most killers.

The team of currently 5 moved into a rectangular formation; their 
weapons were readied, while Jason set the grenade's fuse, and prepared to
throw it...

Rob, who had been trying to make sense of the distant voices, saw the 
red target lasers hover on the far wall, and crouched, holding out his
handgun like a marine, and said a small prayer to whatever would
listen...

Ayn thought she heard a car(or some other sort of vehicle) begin to 
drive by the bar. She dismissed this, thinking that this job would be
over in a few seconds anyway...and in a way, she was right and wrong...

Jason pulled back his arm, like a baseball player, gripping the live
grenade... 


And then, all hell broke loose; as it often does when one of that place's
denizens is loosed in the city.


Elsewhere...

	James felt happy. This was not an emotion that was felt often, in his
case. Usually, the closest he(or anyone else in the city, for that
matter) got to such a feeling was temporary contentedness. But as he
watched Meagann sleep, he found that he was actually happy to see her
rest. Of course, it wouldn't last; these days, finding happiness was like
running a tightrope. Quite the rush, but it's only a matter of time
before you 
Fall.

These days, all she would do was scan the channels through that little
black wire that plugged into the outlet on the side of her skull. James
knew that she was just trying to escape what had happened to her brother,
but he wouldn't intervene. He kept faith, though, that she would come out
of it, and just hoped it wouldn't have any effect on what she carried
within her. She would have to sleep, eat, do _something_...she'd have to
live. And after about 18 hours, she did. 

Dinner had been a quiet affair of some food he'd ordered on the way home
that looked like shit and tasted only marginally better. Meagann had
chosen to sleep on the old, beat-up couch in front of the TV, and James
hoped that the noise he'd heard before was the TV's comforting hum of
technology, and not anything so genuine as crying.

He sat down next to a dozing Meagann who was wrapped up in a blanket in
front of the TV, which was playing some stand-up comedy piece that wasn't
that funny. The room was small, and stuffed with James' belongings, as he
had moved in only a few days before his girlfriend's brother's suicide
changed oh so many things. The walls were barren, save a few covered
windows, and grey; illuminated by flashes of light from the HDTV. James
found the remote, switched the channel to a news station. Yet _another_
senator had been assasinated by disgruntled taxpayers. Go figure.

James stared at the tattoo of a dragon flanked by kanji on his inner fore
arm, right below the wrist, and crowned by the veins and their various
scars. It was the symbol of his new family, the symbol of his guilt. It
was his fault for Meagann's brother's death, he was sure; no suicide. He
should never have brought the people he loved into the business of his
sect. There were never supposed to be any losses of life; never any
casualties at all. But they were stuck now; they were essential to the
plan. Hopefully, within 24 hours, it would be all over. The world would
be changed, and their sacrifices justified. But for now, they waited.

Meagann awoke, sat up next to him.

"I'm sorry."

"I...I understand."

As she went to her room, it weighed heavily on James' mind that she had
said "I understand." Not "I forgive you" or even "I love you." Which was,
of course, more than he deserved.

James tried to placate his self-hatred in the HDTV screen, and waited for
the next day - and all it would bring - to come.


The day was anything but over, though, for the 8 people who were soon to
change everything about James' plan.


End Of Issue 002

NEXT: Part 3. "Meet The Creeper"

Questions? Comments? Flames? MSTings? Pornography? 

Please send to:

(mailto: http-www.no.tomorrow.com@juno.com, CactusJack27@netscape.net) 

And HAVE A NICE DA-AY!!

==========My *.sig is bigger than yours ^_^.===============
 "Only a cynic can create horror-for behind every masterpiece of the sort
must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its
illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them." - H.P.
Lovecraft
(mailto: http-www.no.tomorrow.com@juno.com, CactusJack27@netscape.net) 
(_*_x_*_)
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