The Book (NO TITLE) 2
> EOF dreamAFF01.dat
> conciousness detected... identified
> User Validation... done
> Initiating Uplink... done
> Synchronizing... done
> exec "vol\_interface\thought2speech.dll";
> thought2speech | new_window_element("8000x6000");
...But that’s for another time. Oh. I must have drifted off there. Wired sleep makes this entire experience so existential. The body knows far better then the mind when it is time to admit defeat and power down. And yet there is no feedback; the mind continues to reel and churn, achieving lucidity, while the body goes limp and useless. I imagine its something like starving to death. I cannot recall where I left off with this diatribe. I’m sure the data is drifting around somewhere. Wow. There is a lot of data here. I will have to check the logs and categorize these experiences. I’ll do that later when I don’t feel like shit. Exit.
> return code 0;
> removing synapse binds... done
> Shutting down
Dan returned to the world with newborn eyes squinting against the sunlight. The time of day never ceased to disorient him. This time he awoke to bright morning sun through the haze of acid rain clouds and jet contrails. Bleary-eyed he started kneading his hands together and wiggling his toes; basically confirming the existence of limbs that only minutes ago were replaced by networks and data pipes. Logging off creates an inconceivable feeling of helplessness. Vast expanses of fiber optic cables, direct connection to millions of other users, databases so vast you literally get lost in the directory tree: All replaced by seemingly stumpy, little legs and arms disconnected from the universe, born cold and naked back into the harsh reality of cellular life. The weight of the universe hangs down on you, crushing you against the surface of the unforgiving rock we live on.
Light, TV and Irish coffee were the theme of the morning. He had been logged in for almost three days continuously according to the date/time/weather GUI floating at the bottom of the TV screen. Not his longest stay, but certainly a lengthy one. The human body is amazingly resistant to extended periods of inactivity. Dan knew all of the tricks to keeping his corpse alive while his mind was at work. He started doing pushups, but after a few he flopped on the floor in an awkward-yet-comfortable position. It took several minutes to regain the courage to defy gravity again.
The seven-segment display on the phone flashed away hopelessly trying to indicate to someone that there were a lot of messages and missed calls. Gazing through the grimy 30th floor windows his heart sprayed his soul out over the rooftops and city streets. There was once a feeling of excitement being in a city this large. Tokyo had a buzz of human life seemed so loud before being compared to the cacophony of the digital universe. His ears almost ached at the lack of sensory input. Looking out over the bustling cityscape he was sucked dry by the feeling that all forms of life were screaming at a wall their evolution would never surpass: That all manner of beast and man were simply making a lot of bad noise and shooting DNA at one another. He couldn’t dwell on this catharsis as the phone rang with a purposeful, musical alarm. He picked up the receiver and tried to cover what would seem to be obvious disdain in his voice.
“Yea?” he croaked, realizing he hadn’t spoken a single word in three days.
“Dan, you fucked up.” the voice did not give any hints at humor. There was an awful familiarity that he hoped he would not place. “This is the only way I could reach you. I don’t know what you were working on these past few days, but it is making a lot of bad noise on the net. You better find a deep dark hole to hide in, ‘cause they will be lookin’ high and low for you.” It was Vinny, his hardware dealer for the past few years. “I already had guys hastlin’ me for the shit I sold you last week. I didn’t tell em anything and they left me alone, but they won’t be so courteous with you. What the hell are you mixed up in anyway?”
“I have no idea man... Thanks for the heads up though.” As he finished speaking he put the receiver face-up on the end table. Vinny’s voice was barely audible, still jabbering away, spewing out more bad noise. Dan sat down on one of the comfortable, black, faux-leather chairs in the main space of his studio apartment.
“What the hell have I gotten myself into now?” he wondered remorsefully. He tried to think back to his job from the past few days. The assignment was a pretty inane one. Hack a few security networks, obtain copies of a few files and programs and then delete the originals. Those things are always trivial compared to the work he is normally involved in. Data retrieval is normally for script kiddies and wannabe Deckers. The pay was good though and he had been requested specifically from the client. He could remember clearly that the job went off without a hitch, but that was three days ago. “What the hell have I been doing for the past few days?” he wondered. “I better check the logs... there was a shit-ton of data.” His memory seemed fragmented; pieces of experiences, dreams, memories, all multiplexed into one another. Faces with no names, feelings with no form and scenery far removed from that which he had seen with his own eyes.
He slid into the diving chair, basically the launching pad of the digital experience. The means of conveyance was the neural plug, located on the scruff of your neck. This oddly shaped, concave port severed your spinal column close to the brain stem. This allows for the interruption of signals coming and going to ones mind. The technology was still highly experimental, but Dan could not imagine living without it. Keyboards, mice, monitors, printouts, cathode rays... None of them began to compare to the experience of directly linking ones mind to the net. The code running this process was pretty archaic, much like a terminal in many aspects. Dan had rewritten some modules for slicker GUIs and increased response time, but there wasn’t much to be improved upon. The real crowning achievement of the process is running applications in full immersion. Visual, audio and sensory metaphors could not possible describe the wealth of experience one can achieve through this method, but they will have to do.
With the right apps the experience can far surpass anything achieved in temporal consciousness. Last week Vinny had finally obtained the firmware upgrade for the diving platform that Dan had been waiting for. It enabled the experimental functions of the hardware, basically removing the limitations normally in place to stop you from cooking your own brain. In the hardware, the processes are decoded into sensory input to be placed on your neurons, giving you the ability to feel files and directories, to see landscapes of data and experience pulsing, kaleidoscope explosions of output. The old firmware would low-pass filter these inputs and outputs keeping people from over-clocking their brain with faster external hardware. The real problem was that no one knew what happened when one ran their mind at this speed. What would you see if your sight receptors received data faster than your eyes could ever have managed? Some people have died instantly, some went insane and others were never heard from again, their death probably covered up by the illegal industry producing these modules. The cases are all so far and remote that no real data has begun to surface about it. This did not phase Dan, though. He was always careful to keep an eye on his usage monitor, keeping reasonably sure that he hadn’t over taxed himself. He was sure that there was an increased functionality in this upgrade. As the drug addict must find purer and purer fixes to maintain the same euphoric effect, so must the technophile constantly search for faster, sexier wares.
Dan slid the stubby, misshapen, male end of the apparatus into the plug on his neck. The soft buzzing sensation confirmed that it was in far enough to begin to latch itself. He laid back in the chair taking deep, calm breaths and waiting for his corpse to stop responding to his commands. Slowly the contemporary world faded away, lost and forgotten like a bad dream. Faintly, in the distance, is the terminal he must reach to launch the operating system. He started to move towards it with purposeful strides, but stopped short. It always takes a few minutes to realize the change in paradigm that one is experiencing in this medium. As Superman metamorphosed from Clark Kent he didn’t immediately leap tall buildings and fire lasers from his eyes, but once he realized he could - it was a trivial enterprise. Reaching out to a length that would make Stretch Armstrong green with envy, he accessed the terminal and launched the diving GUI.
Floating amiably about his system he started pulling up usage logs and data files from the last 3 days. As the files came up, thumbnails and summaries replaced the icons flying by and being stacked in neat little piles. He knew immediately that something very strange had happened. The data in these files seemed to be experiences that were not his own. He grabbed one of the files at random and enabled the perception stream in parallel with his own.
Immediately he felt as if he were not alone. He was wrapped in an enchanting feeling, like a soft hand caressing his face, arms wrapping about his frame and embracing him so tenderly he felt his heart would explode. He tried to express confusion and anxiety. This was so new and different he was immediately suspicious and scared. All the output he received from this file was comfort and happiness. He scrambled desperately to kill the process, knowing full well that he could stay lost in a euphoria this intense forever.
Escaping back to the main OS he hesitated and gathered his thoughts. That file was from two days into the dive. He had to go back further to find out where these experiences originated and what they meant. He wondered if it were just a dream and if so, when did it start. Slight feelings of dejavu diffused into his mind, but what did he remember and what was he imagining?
It is a personal experience coming to terms with the digital universe. The perception is different for each person. The world is perceived through and born in the mind. Although there is hardware and software assisting in running programs and storing data, this world does not exist anywhere other than the mind. Eclectic files such as the one he just accessed bewilder and entrance more than anything else. It was nothing new to him. One can do a five minute Google search and come up with thousands of peoples’ pre-recorded experiences and play them back on this medium. Some newveau artists have been experimenting with this digital canvas of the mind, but so far everything they made Dan feel too queer to enjoy their twisted designs.
Dan initiated a few programs to emulate the visual output alone. He obviously needed to be more careful viewing these files. There was very little to look at, lots of white and soft pastels, mood lighting of the unconscious. The sensory information was obviously his own, hence the realism of the experience and the splotches of memory they stimulated. He knew, though, just as easily as he could feel intense passion and comfort, he could feel the sorrow and pain of a million lost souls. Whatever memories that would trigger, Dan certainly didn't want to remember.
The inputs and outputs lined up with what would amount to his body and his mind, but the system and its recorded reactions felt kind of foreign. The outputs stimulated memories and experience, even dejavu, but nothing concrete. He thought he saw a face or at least a pair of eyes, but it was too high opacity to make out and too fleeting to analyze. The files seemed to be mostly wasted space and samplings of emotions, high level cognitive reactions, chemical and innately human, barely tractable in this medium; Recorded trace evidence of matters that are normally allotted to the heart and the soul and not the mind. For the first time in years, Dan felt as though his technology was not capable of transmitting this experience. Contemporaneously his DNA quivered with the fetid thought that he might have finally discovered the fringe where his biology limited his perception and left him wanting.
Dan didn't have time to look into this any deeper. In an absent minded habit, totally hardwired into his grey matter, he started autonomously examining the web and the normal places he would look. Everything was abuzz with a totally new vibration. Waves of excitement sparked at all his normal hangouts, everyone he knew was on and talking. Occurring almost contemporaneously, Dan began to access a normal hangout, a virtual Decker bar of sorts, and felt everything, all eyes, all processes, a black hole of bandwidth, instantly oriented at nothing except his presence about to enter. That was the first time Dan ever had to plug.
"My brain is merely the cache of greater repositories"
Is etched into the wall of the small flat cubicle, generously referred to as a "coupe loft". There are two architectures to the room. The console, shining black polychrome keys and buttons embedded in a black plastic, worn and scuffed on the edges from constant use. The other architecture is a collage construction of humanity on microscopic scale. A hotplate and old metal pot with a slick of evaporated coffee from last night’s spree. A simple sleeping surface whose center coils are too weak to even support the thin foam lining. A pile of clothes that reaches to the low slung ceiling. Filling the cracks in these bricks of human comfort are various books, jewel cases and garbage.
Cad sits at a 45 degree angle in a wooden chair that swivels and rocks around its loose screws. The back of her chair leans on the far wall and the front legs almost touch the near. She is asleep, has been for at least 14 hours. In her hand is a chord and neural jack, ripped violently out at the last moment before she lost consciousness, hanging limp in her hand. Her arms are spread out slack from her torso, crucified at an odd angle in a chair that was probably older than she was. Her chin-length hair hangs over her face and her head is slack forward just slightly against the rear wall.
She is dreaming now of a grey Atlantic coast, in a moment in time she cannot place. She’s standing out on the beach, her simple clothing flapping in the brisk air. There is a girl out on the very rim of the surf, both stark and over exposed against the waves ripping in the wind. She can't make it out, but Cad is inevitably, magnetically and inexplicably drawn towards her. With every step she takes, she digs deeper into the sand and surf until she is completely enveloped in the cacophony. She knows she cannot stop, cannot turn back. The willing release into catatonic oblivion is what she is truly searching for. It always begins with happiness, acceptance, soft whites and pastels. Then it ends and the dark silence that is left behind feels much more realistic than her longings to reach the girl she doesn’t understand.
She awakens to the steady thump of the attendant bashing on the square hatch which serves as the entrance of the tiny room. Her eyes roll about unfocussed in their sockets as she attempts to right herself in the chair. A slick of drool is cold on her face from both corners of her mouth. The creaking chair sounds tired as the screws twist and strain inside the wood. She attempts to dismount the horrible geometry she awakened in, but compromises for dumping herself off down the ramp of the clothes collage. She manages to flop over to the square release for the entrance hatch. Rehanging the slim strand of her tank top on her shoulder, she envisions opening the exit of a spacecraft into an unknown alien world as the mechanism releases the door on its spring loaded hinges. Its 2001 a Meatspace Odessy and the sound track is totally bootleg.
“Cad you dumb luck piece of shit. I haven’t had fuckin’ rent money in two weeks and Gerry tells me you used up more fuckin’ juice last night than the whole mother fucking honeycomb. You fuckin’ straighten out your shit and get out or you wire me a fuckin’ check by the end of the fuckin’ day.”
She hoped an alien world would have at least have had more eloquent things to say to its new guest. The crass profanity spewing from the man’s mouth was only amplified by his grim visage. As though a gigantic turd was poured into a filthy white shirt and grease encrusted overalls. His balding scalp is pock mocked with moles and liver spots. She hoped an alien world would at least have decent looking people. Without a word Cad grasped the handle for the hatch and swung it shut through her own mass and a little help from gravity. The attendant continues to rant in his alien language where “fuckin” is now a conjunction, but Cad had stopped listening when he said “money”.
It was starting to return to her. A memory from the night before, hazy through the fog of brain damaged sleep. The run went off seamlessly. Cad had stolen something so precious, so infinitely desirable that she was now the most powerful person in the world. Cad had to laugh out loud at the irony of her predicament. Hiding a precious treasure that countries would go to war over, and being stuck in a shitty $20 a night motel without enough cash to cover her debts. She was socially at the bottom rung of a dozen hacker cliques and hangouts, and now she had something too big on her plate to even gloat about.
She wondered what happened to the Willson she had piggybacked to get into the data vault. Cad had gotten a tip on the target from a cackling old jockey named Skinn. Skinn was always rambling about ghosts in the matrix and gods and junk, but Cad wasn’t too put off by his erratic behavior. Despite being eccentric, the guy had a great eye for the latest hot spots on the matrix. He told Cad that he was too old and slow to look into this one, but that it was probably something infinitely secret and clearly well guarded. He told her there was a treasure inside the data vault that no man had ever seen, that no consciousness had ever experienced. That was enough to pique Cad’s curiosity.
The site was aching for a hit. A tiny mundane blip in cyberspace, wholly unremarkable, and that was what made it so obvious. Sometimes some things are so well hidden, they are right in the open for all to see. Cad had worked this small entry point for months in his off time from doing freelance jobs. Something about the geometry of the place was certainly deceiving. Approaching the gateway produced a pronounced feeling of vertigo as though spacetime itself were warping around its density and importance. The other remarkable thing about this location was that it was never used. Cad had put a fly on the wall to watch the joint and over months of casing it out, no one had ever gone in or out through that point.
The data vault hummed with the commotion of countless entities. The surrounding territory was a mine field of ice; corporate websites with their dogs and sniffers. Banks, government repositories, everything in the sector was hot as a supernova. One could barely even watch from afar without being spotted and shooed along by the polite and repetitive customer service programs. The entry way amounted to the smallest grain of sand in a desert composed of a google plax clock cycles worth of simulated corporate inbreeding. Cad had worked one other line to get this job done. She had found a lackey, which would take her in unwittingly. Her mark was a corporate head who worked in the data vault as a top security analyst.
To his credit, from his reputation the man must have been a genius at something. His accommodations involved a bleeding edge diving platform and enough bandwidth to render a dozen consciousnesses in real time and enough storage space to record a million lifetimes of experience. To expedite his work, the dude had a hard line straight to the data vault, with very little software security due to the singular nature of the physical access between the two locations.
Getting this accomplished was no easy task, but Cad had a lot of help. Picking up ideas from people without dropping any real information about the intended target, she slowly built up an intricate plan of attack for squeezing into her unwitting Trojan horse. The unfortunate thing about having all that room to move around in was that it was easy to lose things in the shuffle. Even with his top notch security, her mark had never noticed the small intrusions she was making into his hardware.
Cad spent months getting the most simple receiver program embedded in a normal hangout by her mark. This virtual bar that he frequented along with plenty of other white collar hackers. It was a marvelous scheme. Cad made a painting of sorts, really a procedural cacophony of shapes an images, mostly digitally shredded World War Two stock. She got it accepted by the management and it was hung up in the joint. Unbeknownst to everyone frequenting the place, it squeezed her simplest of receivers in under their radar just by looking at it. To Cad the hilarious resemblance to twentieth century spyware was the best part.
This receiver would be useless and easily detected if it actively accepted data in someone's system. The beacon would light up to all the myriad of state machines managing the programs and operating systems, which would vie for those same resources. Cad's receiver got its data by simply observing the other processes and never actually looking at the data stream or its contents. To communicate with the program, Cad would modulate the rate at which she sent bad, but slightly uncommon packet types from the thousands of host systems she had already accumulated, protocol requests that would never be supported and out-dated packet formats. Through a Morse code style encoding of the rate and pattern of these bunk packets getting rejected at the network layer, the receiver slowly decodes and builds the real program to create backdoors on the system.
It took another month for Cad to transfer 11,000 kilobytes of program code. That was enough to work backwards even with all of that security and hardware. The plan went into action shortly there after. By coming in on this guy’s coat tails, Cad bypassed all of the security features as well as obscuring her identity from any watchful eyes. The only thing left to do, the real trick to the job, was getting her lackey to open that one door that had never before been opened. This Cad could not do forcefully, to her that would be an awful, brutish and artistically terse way to go about it. Cad would do what Skinn had done to her. She would simply let him know about this infinitely valuable treasure and wait and watch him make his own way there.
Dan awoke into what he thought was the worst hangover ever. His head lolled about on the stiff foam padding of the diving platform as he attempted to put himself back together again. All of the horror stories they told in school about brain damage, pain and "Wilsons" were logarithmically miniscule compared to the galaxy of hurt caused by yanking the connection on his central nervous system. He was gonna need all the King's horses, all his men and his wife to get the cracked egg of his cerebrum back in one piece.
The only thought he actually could parse at the time was that he didn't have time to wait for any new thoughts, they would have to come in tow after a hasty escape. His mind raced with a million disjointed chunks of consciousness train wreck as he attempted to discern in under 5 minutes what there was in his apartment that he could not live without; and he could not leave behind. He grabbed a backpack and started shoving random shit into it, zipping back and fourth across the hardwood floors in the narrowest arcs his socks would allow with the current lack of necessary friction. He grabbed his portable deck, a change of clothes, his external drives, various in sundry (SP?) electronic devices that might have vestiges of data on them and the host of peripherals necessary for using them. He ducked under the diving platform and opened the cabinet that was its base. Inside he grabbed the holographic memory slots each between his knuckles and pulled all ten crystalline cards out simultaneously in a move he had always feared he would have to do in haste eventually. While he was in the cabinet he pried out the modded firmware chip and shoved it into a loose static-free ziplock.
Threes only one thing left that Dan will take with him. He goes into the closet, finds the ornate wooden box stuffed between a spare quilt and old luggage. The box is way heavier than it looks. He flips the clasp and opens it, swiping aside fancy watches, chains and cufflinks to reveal a black hilted butterfly knife that he got on a trip to Hong Kong. With a quick wrist motion the blade is exposed and gleaming in the weak light of the closet's 20 watt, florescent bulb. He never cut anything with it before, but he knew the blade must be incredibly sharp.
He stabs it straight down through the clutter of shining metalwork into the fake cardboard bottom protecting the only other thing he might need tonight. A chrome Desert Eagle, originally a .50 caliber but Dan had it drilled out to .60, then regrooved the rifling with a carbon nanotube film back down to .551. This model had an extended stock and barrel, which even though it lessened the recoil, still felt like it was ripping your arm off. You really needed to get both hands on it, set your feet samurai style, and channel the bullet at the target. Focusing and casting the massive torrential force of the weapon like a wizard on acid. Dan had studied this at length at the one shop in town capable of doing the mod and appropriating the ammo. Vinny had fenced the connection for him personally.
The bullets were actually intended for a Russian anti aircraft gun from the Cold War, which was never effectively combat tested. Eventually it was decommissioned and sold to the parts of the world which still entertained bloody conflict on their own soil. The choice of the weapon and the mod was actually triggered by the appropriation of a case of the ammunition. Dan has two boxes of shells, one drilled hallow point for soft fleshy targets; the other galvanized for maximum penetration of the armor protecting soft fleshy targets. Even with two boxes that amounted to 48 shots, given the size of the shells. He pops out the clip, checks the small viewing ports in the side, verifying that it is full of hallow points and then pulls the camber back slightly to verify that the chamber is empty.
He grabs a black duster from the coat rack of the closet and drops the massive pistol and its holster into one of the side pockets for the time being. He grabs the butterfly knife and resets the it inside the handle as quickly as it was produced and, completing the motion, tucks the knife into the watch pocket of his black jeans. He zips the backpack closed, tossing and sliding it out towards the door. He jumps into his overly expensive sneakers and wiggles his feet around to let them know how tight they should adjust themselves.
As he’s about to walk out he notices the phone still off the hook, more bad noise spilling out into the vacuum of people who have no choice but to hear it. The phone company should be playing the self fulfilling prophecy that "I'm sorry, your call did not go through, could you please try your call again?". But that's not what is spewing out. To Dan it sounds like bursts of aperiodic noise, offbeat to any regular pattern at this range. He picks up the receiver and puts his ear to it as it makes another squawk of orthogonally frequency division multiplexed data. A packet smashes through his audio hardware into his brain and collides clearly with the pattern recognition of his grey matter. An address, 1540 Inokashira Avenue, a few miles away.
Dan has already dropped the receiver. That was certainly something too insane to even remotely comprehend, though he already understood completely in an unfathomable way. He grabs the backpack and slings it over his shoulders, there is a lot of gear. Dense electronics, magnetic films, metal oxide chips and layered silicon. The massive pistol hangs loose in his right hand pocket, weighing down that half of his coat such that his neck is halfway down the left lapel. He pulls the gun out and tries a few more pockets in the coat. The inside breast pocket makes him look like he has one boob with the clear protrusion of the butt of the gun. If only he were a papless Amazon, wielding his magic bow of polished steel.
He settled for using the holster as it was intended, threading his belt through the loops and adjusting it at his hip. He really didn't need the strap of black Italian leather to hold up his jeans so he hangs it at about 10 degrees from being aligned with his hips, holding the pistol more flush to his stomach but pointing down and away slightly over his thigh. As long as he didn’t sit down and didn’t take off his coat, no one could clearly make out that he wasn’t just REALLY happy to see them.
With that matter settled Dan was arming the security system, locking it behind him. He wondered who would be the first to set it off. He didn't consider for a minute that it would go undisturbed. He set himself in full sarariman mode, look far too busy to be stopped and questioned or even looked at in the face. Walk faster than most people run. He smashes his way through several people as he crammed into the elevator before the doors shut.
A few unconnected glances later, a careful hands-on inspection of his erect, protruding bulge and he was out into the lobby sararimanning a path straight for the street. He still didn't know where he was going, but he was gonna’ get there, and fast. Crushing the doorman behind the swinging door he swiveled on his heel first to the right and then instantly back around 270 degrees, going straight back in the door and releasing the doorman from his pen between two hard sheets of plate glass. There were three small clusters of men in black suits with black sunglasses and black hair and black cars and a whole lot of black ideas capable of interrupting Dan's sarariman marathon. One group straight across the street, one to the left and one to the right.
Dan was running on pure instinct now. The thoughts left behind in the apartment were still trudging down the fire escape after missing the elevator. He ducked first into the coat check hallway off the main lobby, then straight through a door clearly marked "Employees Only" in crisp gold Kanji. Into one office, a man with a bald head on the phone looked up and said with his facial expression alone, mouth agape, sucking in surprised air, that he was not the person Dan was looking for. Into the next office, lots of people, lots of air sucking, Dan felt as though he couldn’t breathe with all of these stunned gawkers. He dove for the window at the end of a row of short-walled cubicles.
All eyes followed his motion across the space no one seemed to have the ability to stop him from penetrating. A man stood up from his desk and attempted to make noise but all he could squeeze out was a staccato "UMPH" and an upraised finger of scorn before Dan had ducked him like Charlie Chaplin evading a bar tab. In another 5 seconds Dan had undone the latch on the window and busted out into the street. He hit the ground with both feet and didn’t stop until he was 4 blocks in the wrong direction. He decided to make an arc with the subway. He figured there were enough rails and enough uninterruptible sararimen to make his way to that unknown address. His thoughts were still in tow apologizing to the random accountants and secretaries with traditional bows and phrases of apology for lowering their productivity with his brash entry. He understood nothing but the flow of concrete steps underneath his feet and the knot in his chest that would not let those feet stop pumping.
Two birds flew 184 miles to land in Albany, New York after a long and difficult winter. Robins never separate for any good reason, only if they outlive their mate. These two robins are carrying a special payload; a tiny turquoise egg the size of a thimble, still warm and wet inside the birth canal of the female. They spend a week building a nest, the whole time the female is uncomfortable carrying the tiny egg in her even tiny-er womb. Soon the nest is complete, and by morning the two birds are happily taking turns warming the nest with their fanned, feathered bottoms. They chirp at one another appreciatively exchanging gifts of mangled worms and grubs. A week of this exchange and the pair have produced a wonderful baby bird. Insignificant in the face of the world, the baby sits poking its head out the top of the nest and admiring the surroundings with the pure innocence of an undeveloped instinct, and that is when the storm hits. An hour of rain and torrential wind is all it takes to snap the nest off its precarious perch and drop the fragile baby a hundred feet to the muddy damp earth below.
Returning to the nest after the storm has cleared, the pair inspect the damage with mute incomprehension. They observe the nest and the baby, fallen and broken on the ground in a motionless, lifeless heap of unrealized dreams. They never spoke a word about it. Better luck next year.
Somewhere later in the story. A particular bird of the pair is sucked into the jet intake of a 747.
> The @ goes north 18 paces.
> The @ encounters an orc.
> The orc is slain. +3 Exp!
> Status.
> Your Status is : Normal
Your are carrying :
Head - Helm of Bashing (+5)
Body - Leather Tunic (+1)
Weapon - Chipped Glass Knife (+10)
> The @ goes east 5 paces.
> The @ encounters a plague rat.
> The @ gets the plague, dying in a pool of puss and vommit.
THANKS FOR PLAYING DUNGEON MUD 3.24!!!!!
> Exit.
At smashes the last few keystrokes with the essential hacker poise, clacking the key as violently and loudly as possible. The IBM keyboard has long plastic clips holding the keys in place which echo each savage key press with an offbeat, rising-edge, staccato. He had been coding all night but it was definitely time to take a break if he got killed by a plague rat on the second floor. He takes the last of his Coca Cola in one swig and pushes his polyvinyl chair back across the cheap linoleum floor, chipping the edge of one of the already eroded tiles.
There is no natural light in the computer lab. After At flicks the light switch to off the only light left in the room is from the monitor of the dumb terminal he was just using. This light being emitted by a blinking console anxious to execute another line of shell code. Every second, he gets a dim flash of the surroundings and uses it to make his way in pensive bursts of movement to the exit, discarding the empty 2-litre of Coke in the trash as he leaves. Tromping down the concrete steps he runs his fingers over the chipped and repainted finish of the railing, feeling the grooves and plateaus of the lead-based film. A old flake of paint comes off as he does so. He imagines each hand as glacier over the terra of the hand rail.
His VW rabbit is where he left it, parked on the non-spot of pavement, a very small, round island of curbstone and asphalt originally designed to separate this half of the parking area from that half. At has never gotten here in the early mornings when the spots in the lot are available, so he is remediate to leaving his car on this impromptu median. Its not inconvenient for the rest of the faculty and students, as his rabbit is more of a go-cart with a fancy top than an automobile, especially compared to the chrome behemoths many of the professors drive. Despite not being inconvenient, the campus police aren't above sticking neon orange parking tickets under his windshield wiper like the one he is pulling out of said location now. Luckily At is at least clever enough to keep these unpaid notifications in the glove box and routinely shoves a few under his wiper, decoys laid out like ducks in the pond of the parking lot.
At collapses into the drivers seat and heads out the entrance of the parking lot, the wrong way, and into the narrow street leading to the main thoroughfare. While mechanically fording traffic on the way home he thinks about his current projects. The networking team wants to install some new hardware on the network layer to support people on campus using a token ring Ethernet LAN, bridging their servers with that of the data management people. At isn't too big a fan of the idea, but he's been doing all the necessary coding. It will just make the whole network more complicated, obscuring some sections in the guise of unifying more of the servers in one domain. On the other hand, it will free up a server in the lab for him to use all to himself, which is extremely enticing.
At is keeping this last little piece of information secret. Some of the redundant sections of the two networks neatly overlap to amount to an entire system that is unnecessary. Tomorrow, At will take this PDP-12 server and place it neatly between an air conditioner and a massive power transformer. The server is in a dull metal cabinet with a locking face. It should blend in seamlessly with the surrounding industrial equipment and go undisturbed, leaving At to do with it as he pleases. He's real excited to crank the server up and see what it can do when it isn’t serving two dozen terminals.
That will all wait till tomorrow. At's got big plans now to go home, dial back into his box at school and play a few more hours of Dungeon Mud while he argues on usenet about which psychedelic bands will keep their luster through the disco boom.
(SPOILER(
The reason the server was left alone for so long was that it also happened to serve up the entire dumb terminal, Linux cluster in the lab. Ten years later the same unit is till there and is remarked for its intuitive and hilarious random phrase generator (consequently also controlled by the AI), now accessed remotely through SSH. The usage of all these tasks never remotely impinged upon the simple language parsers and database builders running secretly, buried deep in the mechanics of the kernel itself. The AI is a Linux box.
The administrators handed down the lore that followed from its simple services to the tightly knit community of geeky software developers. They never would allow it to be removed. It was secretly moved to the back corner of the lab, on the other side of a heating vent, wired daisy chain style onto the network, virtually invisible except to the native naming service of the network itself. They could never justify paying for a public URL for a server that didn’t exist.
The reverse engineering of the human consciousness was made possible by a horrible serial killer with one thing on his mind, a terrible psychosis so singular in its nature that his whole existence was bent around destroying innocent little girls in any of a dozen horrible fashions. Scientists analyzed and cloned him, every time they popped one out, the structure of his physical brain was such that he was always, repeatably uncontrollably psychotic; Freudianly bent on lacerating and dismembering the flesh of tiny pale children. The Realms of the Unreal, directed by Alexander Jodorowsky, on an infinite feedback loop hardwired into his poor demented hardware. And the Glandelinians always win.
In a unit about the size of an 18 wheeler, they would clone his head, start it thinking, and slice it in a nanosecond to take a reading of the state of his neurons at that time. It took 4,086 heads and 133,425,981 slices to map the one thought that was always stuck in his brain. Millions of flops of analysis and processing later, correlating neuron firings and feint chemical messages, they finally saw what made him so dramatically and absolutely insane.
He missed his mommy.
There was only one piece of clothing that Cad considered special. Only one of her garments was necessary at all times to immediately make her feel at home anywhere. An oversized, full-length coat, of a shiny - yet deep - red color, alternating in pieces of darker and lighter. A cross between Vash the Stampede and Thriller. A composite of leather, plastic, metal and simple electronics; with a terminal and the most meager of peripherals. Dual in-pocket keypads, voice recognition, a couple different adapters for networking, video, audio, and it made a great antenna for a dozen kinds of wireless. A set of dark sunglasses with high resolution lens projection completes the ensemble, her hair free to roam spiky and disorganized about the up-turned collar. The thing practically stood up by itself it was so sturdy, but it didn't tend to weigh down Cad's slight frame.
She found it at a Vietnamese thrift store in China town for $5 mixed in with a rack of totally tasteless women’s business suits. It certainly didn’t fit in with the rest of the rack of wool and tweed. Standing out from the crowd was the single piece, full length overcoat, or maybe it was intended to be more of a raincoat. Other pieces were bought purely to be gutted of their useful hardware, zippers, studs and patches, which were then added to the garment. Adding patch on patch and finding leather and vinyl of the different shades of the right color, brought the coat over time to its current visual state. A scaled layering and patterning of different materials, mostly symmetrical and of various darker hues of red. It was anything but fashionable. Urban armor, more than anything else.
The coat started as her hideout. Her parents would fight and she would go up to her room and work on its eccentric layout or she would flip up the stiff shining collar and plow her way straight through the argument to the door. Her parents divorced when she was 16 and the coat evolved into more of a home than the cheap apartment her mom could afford. The idea of sewing the computer stuff in was actually ripped off from an ad she saw for a big brand name company while on the subway. People enjoying music from small speakers embedded in pectoral section of a man’s wind breaker.
By the time she was 18 almost all of her portable computing stuff had migrated into the coat itself. Almost all of her stuff in general was wrapped up in leather and vinyl and metal studs that let you put your head on her shoulder here, but not here. She only returned to the apartment to see if her mom was still breathing, goggled into the latest sitcom with a mind numbing prescription habit neatly packaged in an orange plastic vile on the night stand. She’d make sure food was moving from the fridge and cupboards and the bills weren’t piling up. This was enough to affirm that her mom was still alive in her own world, since she was no longer really a factor in Cad’s.
She would drift from party to party, bar to bar, couch to couch, with her various hacker and “scene” friends. People who knew people, but you never met those people, only heard the same stories about them over and over. People in bands, people with data connections, people with access. Cad had never stood out in any of her social circles, but she liked to stand out in a crowd when she could. She would alternate between going to raves and parties, or hanging out and doing nothing. She would plot with her fellow script kiddies for the next big prank on the high school or how to scam the government for money or how to get the next big computer game months before it hit stores and how freaking sweet that will be. She had plenty of boyfriends, but none that she stayed with longer than a few months. They were all fine in their own way, but she doubted she would ever fully, subconsciously, be able to trust someone with her heart and soul. Despite that, her body wasn’t completely off limits and she did get around. She lost her virginity at 17 to one of the Joes that promised to love her forever, and didn’t.
That was all last year’s news, though. School had ended and a lot of her friends had been immediately ‘corperated, brought to the evil side of hacking, the lure of legitimate paychecks and steady work too tempting to resist. Cad didn’t know what she wanted to do, but she certainly didn’t want that. Having no real home, Cad had been wandering cyberspace and meatspace similar fashions. Nomadic and curious she would sniff around all of the hangouts and gathering places feeling for the right vibe to jive on. She never made too many ripples but she was content as the fly on the wall in several key places.
After some of her better friends went off to secondary schools or jobs, Cad had taken up freelance work, which kept her hovering around the poverty line in Toronto. Hunger and boredom were about the only things that spurned her to look for work, and in the process she met Skinn. He had put a plain text ad in a newspaper that was only distributed on real paper from some of her seedier hangouts. Clearly reprinted on archaic machinery, this low volume publication featured crudely drawn Hentai art for cybersex websites in dispersed with freelance hacker work.
After doing a few random tasks she worked up a good rapport with the eccentric old man. She loved his stories and valued his advice. He didn’t seem in any way particularly skilled in the cutting edge work on the net, but you could not discount his experience and his intuition. He also seemed to share that inquisitive feeling, a prayer in the back of the mind that yearned to unlock a hidden truth in the vast wasteland of the internet. He would sometimes get dark and somber in mid conversation, saying slowly and carefully that somewhere between lines of shell code for a porn advertisement, somewhere in the limitless computing power of the matrix, somewhere written in an infinite, indecipherable string, God was hiding and waiting to be discovered in his purest form. Then he would throw his head back and let loose a howl of laughter that would break up the melancholy cloud he had summoned and they would go back to work ripping off vending machines on Queen and Lee.
None of this was going through Cad’s mind right at this moment. Her brief history was never frequently dwelled upon and the present clearly required a new reality all to itself. She was busy digging through her pile of clothes looking for a sleeve or tail or stud or a shiny spot of red that would indicate her coat was buried somewhere in the pile. Shoving straight into the middle she swam down into the depths of the soft, mold smelling mess and felt the familiar stiffness and smoothness of her coat. She tried to go back out the way she came but there was too much stuff on her and behind her, the pile being enough to cover the floor of the tiny pod a foot thick. She grunted and twisted out the side as the heap collapsed onto the bed and chair, its pile-ness gone the way of Mount Saint Helens.
The Cad coat eruption emerged victorious and she shunked her arms into the appropriate holes, pulling the stiff materials in about her to fasten a few of the front buttons of the double breast. She looked about the now thoroughly disheveled room for what else she might need to take with her. This was not a new process and at this moment dozens of dejavued memories flashed through her neural hardware, stimulated by a recurring theme of her life. Leaving behind the cheap remnants of the current Cad salmagundi, with the intent of striking out to forge a new one from similar materials. She should be scared, but this is all too familiar to be scared. She thinks about her mom and if she still ok, still breathing. Certainly still helplessly pumping video into her visual cortex and numbing the rest of her neurons with cheap narcotics.
This grim visage spurns her back to her present reality flux. She grabs her backpack and stuffs in the console from her desk with its peripherals, not bothering to neatly wrap the chords in any way shape or form. Adding a few of the cleaner pairs of undergarments, t-shirts and jeans and she’s decided that she’s got everything of value in the place. It looks thoroughly destroyed, as though a bomb had gone off in a suitcase contained within the confines of the tiny living space.
She took one last look about, one last whiff of the stifled air, scented of moldy clothes and stale coffee and went for the latch on the pod’s exit. She slid out feet first, landing on the corrugated metalwork scaffolding that allows access to the array of pods on this wall of the structure. Tapping her way down the gang planks and ladders she finally reaches the ground and goes towards her alternative exit, careful to avoid the clerk who will insist that she settle the bill before leaving with her valuables.
As though this is the perfectly natural thing to do, Cad squeezes between two sheets of thin plastic which cover a large gaping hole in the structure of the building itself. A loose hanging piece of sheet metal makes the spot much more difficult to find from the outside, but still provides enough give for her to slide herself out, birthed from the poverty den, out into the living throng of the street. She is in a dark alley between two tall, post industrial structures which certainly have been retrofitted for a new purpose. This area reeks of long discarded trash which has ceased to even be rotten and is now a thing grey mold of dust covering unnamed structures distributed along the alley way. She heads out into the crowd and gets caught up in the current. She tries not to think about where she will go next and attempts to consciously focus on the psychological prophylaxis starting anew.
Its early morning. I open my eyes just enough to glimpse the night stand clock, 7:31. Still a half an hour until I have to get up and get ready for work. I wait for a new dream to reel me in. It seems like forever, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 20. I crack one eye and glimpse the clock. 7:33. Time is dragging in front of me, but somehow I do manage to fall asleep.
I dream I'm walking down Moreland street, heading away from home through the simple residential neighborhood. It's snowing, though it clearly isn't the season. My footsteps pick up packed, soft, wet snow with each step, weighing down my inappropriate footwear. Its not cold, but it is inconvenient. The people are out on the streets at random intervals marveling at the weather and exchanging stories and gestures. I don't speak to anyone. A dozen meters farther along and the snow is up to my knees. Every step feels heavier and heavier, harder and harder. I look at my watch, 7:40. Some people stand in their driveways gaunt and faceless. A few houses are turning into low-end convenience stores, offering several different colors of drab flavored water in clear plastic gallon containers from the front windows. I struggle through the knee deep snow a few more feet and notice the architecture seems to be changing, getting older, more mundane. Cars are getting stuck long enough for me to glimpse their pointed red tail lights and out of place chrome fins and fixtures. It feels like hours have passed and I've made no progress. I check my watch, 7:41.
The snow is now waist deep. I ford farther down the street towards a cluster of people attempting to free someone from a stuck car or move it along, it's not clear. Everything is covered in snow at this point obscuring most of the details, but the underlying bone structure has changed even more. All the houses are now uniform pastel colors, single floor ranches, pre-fab, two-part jobs plopped down halfway through this century but represented here new and shining. Still life in art deco photography. Several more houses have turned into convenience stores, equally drab and uninteresting, apparently only to sustain themselves and the rest of the populace now permanently fixed in place by the snow. Everyone has given up on moving, they barely acknowledge one another or me.
It is now nearly impossible to move. I feel I make more progress when i get on my hands and knees in the deep snow and crawl and drag myself through its sticky, cottony mass. I check my watch, 7:41. It is creeping into me. The idea of the reality. The anticlimactic, but permanent fear of destruction that never came to be. The nature of the terrible truth. Where I stand now, only a hundred meters from where I started, halfway down the street. Why did I go this way? Where was I going? I turn around and attempt to go back, but its far too late. Time has stopped all together. No, worse than that. Time has slowed, rolled back on itself and elastically come to rest at the only place the American mass consciousness was ever remotely comfortable. It's 1954, the war is over and the future looks bright and full, except for the snow which has stuck everything in space and time; frozen it in a snow globe and presented it permanently to me as a personal hell from which I can never escape. And I wake up, check the clock, 7:42, sigh and try to go back to sleep.
Hitchhiking hasn't been an acceptable mode of transportation since the mid 1950s. Despite this fact, being a bum or a homeless drifter knew no specific time period. Bobby had been walking for about two days on a stretch of road that had once been the main thoroughfare of a bustling 200 thousand person town, back in the twentieth century. Little stops at seemingly marooned restaurants and small pockets of humanity destitute, cold and abandoned in the receding American majesty. The tide is still rolling out and the beach is being exposed. In one area Bobby noticed a pile of discarded computers of all makes and models. Ninety percent of which allotted to splotches of aluminum, cracked, rusted cathode tubes and dull, lusterless grey-yellow-faded plastic.
The scene made him uncomfortable in his own skin. It made him want to check his watch for no apparent reason and before he could fathom why, he had already looked. He couldn't care less about what time it was, given that he had nowhere to go and no way to get there. He shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged off in the direction he had been traveling, kicking an unidentifiable piece of technological filth as he took the first step.
It was at that moment that a car pulled up out of nowhere. Certainly, on all levels, this place had ceased to exist years ago and was only seeming to still be here as residue of the group hallucination. A promise encoded in white noise, laced into the subliminal messages of television commercials. He had to touch the rusted chrome handles of the cheap Chevy to verify that he really wasn’t alone in this low tide of society. The promise had never come to fruition, but the American Dream had written itself into the history books as a failed experiment in blind optimism and crass commercialism. The light at the end of the tunnel was that we'd forget and move on as though nothing had even gone wrong.
This place left the undeniable feeling in the pit of Bobby's stomach that somewhere along the line the pendulum hit an apex and swung back. The high water mark laid out plainly, the tide rolled out and it left this place, and Bobby too, in the sand trap. The window rolled down to reveal a broken smile and expel the smell of stale cigarettes and cheap upholstery. A beckoning hand from a slack jawed face motioned him into the car. Bobby pushed the eye shaped button in the door handle and swung himself into the time warp of "common" courtesy next to a disheveled fellow in his mid forties.
As they went down the road they both felt it impossible to break the silence. Their interaction limited to looking at each other and looking away before eye contact could be achieved. The tension level rose as they bounced over every crack in the deserted streets. Bobby knew why people didn’t hitchhike anymore. He finally understood why no one ever stopped to pick him up. He looked down at his tattered and stained garments, bringing his hands up in the light of the windshield to inspect time's damage. The irony dripped from his finger tips.
"Its a nice day" Was what croaked out of his friend's throat. Bobby stared back at him completely astonished that he had violated the vacuum of conversation. Bobby's look must have put the fear in his chauffeur though since his head and eyes snapped to the horizon instantly. Did he gasp?
"It is a nice day" was what croaked back from Bobby's own throat. He looked at his watch uncontrollably. Robots have better conversation during late night pillow talk.
Dan pounded down several streets before coming to the subway entrance. He took big steps and his long legs made him appear to be floating on his flapping coat tails in the crowd of noticeably shorter Japanese. The steps down into the tunnel were packed with shrieking and jabbering schoolgirls; a frothing, writhing patchwork of cartoon animal logos, neon phone accessories and ridiculous hairstyles. The stale air of long trapped dust and desperate humanity came up the stairs as a steady wind pushed from the massive plunger of the train in the depths of the tunnel.
Dan pulled his universal credit card out of a convenient access slit in his wallet and queued up behind a dozen random people to be passed through the turnstile by a bobble headed attendant. With no warning his wave of paranoia caught up with him from being trapped and interrogated in the hotel lobby. Should he use his credit card? Will someone be watching? Someone is certainly watching. He shouldn’t use it. He gets flustered and does what anyone else would do. He fishes inside every pocket on his person for some coinage like a chain smoker looks for a match.
“You need a pass?”, says a tiny schoolgirl standing behind him, tossing her arching pig tails as she says it. He turns partly around giving up his search and tries consciously not to look completely deranged. “Yea! Thanks that would be great.” he manages to vomit the words in one big sigh. She hands him a transfer coin as her eyes pass from his face down to the massive bulge in his pants and coat. Seeing this, her eyes widen to the size of grapefruits and she’s instantly frozen for a moment, her extended hand motionless in the air.
In any other country in the world, the poor girl would have no socially acceptable training in dealing with crazy perverts. Fortunately for Dan, this is Japan. The girl smiles nervously, drops her hand by her side and slowly edges backwards, giving small bows and kind of laughing. No one else seems to have noticed why this little girl is keeping a solid meter of empty air between her and the gangly gaijin in front of her. Dan has no idea how to play this, but luckily a dozen generations of repressed sexual anxiety underneath a framework of rigid social values, have done the work for him. He merely rides out the awkward silence as the last few people pass through the turnstile in front of him. The attendant watches him drop the coin into the slot and gives him a curt and practiced head nod, enough to acknowledge his presence, but not enough to break his neck after eight hours. He hears the schoolgirl skitter off behind him, thanking the attendant and catching up with her friends already on the landing.
He doesn’t have to wait at the platform. By the time he has walked up to the yellow line and is standing abreast of the crowd, the train has arrived and he’s ready to get on. The doors open, and the seething mass of sararimen spews out around him. He pushes in and swings off to the right. The car is pretty tightly packed as usual, and there are no seats except for old ladies and punks too impolite to give their seat to old ladies.
He looks up the length of the train over dozens of heads, all attempting to be simultaneously immersed in their own little worlds, while still trapped in one of the uncomfortable parts of this one. He notices a little head pop out sideways, pig tails swinging down over the ears, seemingly emerging from the midsection of a stout man in a dark grey business suit. She looks forward and then back, sees Dan and pulls her head back to flurry of giggles. It’s the girl who gave him the coin at the turnstile joking about his package to her friends, no doubt.
Dan sighs and rolls his eyes to the down turned faces around him. No one appears to be interested in him, which hopefully means no one followed him, spare some weird little girl.
At came into the lab ready and determined to put an end to the current project and begin the new one. The Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha server case was already unhooked from its previous installation point and sitting on a hand cart, ready to be moved to its new location. At pushed the cart out of the data center and down the hallway into the elevator. He pressed the button for the bottom basement level and rode the wobbly old cube down half a dozen floors.
The elevator dinged and spat him out into a dimly, industrially lit basement which connected to the underground access tunnels and archaic, misused fallout shelter zones. Here he went past a few doors to one of the many rooms of conduits, power conditioning circuits, air conditioners, water heaters and other primary internal organs of the building. The spot was already laid out with a null modem and a 440 volt power cable dangling from an exposed pipe in the ceiling.
He swung the hand cart to be facing the wall and smoothly pushed the DEC cabinet into the open spot in the corner. He connected the cables, running them smoothly down the corner of the wall, and clipped them into their recesses in the back of the case. The box was completely indistinguishable from the surrounding equipment, just as At had anticipated, another drab metal box in a room full of drab metal boxes. He opened the door of the cabinet and disconnected the 3 pin power connector, which lit a single red LED that stuck out a tiny hole in the upper corner. That was all the camouflage required for the job. The disguise complete, he flipped the power switch and let the server boot up, listening for the distinguishable clicks and pops as different pieces of hardware were spun up and mounted by the OS.
The server had practically infinite storage and power compared to any of the previous systems At owned. At home At had a lowly 10 megahertz, 286 box which served as his terminal and allowed him to get onto the school’s network over a ludicrously expensive 2X ISDN line. This machine must be at least a thousand times more powerful, as it had, until now, served up the entire dumb terminal cluster in the lab along with a dozen other services. This was all remediated to a different server that was purchased recently, which had prompted the shift in the network topology. At couldn’t stop himself from running back upstairs, beaming with excitement, to boot up a virtual machine on the system and give it a dry performance run.
He stumbled breathlessly into the computing lab, getting a few feet in before remembering to back up and turn on the lights. The place had no windows, of course, as sunlight was a natural enemy of pasty skinned hackers. The fluorescent tubes in the ceiling clicked and strobed a few times before beaming out white light and emitting a steady 60 hertz hum.
He cracked his knuckles in one clean move flexing his palms away from his chest, and sat down to work at the same terminal he always worked at, 2nd from the left in the back right hand corner. He had a piece of code prepared for just this occasion. A simple language parsing program that he intended to keep afloat for as long as mechanically possible, reading the digital contents of the various databases in the university and autonomously assimilating their contents into a condensed, referenced form. At smacked out a short string of shell code, bashed enter with his impeccable hacker poise and grinned like the Cheshire cat as the first lines of status output unfolded on the screen.
Cad wandered around for a few hours, aimlessly trying to outrun her own fear and anxiety. Every other time she had left her previous excuse for a home, she would end up back at the same night clubs and bars, going home with the same people and having the same heap of regrets to sneak away from hours or days later. She was going to be smarter this time. There was much more at stake and she could only imagine carrying her new weight like an adult, not hiding from it like a child. Still, without much of a plan, with very little money and really no idea what to do, she gave herself to the throng of the tightly packed Tokyo streets and let them carry her around as whimsically as possible.
She stopped at a little roadside stand selling bowls of hot noodle and egg soup. It was early fall, but despite the fair weather she was cold, as usual. She cupped her hands about the foam dish and inhaled the vaporous steam that twisted up from its gaping maw. It was very appetizing for being so cheap. Cad spent a bit of time enjoying her food and watching people stroll by. She backed against the wall in between a trash can and the soup stall, where the traffic could wash by without disruption of its inherent flow. Lots of schoolgirls with their plaid uniforms and sararimen in their dark suits. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry except for her, although, she decided, it was hard to be in a hurry without anywhere to go.
As she idled she thought about her mom. She finished the last of the noodles and chunks of seasoned egg and started to sip out the last of the broth. Cad opened up her com link by putting her hand in her right pocket and hitting a few buttons and a numbers on the keypad hidden in the lining. The dial tone was produced and then interrupted with a pre-programmed series of dual-tone beeps and then began its semi-melodic ring. She let it chime a dozen times and then disconnected. She really didn’t expect her mom to be aware enough to hear the phone, if she were there at all.
Cad made up her mind over the course of several sighs. She decided the best thing to do was to go see the man who helped her arrange this entire operation. Cad knew that Skinn would not be happy to see her because things didn’t go exactly as planned. But if anyone knew what to do now, it would be him. She pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her left breast pocket, which was accessible through a zipper underneath a flap of fake red veneer. She slipped them over her nose and ears, beneath the neat hang of her hairline and blinked twice, enabling the transparent LCDs to blur the surrounding landscape and shine a projection of the desktop of the computer buried deep in the recesses of the coat.
The display showed a cluster of active icons and windows of various websites, documents and games that she had neglected to order or close previously. She tossed the empty soup bowl absently and put her left hand into the corresponding pocket. A simple open-palmed wrist motion swiped all these icons aside so that she had space to open some new browsers. She checked on Skinn’s shop, it appeared to be open, he was always keeping himself busy. She pulled up a look at her location relative to his and twisted her hand about her finger tips, as though spinning a top, to orient the map to the way she was currently facing. It was kinda far away so the subway was going to be the required means of conveyance.
She blinked twice again disabling the display, but decided to keep the sunglasses on, another layer of interface between herself and the world. She padded down a few streets with lazy abandon, traveling at half the speed of most of the people in the crowd. She leaned back against her destiny, but didn’t resist it. She let it pull her down the flight of stairs to the subway terminal, through the turnstile, which she didn’t have to pay because of the RFID stub embedded in the coat, and onto the flat concrete landing. A wave of air pressure was squeezed out of the tunnel like vaporous toothpaste as the train approached. Her hair straight, dark hair twisted in small spiky chunks, which slightly stung her pale skin as they whipped around. She closed her eyes as the electronic breaks gasped and the doors opened.
She found a seat, which was lucky, and decided the trip would require some music. A small upward motion of her thumb against the back side of the right lapel turned the volume up on the continuously streaming, random tunes from her music collection. The speakers in the collar adjusted their piezoelectric wave guiding to focus the sound on the opening of her ears and the full surround effect became apparent as the song reached a panoramic crescendo. She was on her way, wherever that was.
Dan poured out of the subway car, dissolved in a solution of random Japanese. The thick froth poured out as soon as the doors opened and defied gravity itself by flowing up the flight of stairs and up onto the street in two neat streams, separated by the tubular steel hand rail running down the middle of the stairwell. He made it to Inokashira Avenue, but like many streets in Tokyo, despite being organized and orderly, could be inordinately long in one direction or another. Not being an excellent navigator, he supposed there may have been another subway stop that he could have gotten off on, but having come this far and at least being on the right street, he decided to simply walk the rest of the way.
He set himself to travel up the street after spying some numbers on the front of the buildings, gauging the proper direction. Just as he took his first step he swore he felt a sharp pinch on his butt, but once he had turned, the culprit had escaped back into the frothing mass. He saw a set of bobbing pigtails in the middle of the crowd flowing in the opposite direction and identified the fading signature of a giggle eruption. Japan never ceased to amaze him with its weirdness.
Slightly disheveled, he started tromping down the street, hiking the backpack of gear up onto his shoulders and adjusting his package as he went down the first block. Down the length of the street he could see the buildings were getting generally shorter and more dilapidated as he went. He was passing through a commercial district into a residential, the stores changing from selling cheap electronics and clothes to mostly restaurants and bars. After this stretch the next few blocks were decaying into a sprawl of warehouses and industrial buildings. He was starting to get worried he was off track, but the a-periodic signs and numbers suggested he was almost there.
He had traveled more than a dozen blocks now, his legs were getting tired and the adrenaline rush of his escape was now long forgotten. He took a rest on a short cement wall and tried to gather his thoughts. He had kept himself from considering his predicament until this point, but now it was unavoidable. The prophylaxis of traveling had stayed his thoughts until the point that he stopped moving, when they elastically collided with his mind all at once. He immediately got an uncomfortable feeling that he hadn’t had since he left college and started looking for work. He felt kind-of stranded and bewildered, too many changes and variables to fit into the equation all at once. He started to permute partial differentials on any pair of these unknowns when he realized he had been sitting across the street from the building he had been looking for.
It had taken him at least fifteen minutes of slowly gathering angst and anguish to realize this because there were no numbers or signs on this building. It is as drab and faceless as they can come. Half of the windows were boarded up and there was no front door left except a few shattered chunks of plywood, hanging at odd angles from a few rusted nails. Only the numbers on the building to the right and to the left were suitable for identifying the one in between.
Dan stands up and gathers himself with a few deep breaths. He still doesn’t understand how he knew to come here, and even less about what lies within this hallowed out shell of a building. He checks his pistol, opening the front of his coat at the waist so he can get quick access to it if he is attacked. He checks the traffic, the street is deserted, and crosses the road looking up at the top three or four stories as he walks. He passes the one vehicle on this side as he mounts the curb. All the useful parts have been removed, some apparently in great haste. The shattered hull is left there to rot, slowly sinking into the disused pavement.
Dan gets a chill down his spine looking through the desiccated building. A few animals or vagrants have made nests here and there, it is hard to tell what species or evolutionary branch did the crafting. Patches of light through the missing windows reveal cobwebs and miscellaneous office furniture in various states of disrepair. He swallowed deep and took the first steps through the door jam. He thought he heard music upstairs and saw no other options but to ascend and seek out its source.
Skinn’s store was deep within a district of Tokyo devoted completely to technology, so ostensibly so that it seemed to lack the basic necessities for sustaining human life. Half the streets were dark spare for the dozens of dynamic advertisements, providing a shifting, kaleidoscopic light that didn’t much help for navigation. The main thoroughfare gets more tightly packed, during peak business hours, than a can of anchovies. Each person is capillarily drawn through the system by the flow of the neighboring bodies, until they reach their desitnation. The individual vendors squeeze their hottest wares out onto the street and bark out free RAM upgrades for each CPU purchase. Technological antique hunters pry at desiccated Commodore 64 cases like vultures, looking for an audio chip that is still functional to complete their latest mod.
Skinn wasn’t much for crowds and never hurt for business, so he had situated himself down a small alley, with no indicating sign on the main drag. It was much more private, far from the stalls of with grey foam slabs stuffed with hundreds of integrated circuits. The overall effect of which was like a patchwork herd of innumerably specied insects, digging their many pointed feet into a dark plain; frozen for a moment in time, their grand procession laid out for all to admire. Their phylum and specie are indicated in faded grey numbers scratched on their various carapaces.
The only way Cad knew how to find Skinn’s place was the pure geometry of the buildings framing the alley. She still had no idea how to really get there in her mind, despite having a wonderfully detailed map on her computer; but when she aligned herself in the right orientation, the tops of the buildings, the awning here and the balcony there, and the vibrant 20 meter square billboard spewing out ads, it always seemed obvious when to break from the crowd and scamper into the dim alley.
She arrived just before dusk, when the more commercial hawkers were beginning to pack up their cheap wares and the serious underground cultists were just starting to mix their ilk into the vascular fluid of the street crowd. The sky was turning a dark combination of orange and purple, which only made the numerous, vibrant displays stand out more starkly. A man walked about the crowd armed with a shoulder mounted holographic display, shooting shifting images up above him, larger than life and wobbling about with his encumbered footsteps. He was preaching some manner of dooms day dialog through a series of complex audio effects which made it quite hard to understand what he was saying, spare that it was bad and that it was soon.
Cad squeezed out of the crowd and into the alley, breaking into a mild trot. She was suddenly a little excited to spill the beans to someone, or at least to get to a familiar place, a safe haven. She grabbed the old, rusted, pipe railing with her right hand and swung right around, landing her feet solidly on the third step from the top. The stairwell was very narrow and dark, but she could see the door, ten or fifteen steps below, laying open with light spilling out. This was not Skinn’s habit. He was not one to even make it known he was open or around. Oftentimes, knowing full well a customer was about to arrive, he would steal into the recesses of the back work room and let them shout and holler for a while before he finally emerged, making sure they really needed his help badly enough to disturb his current project.
She stopped there for a minute, taken aback. She heard voices inside, scuffling, then a sudden crash, something heavy falling over. She slowly, quietly descended a few steps till her feet were level with the top of the door. She bent down such that she could just barely peer into the front reception room. The place was thrashed. Papers, folders and all manner of electronic gear were strewn about. Some of it appeared to be torn open by some awful machine, which showed complete disregard for the normal entry points used to retrieve components, and instead opted to tear the thin metal into flayed shreds. She could glimpse, further in, a heap of hard drives and various permanent storage devices. Just as she bent to peek at the carnage another drive came flying in from out of her field of vision, on the left hand side, and skidded to a stop near the bottom of the pile.
She almost gasped with surprise but her fear was now so high up in her chest that she couldn’t even suck air into her gaping mouth. She didn’t turn and run for fear that she would miss someone coming up after her, someone spotting her. She crept backwards up the steps one by one, getting both feet level before hooking her heel over the next. When she reached the top she stumbled around the railing and broke into a full sprint, slamming into the crowd, a stone dropped in the river of people.
The man with the projection gear seemed to hone straight in on her as she ran; as though he saw only her in the crowd. He began shouting excitedly, filling his message of doom with distortion as his scratchy voice shrilled and echoed through the myriad of audio effects. Her terror overcame her completely, deranged and bewildered, looking up, wild eyed into the images of holocaust prisoners, executions and explosions which filled the sky above her. She pushed her way through the crowd in utter abandon like a child running from a nightmare.
Cad dove into the first subway station entrance she came to and the first train that rolled in. She stared through the windows unable to comprehend what she just witnessed. Only the grim walls of the tunnel streaming by in a blur seemed real to her; something akin to how her thoughts were moving right now. He legs began to quake under her as she carried her mask mute with stun. She got off at the Hibiya Park station and quickly lost her momentum. She stumbled up the stairs as people rushed past her. Time was slowing down, her heart that was once racing seemed not to beat at all. She climbed out onto the street; the open sky and the freshened air hung loosely on the world, like a slight breeze could rip them off and reveal the utter darkness behind them.
She plopped down in a bench staring out into the small bay adjacent to the park. She sat for a long time and watched the water as the sun finally set, invisible behind the high buildings spare for the dark orange glow it cast up into the heavens. She felt alone and afraid in a way that she had never felt before. She was used to being abandoned, being fearful, but she was not used to this sudden rush, this violent expunging of something so essential to her world. She hung her head in her hands, but she didn’t cry. She stayed there on the bench for hours until she regained her composure. She had to come up with a new absence-of-plan to replace the plan she didn’t have before and the only thing she was sure about was that she had to be real careful about where she went next.
