Cyberpunk ramlbings.

Ivan tapped away on the keyboard, a litre of clear vitamin water at his elbow.  His hands were new and still a little stiff.  But they would be worked in soon enough.  Each tendon was grown individually and is a tiny cable woven out of inlocking strands of carbon buckyballs.  The tip of each finger has a weighted magnet to keep the whole thing in tension and transfer movement.  When his fingers pressed a key the magnets made a satisfying click on the plastic keyboard.  He wore an old ring around the middle finger of his right hand,  a thin gold band.  The skin of his hands was grown in a vat somewhere before they layed it over its robot chasis.  

Our brains aren't wired for this.  It's lucky we have all this stuff to mediate for us

The video parlour was a vast dark recess of smoke, gleaming and flickering with the light of hundreds of computer screens... like the eyes a spider, reeking of body odor and shrimp, it was oddly silent.  Then, somewhere, far away, a microwave was beeping.  It took an aeon just to find a computer terminal.  The place was sea of nerds.  It just went on forever.  And whatever terminal wasn't in use was either out of order or occupied by a derelict or homeless vagrant currently making his residence there.  I caught the eye of one of the Uighur kids who seemed to be bouncing and selling drugs; he told me in a broken argot and a series of hand gestures that there was more room upstairs.  He pointed his finger in the air, then added two more.  Three.  Third floor.  Jesus this place was massive.  

The stairwell was postered with the faces of a faded era of pop-culture.  A junkie sat huddled in the corner, a needle graphically protruding from his arm.  The door to the third floor had a life-size cut out of Mega Man X.  The fluorescent lighting cast no light, but buzzed loudly and strobed around the edges of my vision.

I wore my woongjin stars jacket.  My days in esports loomed behind me like a bad dream or a bad relationship.  The carpal tunnel syndrom in my wrists was not all that was left of those days.  Late nights spent in front of a computer screen, in my bedroom or at a friend's house, skipping school at a pc bang.  I wore it in the glazed expression on my face,  Growing up it was all there was to do.  You went over to friend's houses and played video games.  This turned to other virtual supplements like drugs and alcohol but the video games never went away.  It began with a game called XCOM.  It was about earth dealing with an alien invasion--a sort of expanded version of Space Invaders.  It was all about monitoring various squads and alocating resources for earth's defenses.  So as my life was spiraling out of control I was carefully organizing a multitiered strategic advance in a hyperspace military theatre.   I remember talking through a ten dollar microphone to my clan of 5 or 6 British people.  Sometimes I think I was crazy and talking to myself.  Peace out Pr3P, Jamie, Dan, and whoever else, wherever you are.


I came upon a couple out in the hall.  Apparently all the cubicles were occupied and they stood vacantly, waiting.   He wore a black leather jacket and did his hair combed back like he was from the 1950s.  She was going for the tribal look, with piercings and Aztec tattoos.  I could tell they didn't belong here.  There were none of the tell tale signs.  No traces of orange Cheetos powder on the fingertips.  No noticeable body odor.  They were kempt.  They made pretenses.  Something was definitely off.

A man in a lime green suit came out of his cubicle.  He gazed back and forth between all of us, as if committing our faces to memory.  He was old man, I noted, as he began walking in my direction.  He hadn't had any work done. 

"Are you Winslow?"

I nodded.

"Come inside for a moment."

I bid the couple an apologetic look before heading inside.  The phoney greaser seemed not to notice and casually spat on the ground.  His girlfriend was too busy on her phone to look up.

Spiritus Mundi
   
Across the parkway at the mouth of an underground mall, a small crowd gathered, not loud and boisterous but hushed in worship.  a neoprene face sat flat on a screen preening its eyelashes like a geisha, evoking anger with its mouth pressed into a muted vaccuum O, a pinhole into nothing.  They sat transfixed, gazing into the retail store display window.  Crowds of people brushed past them on their way to or from wherever it was they had to go.  I sat and watched and sometimes noted some things down.

When the subway train came in, it made a note through the station like a tracheotomy wind rattled through lungs ridden with pneaumonoultramicroscopicsiliovolcaniconiosis

Aztec.

A silicon dagger hangs over the mechanical heart.  The high priestess clips off her fingers into the bowl one by one.
The smoke from the marijuana cigarette, the laughing face of a doll and there she was always pulling me under.  The swami's chanting voice condensing the moisture from the air in this rattling hollow chamber, fogging up the plastic.  The market from here is only background noise.  The haggling of vendors, the noise of the boys on their delivery bikes, for now it is all reduced to a burst ear drum silence that is, for the mercenary soul, deeply relaxing.  For an instant the robotic heart skips.

The tribal eyes of man hidden beneath sunglasses, duct taped to an eagle nose, jaguar warrior, the scale of a boa constrictor, made to order, there must be someone under that wormwood tangle of dread locks, yellow pink and green bits of tape, party glitter, bits of leather ties and rubber hooks and metal rings linked together in a chain mail mesh.  He made his rubber suit from what you threw away.
riposte glad now de-res with the neon tipped cigarette hanging glib out of the corner of his mouth.  Chronos hung in the air--loud like mustard gas rattling through a breathing apparatus.  Rubber-tight to this skull, skull-faced from age.  The mask lowered and laser pointers traced the outline of his face onto the smoke and ash kicked up into the air by his neoprene boots.
Tastes exacto sharp

The stainless steel rat rusts out the rat trap, sliding a mini disc into the scar just north of his Adam's apple, connected directly of the resonating chamber of the larynx.  Over the phone, any loss in fidelity will be hardly noticeable.  Impersonating that suit should go just fine, given some luck, if the corp he works for doesn't turn Colombo all of a sudden and start hunting his ass down.  He was discrete, but no one could make a move nowadays without leaving some kind of paper trail.  Besides, in his business, you had to make yourself known somehow--how else would you get any work?  There are few enough people out there looking for a hit man now.  Everyone wants to go to the cops.   And if not, then they want to take care of it themselves.
 
He looks out over Sargosa Flats lit up from the cold fusion light of the blast furnace, glittering like the back of an iguana under the blue-green glow of the strip.  The residential towers crumbling down into the ocean, running along a  sheltered harbour created by a curving man-made promontory like that reptiles tail curling around itself for coldblooded warmth.   Lights outline the darkness for miles into the sea, waves crest to white from the helicopter wind.  The chromatic lung, the readying of a bullet in the chamber.   Acid rain washes the pier clean.  As clean as anything gets in this town.  Eyes of silver.  Her lipstick is red.  The heroin needle, trying to find a vein.   Can't see in this light.  Blue veins don't stand out too well under this blue park light.  The keypad depressed in aharmonic semitones.  

Dumb fingers can't remember the code.

The man with the fish bowl head stared at me from the side, moving horizontally towards me.  The plastic bubble reflected the flourescent lighting, forming a halo.  Angel wings but gollum hands.  And there are diamonds being made, a laser hand arranging carbon atoms to order.  It mocked all my years in the mine.

  We brought the asteroids from space and broke them down with sister robot arms and laser guided cutting saws split them into their constituent elements.  Each asteroid was once part of a larger planetoid object.  Like the earth, the heavier metals like iron and lead and uranium are drawn to the core of these planetoids while the lighter elements settle towards the outer surface.  These planetoids have the habit of being broken up into smaller asteroid-type objects.  When this happens, some asteroids are made of lighter minerals and some of the heavier core minerals.  Each one of these asteroids, formed of the heavy minerals of the planetoid core, contains, depending on its size, aprox. eighty percent of the entire mineral wealth of earth.

A vortex is any whirlpool with a downdraft.

It all swirles round the rusty drain like a coin spins round the yellow plastic bowl of the spiral wishing well I remember from the science centre, staying perpendicular to its curved surface with centripetal or centrifugal force, whichever it was, until it drops through a hole cut in the bottom, disappearing from sight and into the lock box.   men come with keys to unlock the box and empty the contents of coins, or else it would all fill up, men like me. But I don't deal in coins, just wishes pushed aside and into whispered conversation.  See the drainpipe begins with the sink of the air, vibrating with the noise of voices.  And across the room extendable ears are hidden listening in the flowers.  So it all winds round to me eventually.  Down to me, the earbuds in my ear, the poor blue fidelity of the closed circuit monitor, all the creases in your face and around your finger joints, growing blocky and pixilated at 240p, but your voice still warms me.  I shift in my chair, the fluorescent glow of the screen casting a stripe of chiaroscuro blue across my shadowed face, catching the smoke swirling above my head.  my fingers dance along the keyboard, telling my aging machinery to rewind.  A loop of analogue tape reverses on its spools and the rig shudders to a sort of shambling half-life.  I can hear dust on the playback head.  The capstan begins to revolve.  Steam rises from an open microwave bag of popcorn.  Earbuds are exchanged for larger headphones.  Cords are switched, there is some static.  There, all is silent and ready to begin.

Everyone plays videogames all the time now.  She aimed the magnetic bolt of her crossbow at the figure in front of her.  Her display lost resolution for a moment and skipped a few frames.  He raised a hand in stop motion, clutching a gun.  Her finger squeezed the trigger.  She knew what would happen once the frog nano-toxin made contact with the bloodstream of her victim.  It would be a pleasant 15 minutes or so of agony or perhaps even bliss, she had a hard time reading the expression on the faces of her victims, perhaps it stood somewhere in between the two.   In that state who knows how long those 15 minutes would seem to stretch.  Perhaps this moment is the meaning of afterlife, just like in that movie Waking Life.