Tag: Cyberpunk

Poetry-Thing Thursday: Harsh Reality

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Neon lights.
Bright Eyes.
Light pollution,
of a million varied hues.

Neo-Tokyo.
New Chicago.
Sprawl names,
for sprawl lives.

Cold chrome and carbon fiber,
replacing skin and bone.
Neuronal wiring,
for optical replacements and HUDs.

Political corruption,
a dime a dozen,
and all but a few,
live in poverty,
or beneath corporate thumbs.

But is that,
really so different,
than what we have now?
Mortgages, debt, and private utilities,
what do we really own?

Civil asset forfeiture,
or search and seizure–
What’s the difference,
between police and Gestapo,
cop and stasi?

Fascism or communism?
Take your pick.
But of the latter,
we’re free,
to be equally poor.

And to the former?
We have only ourselves to blame,
for sitting when we should stand,
and covering our ears and eyes.

Is this our future,
still far off?
Dystopian terror,
and corporate slavery?
Or is it upon us now,
cold and calculating,
with harsh reality,
making our lives gray?

Bonus Short Story: Make It Worth It

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

“It began with an election,” she said, sparking a cigarette in a way that would’ve made James Dean jealous.

The old rebel could’ve never hoped to imitate it though; She had a booted-foot kicked up backward against a sheet-metal warehouse. Her leather pants were tucked into her calf-high boots, tight enough to say her legs were slender, beautiful, and chromed polyalloys– forced augments after an accident had claimed the real ones. The slightest hint of electric blue encircled her hazel irises, said she’d only elected to get her HUD installed afterward.

Her eyes morphed between brown and green with tilts of her head as she took a long drag. She flicked ash at the gusts with one natural hand, the other stuffed in her pocket and unmoving. Another bionic, claimed with her legs by the same awfulness. Like them, there was an angular rigidity to her otherwise soft, supple face, that screamed alloy bone-weaves. Maybe it was the cheeks, or forehead, their skin stretched a little too unnaturally to be organic.

She took another drag, and plumed smoke, “It began with an election, like most shit-storms in history. World War two did– pretty much anyhow. Hitler’s election sealed the world’s fate. Truman’s election sealed Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s fates. Even Vietnam’s fate was sealed by Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Hell, the only reason Nixon pulled out was ’cause he was too damned corrupt to keep track of everything.”

She scoffed angrily, then flicked more ash.

“Whatever. Point is, everything begins with an election, or the lack thereof, or the assassination of some smart-mouthed politician. We humans and our trust… we really gotta’ learn we’re all out for ourselves. Even I’m only telling you this for the sake of it not being forgotten, ’cause I don’t want it to be.”

Her lone audience member was inert, his HUD recording her every move and word.

She sighed, “Anyway, the great American hive-mind voted in some businessman who’d gotten a wild hair up his ass to be president. He wanted to run the country like a business ’cause we had money problems. Big fuckin’ deal, who doesn’t? Problem was, just about every business he’d run, he’d actually run into the ground. Sorta telling looking back, huh?”

She was quiet for a moment, staring out across the horizon. Between the two sides of the harbor there were enough rundown, ramshackle, sheet-metal warehouses to prove her point. Behind them, their horizons rose in waves of countless skyscrapers. Corporate logos and digital billboards were splattered across them in sickening, electric colors from LEDs and Neon signs, offensive to the otherwise unrelenting gray that formed the sky.

It wasn’t hard for anyone to see the corporate-takeover she was referring to. It managed to enslave a good portion of the country to their government’s debts and screw everyone in the process.

“So this guy,” she said animatedly with her smoking hand. “Gets elected with all these promises to dick around certain, specific groups of people. The country fuckin’ eats it up, like he’s some god damned spunk-shooting john and they’re all his whores swallowing for their payday.”

She snorted a burst of air like a desperate laugh. Her lone audience member gave a silent chuckle to himself.

She continued astutely, “So they lap it all up, like good little servants, and the bastard gets his pay day. He gets on Capitol Hill, and lo and behold, suddenly he’s writing all these laws, submitting ’em to Congress.”

She flicked her cigarette to the ground, pulled another from her pocket with the other hand. The augment’s hand was a chrome skeleton, like an old terminator’s, but with forty-years and billions more in research behind it.

“All these laws getting submitted– and eventually passed– were fed through a Congress bought and paid for by companies lobbying for certain agendas to be passed.” She covered her mouth a moment to spark a lighter with her augment, then shoved both back into her pockets until it was time to flick ash again. “The country knew even then it was happening,” she admitted angrily. “But we couldn’t do anything. Congress had the power, and the corporations had Congress. Even the fuckin’ President helping them didn’t have more than the power of suggestion. But see, that was the thing, they gave him the suggestions. Then when the time came, he shoved those bills into the legal system and their cronies passed ’em without ever realizing they were being so wholly manipulated. Or if they did, they didn’t care. After all, billions were being paid out to collectively keep them complicit!”

She’d gotten herself into such a fury she was forced to pause to calm down. She did it over the span of a couple of drags. Then, with her augged hand, she produced a flask and threw down a gulp. She offered it to her listener, and he swigged with a “thank you” and a wince.

When she started up again, she was calmer, more morose, “So the corporations passed all these laws without any oversight or consideration of the “common” man. With a few, specific laws, they nullified almost all privacy, Citizen’s rights, and any hopes for peacefully assembling against them.”

She took another drink from the flask, then twisted the cap on with the hand, her cigarette between two, real fingers. She slipped it back into her pocket with a casual move and her augged hand disappeared again.

“A lotta’ people then thought people like me– the ones that saw where we were heading– were nut-job conspiracy theorists. You’d think after we’d been proven right about governmental agencies spying on us they’d have at least given us the benefit of the doubt. But nope. Instead we got the same old rigmarole. We were paranoid, lying, or just plain crazy.”

She stared off for a moment, her thoughts elsewhere. Her listener wondered if he should say something to keep her going, but she sighed, shook her head, and looked at the ground.“If we’d been smarter, maybe we’d have rebelled then and there.” Her eyes rose at him again, “But we didn’t. Instead, we took it, hoping one day things would turn out better. Now we’re all screwed. Over the course of a decade, the corporations and that lame-brain puppet we called a President completely overwrote the Bill of Rights and Constitution. Their friends on Wall Street and in their corporate towers were the only ones that benefitted. Meanwhile, we became slaves to corps, so weighed down by debt and fear of the monsters looming over us we’re petrified against action.”

She drifted off on this thought. Her distant look of depression told her listener that his only recourse was to speak. He wasn’t sure what to say though. Instead, he reiterated his initial question– the one that had led to the history lecture.

“So… that’s why you’re taking off? The corps? What about your friends? What about me?”

She sighed, “One day you’re gonna’ learn that the only reason we’re all poor and living on the street’s ’cause we weren’t ready to let go of things and fight back. When that day comes, maybe you’ll let go and take off too. Maybe then you’ll find me again. I hope so, anyhow. I like you, but you’re too young and I’m too old. The gap between’s still too much.”

He shook his head, “I think you’re just running off ’cause you’re afraid.”

She put her one, real hand on his shoulder, “We’re all afraid, Ra. What separates us is how we react to that fear, what it turns us into. Me? It’s turned me into a fighter. If it just made me afraid, why would I run off to follow rumors of the resistance?”

He couldn’t argue with her logic. Then again, she was a decade older than him, and in her late twenties. He’d only just turned eighteen. He doubted he’d ever be able to outsmart her, or even win an argument. Still, he loved her, and she seemed to care about him.

For this last point he made a case, “If you didn’t care you wouldn’t be lecturing me.”

She shrugged, “Maybe that’s the other reason I’m going. There’s no place for love in this world. No place for caring or kindness. It’s all cold calculus and living and dying by the dime. Maybe you oughta’ think about that. Maybe I do love you, and maybe that’s too hard to deal with until I do something to change things.”

He wasn’t sure if she was speaking in earnest or whether she was just trying to shake off his questions. He liked to think the former, if only to keep himself hopeful.

She flicked away her last butt, and lifted her pack to a shoulder, “One day, if the world’s meant to have love in it, we’ll find each other. Until then, stay safe, and know there’s at least one person out there fighting for you. So make it worth it.”

She turned away, her face steeled against undeniable emotions. Ra watched her leave, wondering if he’d ever see her again. At the very least, he knew for certain he’d follow her soon enough. One day, he’d find the courage to say enough was enough, and seek out the resistance. Until then, he’d remain forced to scour the ghettos for food and shelter, his only thoughts otherwise always of her. He’d make it worth it, no matter what. It was the least he could do for her.

Short Story: Vanguard

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

A bright flash. A concussive boom. She stumbled in her run, blind and deaf. Her HUD had been knocked out. It flickered in her vision, spurting lines of colors. That meant her her optics had gone too. An EMP-flashbang. Bastards. EMPs, meant to disorient the cybernetically augmented and their tech, her. Getting out was important, but seeing was even more important.

She felt, rather than heard, the thump of boots. They flooded the narrow corridor behind her. She knew the place’s floor-plan from memory, but in her stumbling run, wasn’t sure she’d make the right turns. She booked it, both oblivious and fiercely aware of the platoon aimed to fire on her.

They told her this would happen; her friends, family. Not the blood kind of course. Shitty parents and siblings had long been an epidemic in this brave new world. Her family particularly, were corp through and through, Aries SC, Guardian LLC, Arc Systems, or one the other big ones, it didn’t matter who belonged to which. Wage-slaves and tin-soldiers were all there was room for these days, and she knew her family was a conglomerate of half of them.

She had meant her real family. Not her blood, but the people down at The Green Fairy, one of the slum-bar-hotel combos where she lived, worked, survived and thrived. Even running blindly from corp-sec down a hallway, optics half-fried, she remembered the first time she’d walked into the place.

She was still a teenaged hell-raiser in those days. Short, spiked, platinum blonde hair accented ever-present facial piercings, and self-satisfied smugness. That was before her eyes had the neon glow of optic augs, but even then she couldn’t have been called innocent, however definite an air of naivete hung about her.

She stumbled again, pictures ebbing back into her eyes. She slid around a corner, felt the thunder of a hand-cannon split the air. It barked after her. Metal on metal grated her teeth.

How the hell’d she get here? She’d showed up at the Fairy to stay the night. With no creds, or even corp-cash, she was forced to slave away mopping floors. They’d lost their only janitor a few weeks before in a gang-raid. It wasn’t the first, and she’d seen her fair-share since. It was how she got the name Cutter; she’d been attacked like everyone else, but by a guy that wanted more than a piece of her ass. She gutted him like a fish with his own knife. The sheer atavism made the other gangers freak. The Fairy’s people took advantage of it. A few more gangers went down in gunfire. The rest bolted.

She still remembered feeling the guy hard against her. He’d grabbed her from behind in a room she’d been cleaning. He stank like month-old ashtrays smothered in grease and piled with stale butts. She managed to wriggle from his grip, slip out and behind him. As he turned to grab her again, she gave his testes a full, hard kick. The force staggered them both. He toppled onto her, screaming. She fought to get out from under him, somehow grasped a knife he had hanging from his belt.

She remembered everything clearly, like it had only just happened, but not the murder. Her first blood. She only remembered standing just outside the room, covered in blood, bile, and stinking of the guy’s bowels. The knife trembled under her white-knuckles as Den Mother found her. The Old lady was a whore, running the place as a brothel– among other things. That Cutter’d drawn blood, nearly been killed defending the place, made her one of the Fairy’s Vanguard from then on.

That’s why she was here now, in this damned corp building. She’d actually been fooled into believing the place was home. Hell, maybe it was by now.

She hurled herself around another corner. Her vision had almost fully returned. Her optics were still going haywire, but she saw the double-doors leading to the loading bay. Its internal storage room stretched out behind a wall beside her. She could feel the van waiting, already running. Too bad her augs were scrambled, or she might’ve called for suppressing fire.

Den Mother had sent her here– all of them actually– but the rest weren’t forced to come inside. Den Mother had long been paying-off corps to keep the Fairy in business. One owned the deed, another the land. As much as they wanted to, they couldn’t take it from her, no matter the amount of illegality going on. Sure, they could send in corp-sec, but Den Mother had made it well-known that she’d blow the place apart with her in it before she’d let them take it. Cutter’d seen the C4 stacked in the basement. It wasn’t a bluff.

Until now, corp-sec had stayed away from the Fairy and its people. In fact, aside from a few skirmishes and narrow escapes after petty theft, Cutter’d never had any trouble with them. But sure enough, after someone in a suit showed up in the Fairy– a weasel-looking guy too sharply dressed for usual, Fairy business– Den Mother pulled the Vanguard in to a pow-wow. Cutter’d never been sure what that really meant, but she knew, when it it was over, that she was about to infiltrate a corp. With the aid of a remote receiver and the Fairy’s resident tech-genius, Dan “The Man”, she’d been tasked to locate and delete all deed information relating to the Fairy and Den Mother.

Cutter watched one of the doors open. Jack the Ripper appeared. Ripper was lethal at any range, and the aimed baby-eagles in his hands said he was all business. The door beside him divoted from rifle fire. Cutter pumped her legs. Ripper stood stock still, damn near invincible with his Kevlar-woven skeleton and armor-plated torso augs. The baby eagles barked and spit lead at corp-sec that dodged for cover at the far end of the hall.

Cutter dove past Ripper into the van’s rear, landed half-in. The Man yanked her the rest of the way. Ripper’s eagles barked. He back-stepped confidently, unrushed and unswayed. He fell in backwards, rolled to come upright, still firing. The baby eagles clicked empty. The Man hit a key on his laptop. The auto-van growled, tires spinning, and tore off into the night.

“You alright?” Ripper asked reloading his eagles.

The Man was too busy hacking the autopilot, spoofing its travel information. A sign on the side of the van said “Aries Security Corp,” so the corp they’d just hacked would have no idea who’d really done the job.

Cutter’s chest heaved for air. Her hands ran along herself to check for holes. Other than a splitting migraine and some wonked-out optics, she was fine. Fine? Alive, more like. She’d probably never been fine, never would be really. At the very least though, her home was safe, secure. The Vanguard had prevailed again.

She swallowed hard, “Yeah. Five-by-Five.” He handed over a canteen and she drank deep. Then with a breath, “Vanguard always wins, right?”

Short Story: A Lost Cause?

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

The Paris Incident… what more can be said that hasn’t been already? Everyone knows how it started, everyone knows why it went to shit, and everyone knows how the Americans– the biggest bulls of them all– were silently and willingly castrated. Jesus Christ, we were so stupid.

To understand why Lemaire’s death had such little effect on us, you have to understand where we’d come from. Then, once knowing that, you’d have to understand why we did what we did.

When Lemaire died, and Paris went up in flames, we watched with the rest of the world, petrified just like them. The difference was, we could mount no revolution of our own. Funny thing about being the one with the biggest stick– when its turned on you, you’re pretty well fucked. Blue-collar, white collar; didn’t matter your shirt-color, if you’d found a place to bitch about things, you were jailed before the broader ‘net heard your complaints.

But like I said, you have to understand where we came from. It started decades ago with the first, foreign terrorist attack this country had seen. It wasn’t just a tragic occurrence for us. Other places in the world were used to that sort of thing. Not us. Between the IRA, the middle eastern sects, and the average, everyday nut-jobs Europe was rife with those attacks. Paris, London, Berlin, hell even Belgium and Sweden had felt their fair share of the dirt being kicked up by those fucking jihadists to the south.

Us though? We weren’t like them. We had security, sanctity, sovereignty, and in them, peace of mind.

So when that first attack hit, it was more than just a pin-prick in our overblown ego, it was a god damn gaping hole in the balloon. Unfortunately, that balloon was also our heads and what we did after, even if for the best of reasons, made sure of it. When the time finally came for us to face our demons, we realized we’d left ourselves powerless.

For decades we’d heard from ultra-leftists about the “erosion of freedoms,” while the right pitched its agenda as the “protection of rights.” It was all just rhetoric meant to hide what people were really afraid to say; we were becoming slaves– either to our government, or the corps that eventually took over. We were all chained to 9-to-5s, rising taxes, and crippling debt. Not even the best and brightest of us could escape after college tuition went through the roof. For the first time in history, we started seeing cities– literal cities– go belly up from outrageous debt and unyielding corruption.

So we did what any first world nation would, printed more money and gave it out by the bucketfuls to people whom promised to protect our economy. Ha, yeah, bullshit. What most did was take the money and run. Turns out ol’ Steve Miller was right after all, but our Billy-Joe and Bobby-Sue were Wall Street and the Financial industry. The difference? They didn’t so much shoot a man after robbing his castle as knock us down and trample our faces in mud as they ran roughshod over our country and economy.

So what we eventually had was a whole country of people terrified from a blow to their ego, scraping to get by after a near-totally collapsed economy. Understanding that makes it easier to understand what came next, and led us to our… current, predicament.

It became obvious about a decade after the first attack– the only attack, really– that our freedoms were eroding. Even as the politicians called for increased security, safety, and freedom, they forced laws past that tightened their grip around our throats and our own belts. They bludgeoned rights and freedoms with repeated attempts to pass harsher and more ambiguous laws, gave total power to acronym and police agencies. The shit storm that hit the fan when we later found out– shockingly– that power was used for all the most malicious purposes, was too little too late.

Whod’ve thought, right?

All kidding aside, what we had was a country of pissed off, desperate people too poor, hungry, and terrified to lift themselves up. More importantly, they clutched for anything and everything that even remotely resembled security– you know, that bygone illusory thing we’d always thought we’d had. So when the corps came in to downsize the police force, clean-up the borders, and take-over the already-corrupt justice system, who’d have thought it could get any worse?

No-one. Why? Because we’d never seen such atrocities committed by our own people, let alone against our own people. We were simply naive; a country too young and juvenile in mind to realize we should be careful of the silver spoon fed to us, lest it contain arsenic and cyanide. Instead, we swallowed it whole, gorged ourselves on lies, empty promises, and rhetoric and propaganda that would have shamed the Nazis. All of that, in the hopes that everything would “get better soon.”

The eternal why is simple really, we are naïve, both as a country and as a culture. The English empire has spanned millennia. Even most, legal orders of European countries were hundreds of years older before they fell. Comparatively, we were short-lived. It made us that much easier to conquer. Hearts and minds were a hell of a lot more effective than guns and bombs, and most of corp execs knew that. We didn’t. So they promised everything our hearts desired, and the return of peace of mind through it, and we didn’t hesitate.

In a matter of months, the US police forces were eliminated by various sects of corporate security. The Military went with them. Soldiers were given a choice to stay on with one of various corporations or leave without a second consideration. The Navy was outright eliminated, air superiority a given from the Warhound-Raptors patrolling the skies and coasts in flocks. More to the point, we relinquished any hopes of self-defense in a bid to keep foreign execs happy.

The State and Federal Governments stuck around a little while longer than most civil services to “ease the transition.” More bullshit. What they did was pass a whole slew of laws all that pretty much eliminated the bill of rights and nullified the constitution. Why? They were all bought and paid for. Every last one of them held positions in corps, received weekly checks from their payroll. We learned that the hard way when the last of the governments dissolved– and we clapped and hooted and hollared about it.

And then there was silence.

Fucking deafening silence.

Media outlets went off the air, the ‘net went down, and all but a few vehicles were banned from the streets and skies. Conventional vehicles were outlawed to fatten the corps’ bottom lines through public transport and electric vehicles. The only thing we really owned anymore was our debt– hell from what I hear, even our sperm and eggs aren’t really ours anymore. It belongs to the corps now. Everything. All of it’s just waiting for some reason to be cut off and sold off to lower our life-debts.

I can’t even really be angry. Not really. I’m just disappointed. Our country had so much potential, such an unbelievable beauty and spirit. It seemed nothing could crush it except us. Then we did. Our streets turned into mostly dilapidated, abandoned memories outside inner-cities. Homes are gone too, everyone stuck in corp-owned buildings, prisons, or risking the elements hiding on the cities’ outskirts. None of those is a viable option to me, not really, but I take what I can get.

So, just like yesterday, I’ll slip into my boots, strap on my armor, grab my rifle and go to work. Maybe today someone will stand against us. Maybe I’ll be forced to gun them down. Then again, maybe not. Maybe we’ll be faced with another person standing beside them. Then another, and another until the whole damned country’s ready to die to take back what’s been stolen.

If not, I’ll just go lick the hand that feeds me again. I’d rather bite it, but I’m not gonna’ let it beat me into submission like the other inmates and homeless unless I’ve got a damned good reason. I may have a gun, but really, I’m just another wage-slave with armor in place of a suit.

I don’t know if it matters, or if it really could– you know, to be one who stands up. All I know’s the older I get, the more I start to wonder; are we really a lost cause?