[did a gentle edit, wrote some stuff to get the last 2 posts to make more sense and then wrote a whole bunch more. this is the whole bunch more]
Somewhere Over the Rainbow Nation
Q-Topia failed to emerge, but Ikea flat packs were shipped down to the Quarter openly now and serious building work began, rehabilitating docklands property. When the Hets started trying to buy loft apartments in groovily restored factory space, the queers figured they’d hit paydirt and many of them immediately sold out. Still, the Quarter remained pretty queer.
Charmageddon stayed exactly as it was. Subterfuge would always hold its own mystique and exclusivity can turn a fat profit. Somebody opened a feminist bookshop next door to it, which went bust within six months.
When they cleaned up the docks, Scar’s mass of fallen eights got a clean up and the title, “Infinity Sideways” and apparently, Scar became An Artist. Bemused by the title, her new workshop and a pocket full of paper, Scar immediately grabbed an aerosol and sprayed COPYWRONG all over town. Then she went back to twisting and welding eights and as soon as something looked big enough, somebody came and bought it.
Working more or less legally, the dream team of fifteen still existed, under Sam’s control and ever remote, ever mysterious, Veto. They weren’t just collecting data now, they were manipulating it, proving it, creating it and to Scar, it felt pretty much like bending eights back at the foundry. The fifteen looped and circled through cyberspace, building the Quarter Online. A pissed off committee finally accepted Scar’s antipathy to purple and agreed to predominately pink branding. Scar quietly built an installation, darlings, of every queer symbol and logo you could ever think of or dream up – and she painted every single one of them blue. She never sold that piece.
Did I mention it’s damn hard to kick life into a plot format? Fuck me, it’s horrible. I went back and rewrote this bitch; added shit, took out shit and fixed some total fuck ups along the way. When I’d finished the cyberpunk bit, the story felt kind of finished – looked that way too. Like … here I am trying to write this bastard of a thing and snip and stretch it to fit 50 000 words and suddenly *BAM!* the car-chase scene’s been done and the shoot-out too and all we need now is a kiss and a sunset. Well, sorry for you, my year wasn’t that tidy.
[The Dream Fifteen Team
Scar: yours truly
Helen: Scar’s main squeeze
Samanth0r: team leader and deep geek
Jake
Dave the Bear
Deano
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16 .... to replace samanth0r if nec. And it became necessary.]
Thursday’s Wild
It was probably a Thursday, shitty things always seemed to happen on a Thursday. Blue hauled the fifteen back to meatspace and we all got our meat eyes back except Sam, who was convulsing at her deck. Blue roared, “Get a medic!” and somebody did. A space blanket, a hypodermic, a massage and about an hour later, Sam slid into a fitful sleep and didn’t talk for three days. She never said much anyway, but suddenly her silence was discordant.
“What the hell did you see out there?” asked Blue, when Sam had finally rejoined the talkstream with one single word, “Fuck.” We listened, the fifteen of us and Blue, to words that didn’t make sense at first. “Sangoma,” said Sam, “right, there’s this … thing out there … Sangoma …” then she typed into her feed and showed us: 54|\/90|\/|4 – sangoma, in leet old school nineties hackerspeak. Hax0r … Sangoma means shaman – you knew that, right? Good.
Sangoma had frozen Sam out there and then almost burned her with a datastorm of raw code. Sam could only process it by typing it out, this is what she said:
you gonna burn you gonna burn you gonna burn we gonna rape your evil asses!!11!!1 you got generikkka clean but it ain’t all that way, skinny geek. got a army here yo we gonna rape every fuckn lesbian looks like a lesbian we gonna cure your disease you all gotta get straight or die, sisterfuckers.
The bastard had looped it into a mobius too and without a defrag, Sam was in severe danger of going under and then flatlining.
Sam typed some digits and then passed out again.
0826090958
What the suffering fuck was that?
Accessing the open interface, Scar googled it and got as far as finding out it was a rogue cellphone number. She hadn’t even known that cellphones still existed. They did, but only on a rigidly controlled registered network and that number wasn’t on the list – neither were the ten consecutive numbers before and after it. After a few hours wrestling with software, Helen got a program installed to comm with the cellphone. VOIP software just reached distortion and white noise and snow visuals, further digging got them to a text channel. What to say?
samanth0r hit by 54|\/90|\/|4 pls advise.
Wait.
Fourteen plus Blue, sitting staring at a screen, waiting.
Beep!
scar jack in
Scar jacked in.
Straight into Quarter Online, branded pink and inverted goddamn pyramids everywhere. Man, Scar loathed graphic designers. OK, where would Veto be? Adjusting her eyefeed and her movements, Scar started to do what only she could do – desaturate the environment. It wasn’t a structural change, merely a perceptive one. Pink faded to green and the green got stronger and with a bird’s eye view of the ghetto, Scar started seeing blue, a chink of it like light that broadened as she neared it.
You’re Not in Troyville Anymore
Scar surfed right into the blue and suddenly there weren’t any edges any more. Curves everywhere – if gravity had existed in cyberspace, she’d have been lost for sure. In amongst the ever shifting blue, was a drop of mercury and it felt important somehow. Letting herself hang there, she focused hard on it and then, when nothing happened, she let the focus drift.
good
The word floated on to her eyefeed, but barely; monochrome and like something about to take off in a hurry.
VETO?
yeh. don’t talk, there’s no time, just remember what i say. we gotta be quick or you’ll crash too.
k
ok. this sangoma, who nine inch nailed sam, is serious shit. that data he looped into sam is all true and there’s no way in any dimension i can fix it
Scar’s heart sank. Veto had never, ever, not been able to accomplish a tech rescue before, it was terrifying. Who the hell, or what, was sangoma?
what you gotta get, is global attention on it and then hope for help. i’ll give you pathways, contacts and then i’ll do what i can, but it’s gonna be indiana jonestown from here. work in pairs; one surgeon, one slasher. sneak through – if you’re damn lucky, you can sneak back.
It was as chilling as that ill wind people talk about so much. Scar ventured one question before she flipped back to meatspace.
where r u?
girl you’ve read gibson – i’m where all mastermind hacker genius types end up
Aha. Tokyo.
Flip.
The stomach cramps were straight from hell. Scar puked, then sucked on some glucose, shrugged and then started typing. Subliminal data showers sprayed as she three finger hunt and peck typed, as the rest of the fifteen plus Blue read over her shoulder. It was pure code and Helen got to work on it as soon as Scar dropped back, hauling maps out of the text file. Eight packets of data, eight maps – eight again and they’d better not fall. Fifteen divided into pairs was an uneven seven and a half, unless they’d rewritten things since Scar jacked in.
Blue was going in. Without a word, Jake brought another terminal across, they all assembled a deck, goggles, cables, nodes. Dave went off to find a new wingman, to stand and watch them when they jacked. Blue prepped the noob and Helen prepped Blue and everybody flexed their fingers as they pasted each other up, applied the nodes, put on their goggles and hot power switches.
They jacked in and there, in the corner of their eyefeeds, were their maps. Scar had paired up with Helen, obviously – well, you know lesbians, joined at the hip when they’re not slicing each other’s backs. It didn’t feel remotely heroic.
Surgeon in the lead, Helen motored along invisible gridlines, pausing to cut a pathway that Scar closed up like it was Tetris blocks afterwards. Shape into shape, colour to colour, Scar had to remind herself to keep one eye on Helen, not to get left behind in the unthinking dance. There was no communication between teams, it was strictly a stealth mission and they’d all known going in that they might not get out.
What happens if you get lost in cyberspace? Simple. Your body atrophies out there in what looks 100% like a coma. On the net, surrounded by pure data, you last as long as your body does, but you fray at the edges as bits of you wheel off to join the Gibson-Stacks. One day you’re not even a memory, just a fragmented, dispersed code string. After a certain point, nobody can bring you back. They say it’s a painless way to go, but they say that about drowning too and there’s no-one with irrefutable proof. If you’re lucky, you become myth.
Waiting for Helen to untangle and cut some particularly dense data as they made their way through the offshore banking sector, Scar studied the map, feeling the need to memorise it. Past that sector, they were into mostly open space, the data desert, where you found the really interesting stuff, if you had the time to look. They didn’t.
La-fucking-duma! Helen and Scar were at the edge of the Marais Matrix, the French queer nation state’s online presence. Back in the day, the Marais was Paris’ queer quarter – filthy streets and delightfully dodgy bars … Scar had no idea whether that even existed anymore. With the code and credentials Veto supplied, they’re soon interfacing with the French. Humour wasn’t lacking, despite the circs and they were soon in very serious conversation with three avatars; a beret, a clove of garlic and an accordion.
Back in French meatspace, three people were getting scrolling updates on their eyefeeds from Scar and Helen. There was silence once the scrolling ceased; deep, dark, velvety, abysmal silence. Scar considered offering everyone slices of it just to break the ice, but thought better of it.
you can get back?
yes – hopefully.
we have to talk, to think. there are no safe global channels.
yes.
48hrs.
ok
go
They went.
48 hours … from when? Time, was not a factor in cyberspace, only data. Helen punched the figure in somewhere near her left temple, logging it in. They’d find it in her goggles even if she didn’t make it out again.
The risk getting out was far greater than on the inward journey. Who knew how many bots had been crawling their pathway since and if there was so much as a nano out of place, they’d be hunted by every security system around. Before they left the Marais Matrix, Scar and Helen took another careful look at their maps and then they commed, just quickly.
i’m holding ur hand
i’m holding urs
8
yes. 8
In the interests of accuracy and transparency, I should have written a whole bunch of tension between me and Helen into this mother, I know. Apart from anything else, can you honestly imagine a lesbo relationship, 8 months old by then – and yes, the symbolism didn’t escape me – without a whole shitload of snot ‘n trane? nah, neither can I. We had our fair share, sure, but sorry for the rest of you miserable cretins out there, on the whole we were damn happy and every time we bitched and growled at each other, we made progress too. Sometimes in those days, I wondered whether we’d survive the loss of the revolution (but we did) and then the following crises … but we did. And yes, when I bitch on in italics about what my girlfriend said about my writing, I’m talking about Helen. Always Helen.
How did we survive the peace? What peace? We stay cordial, on the whole, the rest of the world doesn’t. It’s human nature, innit?
So Scar followed Helen outwards, wishing Helen had an ass to stare at in there too, it would have made things easier. No comms on the journey, because there were no secure channels. Scar’s audio feed cut in though, she’d programmed it back at the basement, to start up after 4 hours – danger time as far as cyberspace time went. She pictured her body back there, starting to bleed from the ears a little, maybe. Hopefully the wingman would be making sure none of them dehydrated, but there was fuck all he could do, he’d been ordered not to interfere, not to haul them out, until they gave the signal. No matter what. She decided not to alert Helen to her music alarm, it could throw her focus and they were both fucked if that happened.
Helen was moving like a Sufi then, elegantly circling through data she’d seen before, cut before. Good thing data didn’t scar … well, not itself, anyway. How long would it take them to get back, realtime? How far over the 4 hour limit would they go? What shape would they be in when they got back? How were the rest of the fifteen plus Blue doing? Fuck, it was awesome to have the space and energy to get neurotic. The thought of Samanth0r lying dying back there bummed Scar out though.
Sam was such a savant. All she needed was some kind of support structure around her and then she flew, made magic, danced through cyber skies and then came back to impress everyone with her brains and her ridiculous jokes. If they all made it, Scar was going to talk to Helen about getting sam a girlfriend, dammit there must be someone good enough out there – to cope and to get the benefits too. In so many ways, Sam reminded Scar of herself and she just plain couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. It was bullshit.
Back at the basement, meantime, the wingman was starting to shit himself seriously. Unused to the sight of gormlessly twitching deckhands, he’d hysterically called everyone he knew, so by the time I was hearing music, apparently we all had a couple of nurses each, dabbing on water, trickling glucose on to our gums, cleaning up the piss we’d let go of involuntarily.
In cyberspace, I wasn’t even hearing my music. I’d loaded up all of my R.E.M. albums and hoped like hell I wouldn’t be hearing them all, there was almost a day’s worth of music there.
It was getting harder to keep up with Helen and Scar started worrying too. That time Helen stopped breathing was terrifying and that wasn’t even half as intense as their current mission. She pulled herself together and started muttering om mane padme hum over and over and over in time with her Tetris movements. It must have worked, because the next thing Scar knew, Quarter Online’s faggot-flamboyant pyramids were in sight – they were fucking beautiful. Facing each other, Scar and Helen punched out their signal and …
… and didn’t regain consciousness for 24 hours. Apparently. Helen hadn’t stopped breathing after all and although they’d both got some fairly serious earbleed, dull hearing seemed like a small price to pay. With any luck, it would be temporary, if not, they’d just have to deal with it.
Scar had wanted to watch the other pilots get home, but by the time she surfaced, it was all over. The fifteen made it. Plus Blue … didn’t. Hearing that little piece of news smashed through their swagger like dynamite. She’d made it so far – all the way to Tokyo Online, with Deano as surgeon. She’d made it almost all the way back too; she’d fucked out somewhere near the Quarter and all Deano could do was his own slasherwork to get back. He couldn’t stay in there with her without his body too, there wasn’t even any point going back in there after her.
Helen wept like a waterfall, incessantly. Scar didn’t, but Scar’s reactions were frequently fucked. She felt her jaw grow rigid and a cold pain set in. Blue had been an unlikely mother figure, perhaps, by Het terms anyway, but that is exactly what she’d been to the fifteen. She’d even wiped their goddamned asses if necessary and now she was gone, face stuck in a rictus that would relax long before the rest of them could.
“She’s getting a hero’s burial,” said Dave through clenched teeth, “just as soon as we got time.”
24 hours left until the other four queer quarters (yeah, leave it to the queers to get five quarters together) did whatever they were going to do, if they were going to do it. 24 hours until they could make a plan to destroy the sangoma, get Sam out of her immobile shell. 24 hours to find a way to decode the sangoma and stop the curative rapes of lesbians in other Generika ghettoes.
No time for sleep. Time for Scar to go find Veto again, hope like fuck he was still there and that he’d have advice.
Scar jacked in, with the fifteen minus Blue standing around her, willing her on, Helen rubbing her shoulders non stop.
The shoulder massage is completely underrated man! Got someone in distress, under stress, whatever? Rub. Their. Shoulders. Hard too. Trust me on this one.
The Quarter’s pyramids looked like a friendly Vegas to Scar that time and she missioned quickly through the data and the desaturation and found Veto’s blue fast, in a different space to the time before. He wasn’t mercury then either, he was, of course, a 14 year old boy.
jebus!
no, vet
har har
u gonna diss me, dyke?
n0 fuckn way man, ur a fuckn her0 y0
yeh, true, but shuttup
*zips*
heh. good. ok, i’m up to date. got comms from france, japan, somalia + malaysia. they coming y0.
thank fuck
yeh. ok. listen scar. that 48hrs is up, u 15 jack in, line up here + meet the globals. i got a map for u, u get it then + code. code synthesised from 5 1/4’s. if u can get that code into teh sangoma, u disable his control and then ground team can get into the ghetto, stop that shit. got police and media on the alert but ain’t nothin gonna work unless u decode the fucker.
gottit.
scar …
good luck
veto?
yeh?
u otaku?
yeh
<3
*FLIP*
Knowing more of Veto’s identity made Scar want to fly to Tokyo and buy the boy a thousand Gundams or whatever the fuck he was into. She wanted to hug him, adopt him, she … she better get her ass into gear and report back.
“What’s the time?” were her first words, but Helen had already checked her readouts, done the math and so the first words she heard were, “We’ve got 20 hours, babe.” She’d been online for a mercifully short space of time, considering how much was at stake, considering what kind of shape the previous jaunt had left her in, considering what was up ahead.
“OK,” said Scar, “here’s the deal.” She’d only just stopped herself from saying “dealio” – she was looking forward to going post-cyberpunk, when hopefully the slang would improve. She briefed the fifteen and all their newly acquired wingmen about the general plan and then they split into groups to strategise and try to get themselves into something resembling a healthy state.
They didn’t have time to sleep … they had to sleep … if only Blue was there, oh man. Time to call in the medics, time for seriously precise sleepers. Four anaesthetists from the city put them under and then brought them round again. Five hours gone. Another hour spent washing, finding comfortable clothes and food. T minus 14 hours and counting …
Time for Scar to jack in again, quick in and quick out.
veto
4tw scar? u shouldnt be here y0
i no. veto, if it all goes shitshaped
o fuck me no – dyke drama
har listen l0ser
whut
r u safe?
yes
u got money?
hell yes
whatcha need veto
fokol scar i’m good man
no veto what u need?
…
whut? c’mon boy dammit
friends scar. how bout u get thru the mission safely + be my friend
*FLIP*
Scar hadn’t even signalled, the little fucker had booted her offline. She grinned.
Mawkish, huh? Ah fuck you. You had to be there to understand that moment.
Otaku asking for a friend – was that a global first? Not the impulse, certainly, but the expression of it. Veto was OK somehow, still human.
T minus the remaining 11 hours was spent checking and testing the computers and equipment. A malfunction would mean too great a failure. The fifteen and the wingmen ate together, checked each other’s equipment and got ready. Helen suddenly yelled like a politician, “Genderno!!” and then everyone else yelled it and by that time they were all jazzed like a rugby team before the Currie Cup, like Bafana Bafana before 2010, or some damn thing. “For Blue!” yelled Deano. “For Sam!” yelled Dave and Scar countered with, “Alriiiight, let’s jack the fuck in!” Fuck it, thought Scar, Sam is gonna go batshit when she hears she missed this.
The fifteen lined up in the Quarter Online, Scar desaturated and cut them all right through to Veto, who was there with about 50 avatars, all hopping up and down like animated gif’s. The same information uploaded, scrolling across all of their eyefeeds at once.
there is no alarm call on this
there is no safety net
lives are at stake, far more than just urs
commit now or fuck off
Nobody fucked off.
if ur using a controlled or uncontrolled substance, fuck off
Nobody fucked off.
if u got kids, fuck off
Three avatars flipped out.
if u got 2nd thoughts, fuck off
Nobody fucked off.
map + code uploading now. when u got the files u gonna see a diagram of who goes where. n0 fuckn hissy fits or i flip u. u form the shape u see in the position u see + then u keep ur fuckn heads down and cut like it sez. understand?
Hell yes. Scar wondered whether the group would be quite so obedient if they knew Veto was 14. She’d only told Helen, she’d probably only ever tell Helen.
u lose a player, u keep playing.
yes, sensei …
u all got the data so anyone, everyone can do the work
yes, sensei …
if u get as far as sangoma ur in more shit than u ever seen y0
yes, sensei …
u know how to plant a virus?
yes, sensei
good. go
And Veto was gone.
[ASCII here]
And that’s how they rolled, fiftywhatever avatars all in a tight hexagon, five triangles, the five quarters.
Scrollfeed: securibots disabled.
That done, their only problem would be SangomaNet. No point in stealth this time round, just by gathering there, they had effectively declared war. The shaman would be wrapping itself in code now, to deflect attack. Their only real hope was speed and so they flew.
The scene was as ugly as Tony Blair’s missus first thing in the morning. There was no surgery at all, just a maelstrom of slashing right round that hexagon, like Boudicca’s chariot spikes.
Someone (if I tell you who know I’ll blow my own punchlines) recreated the whole thing graphically afterwards and it was freaking gorgeous. All those stacks giving way to this bright silver, swirling disc. What a trip man, what a fucking trip.
The sangoma had wisely positioned itself out in the data desert, giving itself room to move, but hey, that gave us room to move too and hopefully we were enough so that if we could find a corner to chase it into we’d damn well make one.
What it looked like online had no relation to what it looked like back in meatspace and it really didn’t matter either. What we saw though, was intimidating. Comparing notes later, we all saw whatever we feared the most, in true mythical monster style. I got a ten foot tall angry purple woman and I felt my blood run cold. A few others out of the fifteen saw women too – Dave got his ex wife, which is something we really haven’t stopped laughing about yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment