Net-cromancer: A cyberpunk fable
A short story work in progress
This is a work in progress of a short story/novella I’ve been tooling around with for a couple of months. Partly an attempt to practise world-building in creative writing, partly just an idea I had for a story that I thought would be cool, its final form is yet to be decided, and I welcome any and all feedback.
[ONE]
The sky, burnt orange, thick and sodden, like a blanket of slime over the city. The air, humming with the static of a billion discordant communications. One last great insult to the Orgs. A sickly sweet attempt to lure us into the net.
The promise of peace from the eternal noise.
One last prison for the mind.
It was almost torturous, the scent of mango on the air almost everywhere you travelled, the telltale sign of H1VE’s presence. It wasn’t enough that our lives were already entrenched in plastic, now nanomachines covered every inch of the planet, ensuring that no one could truly live off the grid.
I tried my best, but there was no existence independent of the world around it, and I couldn't help but resent every second of it.
They were in your blood now.
A hand stretched out across the expanse longing for flesh and bone to reach back. Too busy our lives already swallowed by ersatz scouts. They are trillions, an invisible army digging their way through the very fabric of reality. There was no purely organic anymore. Not in any way that mattered.
A brief chill cut through me as I dropped down from the roof of the shack. The kind of chill that seems alien in the moment because you’re so used to the weight of Summer. The days kept getting hotter year on year, and even with these miraculous advances in science all humanity had managed to achieve was ‘locked at forty’. What a joke.
I was on the hunt for an escape rope. My time was running out. Every day it became harder and harder to exist in the moment as myself, and myself alone.
A 100% bona fide human being.
No cyber brain.
No implants.
Just good old fashioned flesh, bone and assorted traumas.
I pulled up to the H1VE hub, one hand in pocket nuzzling my blade, the other gripped the case I had dragged along with me. The street had emptied. It was the hottest part of the day and sunstroke had a nasty effect on implants. A second too long baking in the audience of that giant orbiting menace and you’d lose days, weeks even.
This was the perfect time for a heist.
I opened the case, affixing my headset and running my hand across the smooth cranium of this exhumed artificial entity. Much as I despised this technology, I must admit the satisfaction of clicking wires into sockets is second to none. You don’t get this with the new kits. Everything is wireless now, you don’t even need a backup power source, it all just runs off the body.
You are the battery.
Years ago I had watched this bit of classic science fiction that posited a dystopian future in which all of humanity had been plugged into a grand simulation in order to be harvested of their natural energy for the machines that had taken over the planet. It seemed ridiculous at the time. What we have now is worse.
HELLO CAM
An artificial voice rang through my ears as I fired up The Skull.
‘Hello Loro’ I replied, fiddling with the uncomfortable ear piece I was reluctant to put near my brain for too long. ‘Are you ready for some fun?’
VERY MUCH SO. WHAT ARE WE DOING TODAY THEN?
‘Oh, nothing fancy. There’s a data hub in this unit that i’d quite like to get into. Some treats for the both of us, I think’
YOU THINK?
‘Well, if I’m right, then maybe this will be the last time we end up working together’
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER TO WEEP OR SCREAM WITH JOY
‘You cheeky bitch', I laughed.
With the last of the initialisation done, I returned the skull to the case, and made my way around the back of the unit. Fingers crossed that they hadn't updated the key lock, I let out a sigh of relief as I punched in the code I ripped from H1VE servers earlier this morning.
0451
The satisfying click of the maglock, I took one last glance around as the hatch opened and I crawled in. It was absolutely roasting. All the advances in technology in the world have not stopped the basic fact that things that require energy generate heat. I knew time was not on my side here but I couldn't pay it any mind. This time I had to be thorough. The bounty was simply too important.
'Loro, open the directory please'
WHAT ARE WE SEARCHING FOR?
'My source tells me there's a hidden folder somewhere in opps'
THERE IS
'Well, would you like to retrieve it for me?'
WHAT'S THE MAGIC WORD?
'Please' I rolled my eyes. Having to negotiate with lines of code masquerading as a long dead hacker was not how I pictured my life.
THANK YOU
A brief hum, a whirr, a clicking sound that definitely did not need to be there but was included in The Skull’s design for nostalgic reasons, and then silence.
I’VE LOCATED THE FOLDER BUT…THIS IS STRANGE…
‘What is?’
THERE ARE CLOSE TO 2 BILLION FILES HERE BUT THEY ALL COLLECTIVELY HAVE A SIZE OF LESS THAN A MEGABYTE
'You mean Zero-Byte?'
NO…I DON'T HAVE THE REQUIRED INFORMATION TO EXPLAIN WHAT THIS IS
A chill swept through me. This was something new. Something even Loro in all their infinite wisdom couldn't compute.
CAM
‘Loro?’
A piercing tone started to permeate the unit. I could taste something almost amniotic. A panic swelled within me as Loro’s words stopped making sense and my heart stopped beating.
Something in this place was killing me.
USER ACCESS UPDATED
The world ceased to exist.
[TWO]
I awoke violently. It was dark and I was in an unfamiliar place. That amniotic taste remained but was now amplified by a constant background hum of rust scraping. My head hurt. I could not get my balance. I looked around. I looked down at myself. Intact. Still wearing the same outfit. No bruises, or puncture marks, or cuts. My eye’s a little blurred but not much more than usual.
CAM
‘Loro? What happened. Where are we?’
WE ARE SAFE, FOR NOW. BUT I NEED TO EXPLAIN SOMETHING TO YOU.
‘Ok, I'm listening’. At that point my hand instinctively went to my ear. No earpiece. I touched my face. No headset. I looked around. That chrome skull was nowhere to be seen.
‘Loro, how are you talking to me right now?’
CAM, CAN I TRUST YOU TO STAY CALM AND LISTEN TO MY ANSWER, EVEN IF THE TRUTH MIGHT BE HURTFUL?
‘Why would you ask me that? How can I promise something like that? Loro, where are you?’
CAM…
Ice formed in the pit of my stomach. A violation had occurred and suddenly all I could feel was the sensation of everything around me. Prickling my skin. Stinging my eyes. I wanted to vomit but it didn’t seem like there was anything to come up.
'How?'
I DON'T KNOW. WHATEVER WAS ON THAT SERVER HAS ALTERED OUR STATES
I have augs.
I frantically checked my body again but there was still no sign of surgical scars, no injection sites, no visible sign that anything of my body was different. Yet the sensation of living was off, and Loro was speaking to me inside my own head. I could no longer smell mango. What was this?
'I…I don't know what to do', I stammered quietly.
I have augs.
I have no frame of reference for how they're supposed to feel. How they work. What they mean for how I navigate my normal life. Can I still have my normal life?
A gnawing dread had to be stifled if but for a moment so that I could ask a pertinent question.
‘Loro?’ I began, but they already knew what I wanted to ask.
THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE PAID TO FIND, CAM. THE NEXT ADVANCE IN NANOTECHNOLOGY, A WAY FOR H1VE TO GET EVERYONE INTO THEIR ECOSYSTEM
I SUPPOSE BY EXTENDED LOGIC, THAT MAKES YOU THE BOUNTY
A wave of nausea started, and in a second was instantly suppressed by something within me. I thought about the pain in my head and it almost immediately started to dissipate. Systems configured within me to alleviate any and all indicators that I was once human. I thought briefly about what else I could do, and then about what could be done to me in turn.
This was H1VE technology, they’re probably already logged in and monitoring me.
‘Loro?’ I began to ask again, and again was intercepted.
THE PROGNOSIS ISN'T GOOD, BUT WE COULD STILL MAKE IT TO THE DEAD ZONE.
IT'S NOT SAFE TO MESSAGE ZEMO RIGHT NOW, BUT I CAN SEE IF I CAN JAILBREAK THIS SYSTEM FROM THE INSIDE, GIVE US A BIT OF PRIVACY
‘Do you think they anticipated you being here with me?’
MAYBE. BUT THEY ONLY KNEW MY FLESH SELF BY MY DEEDS, NOT WHAT THEY WERE TRULY CAPABLE OF. WHAT I AM TRULY CAPABLE OF.
‘Well, be careful please?’ I responded darkly. ‘I don’t want to be bricked’
[THREE]
Having spent almost my entire life around computers, and painfully aware of their capacity to change lives, for better or worse, I found myself at a crossroads with this new body of mine.
I say ‘new’ as though it wasn't the same old body as before, just now infected by a likely irreversible technophage, and equally haunted by the spectre of someone I never actually knew.
It at the same time felt both familiar and alien. Sensory experiences heightened, I could feel the muscles in my arms and legs rearranging to maximize my latent strength. My heart, now beating in a more uniform rhythm to more efficiently deliver oxygen to my organs. My organs…Christ, I don't even know.
It was my brain I was most terrified of now. Memory altered in such a way that I struggled to keep a separation between lived experiences and everything I now had access to on the web. I could never remember my father’s face, he died far too long ago for that, and because he lived off the grid at a time when that was plausible, no images of him existed online. And yet, when I thought of him now, some disgusting freak of nature came to mind. An AI generated apparition, an approximation of a man built out of nothing but demographics and structural prejudices.
Loro was working hard to create a sort of faraday cage for my identity, a means of separating the ghost from the phantom, so to speak. It was honestly fascinating to work through this experience with them, as I could sense everything they were doing. The routines I already knew, and the things unique to them.
While alive Loro was notorious among the underground for their ability to pull themselves out of the gnarliest situations with nothing more than a Dek and some panache.
It was for this reason that I felt like I had hit the jackpot when I changed upon their Skull, a post mortem gift to only those most adventurous, a paradoxical artificial approximation of someone deathly opposed to the spiritual theft that machine learning partook in.
It started with an innocuous message on a nameless message board, just days after it was announced that Loro had died. A series of physical coordinates, an IP address, a cipher and, most bizarre of all, a children's riddle, none of which pointing to any one particular space, or so we thought. The community went wild with speculation. Had Loro discovered the mother of all data dumps? The keys to the city? A means of wiping out H1VE altogether?
As it conspired, and as I discovered the hard way, what lay in wait at the end of this particularly baffling sequence of puzzles was a Skull, and the realization that Loro’s spirit had been broken. Not by some big, evil revelation, but by a thousand cuts. Their own notoriety brought nothing of substance, nothing permanent. It brought them a lot of grief, and anxiety over constantly being surveilled. Public enemy number one for the corps and the state, and all for a series of answers that only begged further questions.
There was no end to this road for Loro except the one they could make for themselves, and so, one day, they took their own life. The Skull was a gift to the community, a database of tools to continue the fight and a remnant of a person no longer with them but willing to leave something of themselves behind.
I selfishly took it. I saw it as a ticket to outer space, a life jacket for one when it could have been so much more. I’ll admit I’ve never had an ounce of selflessness about me my whole life but even I had to give it a second thought because it was just so greedy.
I still did it though. And here we are. Loro’s gift to the world, now a rotting revenant trapped in the body of a fucking idiot.