"Second Reality"

A cyberpunk influenced piece I've been working on during the really late hours of the night...

CHP.1     The Walk Home.

The air was thick that night. Thick and cold, like a lead sheet that blanketed the entire city. I was unsure if my footsteps were heard though I didn't particularly care, I just continued my way down the alley. I looked to the sky and saw the familiar view. My eyes gazed upon a starless, pitch black sky. Adorned with the vertical edifices of thousands of sky scrapers, the only stars you were ever going to see were artificial. Simply just lights in the near millions of tower windows, or the occasional hover pod making a midnight run. Those like me never had the luxury of owning such a vehicle, such a marvel of technology in and of itself. Merely taking the primitive bus systems around town came to be expensive enough. I had just gotten off work not even an hour ago, if you could call what I do anywhere near a “normal” job. In a way, staying off the grid so to speak was perfectly beneficial to my occupation, as anonymity had since become my identity. The tungsten illumination of the alley lights only served to bright a path of pure desolation and decay as it clashed with various neon fueled advertisements of skanky bars and not so swank parlors around this part of the city we all have come to call “Delta Prime”. My apartment wasn't far from here, and often times I took my time to get there to ensure I had dealt with my previous job completely. I didn't need any unwanted business following me home.

 

I checked under the pocket of my trench coat, making sure that my .45 ACP hand gun was still there. Indeed it was. During the course of my last job, I had taken a near spill down a 15 step flight a stairs, and it would NOT have benefit me to have left any shred of evidence of my being there, lest a trade mark trail of bodies of assorted ilk. Sometimes it was the lame drug deal gone bad, and I had to play the role of a party crasher...if you chose to use such an antiquated term. Other times its the removal of a highly volatile political puppet that wants to encroach upon our worlds already limited freedoms. Sometimes, it just gets out of hand. They want to do nothing more than evaluate and scout the situation and only move in on the bounty when absolutely necessary but then there's the feeling. The unmistakable feeling that the person you're working for wants you just as dead as the f****r you were paid to take out and that your pay was a mere manipulation tactic to see how desperate you are. I hate those jobs. They're always too messy. Not so much for the intended targets, but for the a******s that thought they could get away with setting me up.

 

I'm not overly proud of what I've chosen to do, but in a city that would literally tear itself to pieces without the efforts of people like myself, I had to find some kind of a niche to carve for myself. There was a time where I was solemnly swore to protect the people, the dignity, and the laws of Delta Prime, and I'd done my job well, even earned my self several medals under their police force, but that was then. Once you realize that bounty hunting isn't the only job that wants to set you up for possibly the worst fall of your entire life, you also inevitably realize how truly fucked the world is and what a real dog-eat-dog game it is. I was near the steps of my apartment now. I ascended the rusting metal stairs now certain that I hadn't been followed and as I progressed into the main center of the large rectangular complex I returned to the familiar sights and and sounds of under waged living in the year 2040. The Securi-Tron security cameras were on nearly every corner and corridor of this complex. Security is something our world came to embrace when we first birthed mass AI in our world. Too lazy to complete our own tasks, we resorted to androids and various mechanical counterparts to do menial labor for us, however the leaders of man never fully trusted them at first. In the year 2025 this distrust seemed to disintegrate and Securitron was born. It was partnered with the police force I had previously worked for but when it up and took over our police force and slowly started replacing human officers with what we called the “Guardian” units I split. I can never seem to get away from their cold, judging, steely stare. It peers right into your sole, grabs a hold, and refuses to let you go. They are linked to the security cameras that are on every single corner and light post you can think of. Almost everything you say or do can be recorded in this world, and people are still under the illusion that it was all done for their safety, so that we could immediately respond to emergencies as they happened.

 

Now all securitron seems to do is just use its iron grip on our privacy for its own end. I didn't so much want to delete my entire past, erase everything I ever was, that I had ever done but it was a survival tactic. The few that I associate with these days merely call me “Shadow” because that is where I feel I must exist most of the time; in the shadows, hidden from the watchful eye of an authority that seems to have a very dark agenda of its own. The sounds of these complexes were just as dreary, but they all retained the family strife of humanity that was always familiar to us: a distant couple arguing about god knows what, the bass filled rumble of some prick with his stereo on far too loud, an unruly baby crying wanting its mother to ease it back into a peaceful dream far away from this bleak world...and the soft purr of Blake. Blake was a stray cat that always followed me around my complex. I don't know where he came from. He just showed up one day at my door step and refused to leave. He's a good cat, and I've always been partial to pets. I let him stay because sometimes living alone in this place can really get to your head. Blake followed me down the unpleasantly sterile scented corridor (it seemed to have been recently cleaned, the cleaner smell nearly burnt my nostrils) to the door of my apartment.

 

429, it read above the door in precisely stenciled letters. I put my key into the door lock and with a swift swipe of my card the electronic lock disengaged and I pushed the door open. Blake quickly darted in front of me into the apartment like a black blur and went right to his food bowl in the kitchen. Often times I wonder how he ever makes it outside from a completely seal room, but that's neither hear nor there. I stepped inside and shut and locked the door behind me, and tossed my keys onto the table in front of my couch before practically collapsing onto it from exhaustion. I needed a vacation from jobs for a time, my body couldn't keep putting itself through all of this constant abuse and not eventually break. I sat up for a moment, took my coat off, tossed it onto the recliner that I had found and kicked off my shoes while Blake busily nommed away at his food. There wasn't much to my apartment that seemed overtly high tech for the year 2040, I live with what I need. Excess really isn't my thing. There are some a******s in this world that manage to afford the rich high rises of Omega tower, a towering structure near the heart of the city, away from this dank and nearly toxic sector, and still feel like they never have enough. They can afford a $200,000 a month apartment suite...yet they don't have enough.

 

Sometimes I wish I could get a job against one of those types just so that in their last few moments I could give them this speech about how they should've appreciated how lucky they were or something along those lines, but then again, I don't think many people in this day and age ever saw Pulp Fiction, and even fewer even watch anything intelligent. I own a TV, but never watch anything on it besides old movies. The preprogrammed nonsense had only gotten more propogandous and idolatrous with time. The news had become nothing more than a biased, religiously fueled mess. The guilt of God's judgment seemed to find its way into EVERY facet of every story. It seemed as though we had gone into a high tech dark age, where God was simply just a tool to scare weak and degenerate people into controlled submission. Even with this sad reality, I stilled maintained my faith. I never viewed a God as a being of manipulation or control, but as something that cannot harbor our human ways of hate and intolerance. Something that always wanted to forgive you because it saw the reasons behind everything. It was comforting to have a father of Forgiveness to turn to in such an unforgiving world. It helped me feel less alone. For some, the simplicity of that just was not enough, and they either demanded and explanation that I could not give...or tried to force me to buy indulgences...prepaid forgiveness on a card. F**k. I really was living in the dark ages.

 

I rolled onto my back and stretched out. It felt like every muscle in my body had been over twined and was about to snap up until I did that. Slowly, I drifted into a sleepy state while watching the familiar twinkle of the city lights from my partially cracked blinds, and in the farthest distance I could see the distant mountain ranges that few had ever been too...

 

CHP.2  Wake up John...

My skull felt like there was a jackhammer inside of it.  Bright lights, burning as hot as the sun were hovering above me, arranaged in a circular pattern.  A distant white ceiling hung above this blinding mobile.  The cold of steel ran shivers down my back...but where was I?  I could not move, but I was moving.  Through corridors and hallways.  Covered faces blurred past and loud voices jutted in every now and then, fading into obscurity.  A pain to end all pains screamed through my chest and my right arm, but I could not react.  I could not move.  I thought I might've died and ended up in some transitional place between Earth and Hell at first and that this was nothing more than a nightmarish transportation process but as my hearing grew better, I started to realize that I had ended up in a hospital.  One of the many military hospitals set up in this nasty place.

 

I hate this dream...a million times over its always the same.

 

Author's Note

work in progress, wanting critique

Reviews

[Ren/Olivia]

pretty awesome. we need more. -Ren

[Megan]

Please continue. It's not often that a story catches my attention like this. Great work, you seem very experienced.