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[yaboyyjay]

Nightfall. Planet Provia.

Catgirl Dot is kicking back on a narrow catwalk, thousands of feet above her resident arcology's largest bioreserve. With so many body modifications transforming her into a feline, she's able to slink around the protected area undetected.

The irises of her electric green eye implants are glowing as they extend out from their corneas to project a quantum computer-generated reality into her lens, directly stimulating the retinal cells that transmit visual information to her brain. Using a true-to-life virtual avatar, Dot searches the simulated world for her newest long-distance beau, Clu, who dwells in a cubicle apartment on one of 15 surface colonies scattered about the planet's only natural satellite.

Clu is standing outside -- or what passes for outside on the lunar superstructure -- and gazing up through the colony's semitransparent radiation and micrometeorite shields.

Provia fills the sky.

The irises of his bionic eyes are flickering as he switches to their shared simulated reality to generate a private, self-furnishing loll room. Then, he invites her to join as the room auto-populates itself with a random assortment of simulated Provian pets.

Dot's avatar spawns in next to a fuzzy moffbat that's been coded by an algorithm to flutter around her in circles.

"Hey," she's smiling, baring custom fangs with her tail dancing behind her.

"Hey," greets Clu. "Nice mods. You actually have fangs?"

Back on Provia, Dot flicks out her tongue, and a barbel pings against an incisor, amusing Clu to the point of distraction. Finally, she purrs, "Why don't you come down here and see for yourself?"

_____

Art by Jelle Atromitos

[yaboyyjay]

The phone was possessed.

Donnie wanted to buy it, Alyssa wanted to sell it, and Jayden wanted to shoot it with his drone.

I just wanted it work again.

“Where’d you find that thing?” Donnie asked interrogatively, refusing to look at the inert hardware as if the mere sight of it would trigger an autocannibalistic frenzy.

“The question is,” I said, moving the phone into his line of sight just to watch him recoil, to disrupt his moral sensibility. “Where’d it find me?”

Alyssa motioned for the phone, but I snatched it away from her graspy digits. Donnie looked on, traumatized.

“Give it to me,” said Jayden.

“Why? It’s dead. What are you gonna do with it?” I mashed buttons randomly. Yet he grabbed the phone and held it like a vial of Guanarito virus, ripe and ready to bring down a microstate.

“Doesn’t look dead to me,” Jayden declared as the phone suddenly activated itself. “It’s not dead.” The screen flashed with electric colors.

“It’s… undead!”

"Hrii ng'fhalma ep ee Nyarlathotep."

A voice rasped through the speaker, almost impossible to hear over the silence that fell between us and the universe. Then, it grew louder, and Jayden dropped the haunted artifact, backing away like it was going to reach out and grab him.

Alyssa was recording it with her phone.

“H'stell'bsna ron ah tharanak!” The cell-dweller bellowed. Then it let out an incessant, wrenched stream of untranslatable words that rattled my nerves, trembled my teeth, and shook me bone deep.

Someone had to stop it; stop the noise, the unholy racket conjured up from evil, screaming through a powerless combination of metals and plastic.

With one hand smashed against an ear, Donnie snatched the phone from the hardwood floor and broke swiftly towards the kitchen.

We followed almost on cue, watching him toss it into the microwave oven, slam numbers into the prompt, and start it with the cold, hard focus and determination of a carefully planned freak out.

As the numbers counted down, a hellish skull tore into this world from another. I gasped as the phone erupted into a horrifying version of itself, morphing, spitting, and screaming. It ripped and raged and bled and fried from the inside out, letting out a transdimensional death-cry before painting the insides of the oven with silver, platinum, palladium, copper, tin, zinc, and something totally not of this planet.

Alyssa shrieked but kept her phone steady.

“I got it!” She laughed triumphantly. “I got the whole thing!”

But as she was recording her phone died. Then the screen began to flash with electric colors…

[yaboyyjay]

Metroid Molting (After Hawk's Roosting by Ted Hughes)

[yaboyyjay]

Wayne lost her in an autonomous car crash.

He'd lost a lot of himself that day after flatlining on the flight to a trauma unit. A trauma specialist recorded that he'd been dead for ninety-seven seconds, but it may have been an eternity.

He remembered hurtling through a long dark tunnel; infinite darkness chasing him towards a light. Then the light took him, and he felt more alive than alive, bathed in warmth and love from the receeding past and the approaching future. A love that met him in the specious present and brought him to her for a final farewell.

Wayne remembered it clearly: it was her time, she'd told him. When he protested, she comforted him, telling him to return to his body.

"Where are you going?" he asked as she radiated concentric rainbows. "How will I know you'll be okay?"

"Watch for the blue jay," she replied, then he found himself with a befuddled trauma team and a skyscraper high rescue and resuscitation bill.

Most of Wayne had been replaced with cybernetic parts, but his heart still pumped red blood. He still felt the energy of the universe, ebbing and flowing, interfacing with organic and non-organic life. What's more, he felt changed, evolved; no longer afraid of death. And he burned for his time to come, longing to be reunited with her again.

Then, one day, while walking through the city, Wayne heard something that had been all but wiped out in the sector. Something his bionic ears couldn't convert to a neural message or recognizable sound. When he looked down, he saw it: a blue jay bouncing along the ground!

As the bird hopped towards him, his bionic eyes tagged it as an anomaly, a sign that couldn't be interpreted by machines. But it chirped, and he felt relief, smiling for the first time since they were together. Because it meant she was happy and alive somewhere, on the other side of forever.

_______

Art by Dan Mora

[yaboyyjay]

A smuggler came to a security checkpoint with a BigDog. The BigDog’s modular storage rack was stuffed with various low-grade military gear. The securitybot at the checkpoint was suspicious, and it X-rayed the containers, studying the colorful holographic backscatter, until there was useless data scattered all around, but not an illegal device in the containers was found. “I know you’re cloaking something,” said the securitybot as the smuggler left the gate.

Now each day for ten months the smuggler came to the security checkpoint with a BigDog. Although the securitybot searched and searched the containers on the dog’s back, it never could find anything dodgy in them.

Many years later, after the securitybot was relieved of duty, it happened to see the smuggler in a marketplace and said, “Know what I’ve always wanted to know? What were you smuggling? Autonomous drones? Emotion engine modulators? Ballistic shield generators?”

“BigDogs,” said the smuggler.

_____

Art: "A Boy and His Dog" by Sandara

[yaboyyjay]

Mexico city, 20XX. An unforgiving star is bearing down on 9 million denizens as heat wavers over the sizzling, pothole-ridden pavement. Suddenly you hear music pumping from strategically posted megaspeakers, washing across city blocks and pulsing down sexual boulevards and gritty back alleys. Thumping from car speakers… in unison!

Sinister supersaw leads roll and plow into brick and mortar. They flood through open windows into lofts, into the minds of workers and peds alike, far and wide, who pause to drink it in. Cars halt in the middle of intersections and release entranced occupants, hypnotized by the sheer power of rhythm. Then a man (Rabia Sorda!) leaps atop a sedan and rips the cargo vest off his lanky frame, arms flailing six ways and every which way between. He’s jumping, stomping, thrashing, wailing at the gods to the rabid noise of the Neo Millenio.

And the people follow.

Thousands - no, millions - reach for the sky. They pound the concrete in gravity-defying leaps. A city rocks beneath the weight of broken dreams… and the gods take notice: storm clouds coalesce over a choppy, discordant wave of manic mammals, blocking the angry sun as people rave from balconies and rooftops and under streetlamps and stoplights, bodies bouncing in synch to the sound of Cenobita:

“DE-PEN-DEN-CY! DE-PEN-DEN-CY! DE-PEN-DEN-CY! DE-PEN-DEN-CY!”

The chant carpet-bombs the crowd as clouds empty their contents, punctuated by thunderclaps rivaled only by four-by-four kick and snare relationships so heavy, they can be heard from 15 surrounding sister cities. Sweat mingles with sheets of rain and something amazing happens. Something impossible. The gods target Rabia Sorda and turn him into a torch.

Electric blue fuego ignites the sky and engulfs the neopunk. But he raves! He raves unscathed, mohawk standing on end, sparks dashing through his fingertips! His eyes are pools of electric light, glowing bright between lightning strikes. He’s deified and the mob’s electrified. Then, waves swell and undulate from the center, matching sub-bass frequencies that fall well below the threshold of consciousness, and, just like that:

“IT’S OVER!”

[yaboyyjay]

The Hyperloop vactrain arrived, docking with station ring G-27 to load up on washed-out co-founders and other evenly-distributed futurefolk.

Delphi, a full-body VR dancer, boarded the capsule and sat nearest to the airlock. As the capsule approached supersonic speeds, she put on her Apple Vision 8 and used an app to discover local players in the latest fan-modded build of Battlefield: Dystopian Warfare.

The app matched her with three other passengers in the loop, including someone from her capsule.

She was calling down an orbital laser strike when the vactrain docked at her stop. The hatch unsealed, and Delphi looked around for her teammate, spotting him in the last row. Sporting black rhino horn implants, he was wired up to the chrome dome and manspreading across the seat.

He lowered his headset, scanning her visage with face-recognizing iOptiks. But the dancer hurried off the capsule, quitting the match and blocking him before he could spam her with double dick pics.

______

Art by techgnotic

[yaboyyjay]

WATERFALL

Bryce (username: Mario) was listening to music when he received an invitation from his friend, Alexia (username: Cherry), to meet in full dive virtual reality.

Mario didn’t have anything else to do that evening, so he activated his wearable head-mounted display. Then, he paired the wireless, non-invasive input controller (or brain-computer interface) to the display, put it on his head, pulled it down over his eyes, and accepted the invitation.

He was standing in a full-scale model of M.C. Escher’s Waterfall, which had been rendered in a video game engine known for its stunning graphics that pushed the boundaries of VR without any performance issues.

He switched to continuous movement and—using the BCI controller—proceeded up a flight of stairs to examine the impossible machine from below. With an uncapped framerate, silky smooth sparkling water poured over the wood-textured wheel of the watermill. From a traditional perspective, water appeared to zigzag up two tribars and tumble down again—violating the laws of physics.

Bored but unwilling to leave, a few regular users in customized avatars were hanging out on the narrow, shallow, 20th century brick-mapped water channels. Others were leaping from truncated paths and searching for glitches.

Everything else was normal: a non-playable character stood on the flat roof of her home, calmly hanging laundry out to dry, while another NPC—the miller—gazed into the sky. Both seemed oblivious to the impossible waterfall, though they were programmed to comment extensively on the piece.

“Mario!” Cherry greeted from a balcony. Her avatar waved. Mario returned the wave, distracted by what appeared to be a cluster of moss and lichen, enlarged many orders of magnitude and swaying in the breeze.

He craned his neck, eye-trackers tracking his pupils to view two towering supports for the waterfall’s aqueduct. They were topped by two compound polyhedra: three intersecting cubes for one tower and three octahedrons for the other.

Seeing the shapes for the first time triggered an NPC: “Escher loved mathematics and art!” said the woman airing out laundry in an infinite loop.

“Newbie alert!” A regular yelled before leaping from a ledge.

Mario imagined scaling a pillar of the first and highest tower to view the solids. It would be tricky and he wanted to record the geometric wonders.

One problem: Waterfall’s developer had disabled recording. So Mario had to use a different recorder—one that wasn’t on the blocklist.

Mario left Waterfall and joined a sea of avatars in Google’s sprawling search engine. He was using Cherry’s theme, who’d customized everything to look like something out of Tron: a classic film from the Old World with an aesthetic of space, with structures representing social networks scattered across the virtual landscape.

Billions were in the flow of browsing. Mario pulled up a list of stores, then followed directions in his heads-up display to Daydream View, a store selling recorders that bypassed most blocks.

He was auto-greeted by the mascot of Daydream View. With a powerful search engine, it answered most questions before anyone could finish asking them. Except for a few visitors browsing VR video game recorders and other expensive items, the store was all but empty.

After several minutes of browsing, Mario downloaded a VeeVue Recorder and Editor for 20 credits. Then he exited into organized chaos to make his way back to Waterfall; into a world of ads, bots, and users with custom avatars. He didn’t feel like walking so he switched to top-down view, which presented every site from above, then selected Waterfall before diving back into his avatar.

He spawned in with an unrecognizable device that may or may not have been a recorder. Cherry was gone but the site retained a steady stream of visitors coming and going insofar as the mental cost was low.

Mario examined the machine. The aqueduct, which started at the waterwheel, flowed endlessly behind it.

From where he was standing the illusion was broken: directly overhead were ledges of the two tribars. Water flow stopped at each ledge. The bottommost aqueduct formed an L, the middle a Z-like shape, while the uppermost aqueduct was a ledge from which water tumbled down unto the wheel. He shifted his gaze to a curl-up lounging under an arch of a small bridge, which connected the flat roof of a house to the watermill.

A fictional animal invented by Escher, it was programmed to watch Mario with two stalked, beady eyes, then—true to its name—curl up and roll around the villa and climbing expanse of terraced farmland.

“The curl-up is elongated and armored with several keratinized joints,” described the miller. “It has six legs, each with what appears to be a human foot. It has a disc-shaped head with a parrot-like beak and eyes on stalks on either side. It can either crawl over a variety of terrain with its six legs or press its beak to the ground and roll into a wheel shape.”

Mario wondered who was watching. Waterfall’s developer logged every event “to help improve the experience”, which involved tracking users to determine their interests. He suspected Waterfall’s developer would sell his information to businesses, who’d spam his inbox with advertisments.

Nevertheless, he wanted to record everything. It’ll be worth something to someone, he thought. But that wasn’t the only reason he wanted the video. There was also the satisfaction of bypassing obstacles to make it. ThreeVee, the internet’s largest VR video-sharing site, needed a video of Escher’s Waterfall, and Mario wanted to deliver.

_______

Mario spawned at the bottom of a stairwell; an entry to the quaint villa. At the top of the steps was an open space. Behind him, to his right was the home with a large balcony, where the woman was hanging clothes. To his left were some steps descending unto a rooftop, where the miller stood with his back against a railing.

He changed into his favorite parkour outfit and took a deep breath from muscle memory. He wasn’t going to actually run. Instead, he would activate the neurons that triggered locomotion by thinking about running, while the BCI controller translated neuronal signals to movement in VR.

Without hesitation he opened VeeVue and began recording.

________

Mario is gazing up at the waterfall in first person.

From his perspective, the environment blurs as he inhales, sprints, and jump-kicks off a brown painted wall. Then he twists in mid-air to grab the ledge of a small arched walkway serving as a bridge to the mill.

Both of his arms are extending into the field of view, gloved hands gripping the bridge. He hangs for a beat before climbing with his heart rate, then stands to record the top of the walkway.

A trio of regulars are sitting on the only steps to the bottom water channel. One of them glares at Mario and flashes an obscene emote.

“Nice recorder, newbie. How much did you pay for it?”

But Mario jumps over them, splash landing in the channel.

"Hey—!

He breaks into a sprint, aqua blue water sloshing around red running shoes. The brain-reading technology is controlling every step as he stops at the L channel’s drop and whirls 180 degrees, spinning the colorful environment.

Jumping vertically, he grabs the ledge of the second level water channel and pulls himself up.

Then he's free-running the waterway. As he turns a hard corner, the highest tower looms.

Keep running.

He cat-leaps to grab the uppermost ledge with one hand only to slip and splashdown flat, submerging briefly. Two regulars peer over the top ledge and laugh as he springs up gasping for air, overwhelmed by the fear of drowning.

He looks above them: part of the simulated sun is occluded by Escher’s compound of intersecting cubes.

“Mario?”

He’s glancing over the side of the channel to get a bird’s eye view of Cherry’s avatar.

“Up here!” Their eyes meet as he leans slightly over the ledge to flash a victory sign.

“Are you using a recorder?” she tut-tuts. “Those are—”

“No,” Mario lies. He’s backing up to the first corner of the second level water channel.

“Haha,” sneers one of the regulars. “10 credits says he’ll fall again.”

But Mario is running, the sound of his footsteps breaking the surface tension of the water. He gathers speed and leaps, this time catching the ledge with both hands. Inhale.

Exhale.

He pulls himself into a sitting position and the regulars vanish, exiting in unison.

“Pay up!” Mario announces.

But they're gone and he's laughing over the trickle of the waterfall, the birds perched at the height of the tower, and the gentle breeze taken from stock sound clips starting at two credits each.

_______

The top level was supported by four columns that were covered in graffiti tags. Mario would’ve had to shimmy up a column to reach the highest point of the fall.

But balancing on the top level, against the flow, had taken more brain power than he’d expected. He stumbled while reaching for a column, the horizon tilting at a dizzying angle until he fell down the fall, the recorder capturing it all.

“Oof!”

He laid there for a moment, then pulled himself up from where the wheel-powered aqueduct began.

“Ouch...” Cherry said as he exited the channel and vaulted over the railing some three meters to the ground, where several visitors had gathered.

“Did you tag a column?”

“How much fall damage did that take?”

“Waterfall is a lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher,” the miller said abruptly. “First printed in October 1961. It shows a perpetual motion machine where water from the base of—”

“Skip intro!” Three or four visitors shouted at once.

Mario stopped recording. Paranoid, he glanced around for a moderator that would boot him if they detected a Daydream recorder which, while recording, had changed his avatar’s eyes from a custom color to bright crimson red.

The small crowd of visitors and regulars dwindled with their curiosity. Cherry’s avatar was sitting lotus style in front of Escher’s moss and lichen garden. She could’ve been doing anything from talking to friends to paying off owed credit. Either way, she was absent, and would likely remain so until kicked off the site for going idle.

Mario walked close enough to her avatar for a message to pop up: “Switch to this outfit?” He agreed and was instantly clothed in the same getup configured for male avatars.

He wore a casual, lightweight, sleeveless, slim fit zip-up hoodie over a vantablack printed teeshirt bearing a single, stylized word in hex color red: “CyberPunk”.

Ironically advertising the subculture, the teeshirt hung over a pair of techwear: on-brand harem pants hiked up to his knees and covered with cyberpunk flair.

Dangling before the teeshirt were three necklaces: RGB colored microcircuit boards attached to a thin chain. They’d clink together as he walked, his hands covered in fingerless leather gloves.

“Decent outfit.” Mario said to Cherry’s blank avatar. She’d muted her eye trackers.

_______

Mario decided he’d recorded enough. Falling made him want to try again, but first he wanted to upload his run to ThreeVee.

He stepped back into the infinitely branching traffic of Google, joining the flow once more—billions of avatars travelling at different rates. Some walking, some running, many zipping around on light cycles.

The entire place was alive; the search engine, an organism. Social networks were represented as complex superstructures. Facebook and Twitter towered higher than the graphics engine could render.

“Amazing, huh?” Cherry spawned beside him, exiting Waterfall. She’d changed outfits.

“Yeah, for a walking simulator,” Mario replied. “How is it practical to travel this way?”

Like Cherry, Mario was using the free version of the Tron theme. Light cycles were included in the premium version, although they were cosmetic and wouldn’t travel any faster than what he’d paid for.

“I like it,” she opined. “Makes it more immersive.”

Mario received a notification but ignored it, breaking into a sprint.

Cherry did the same, closing the gap immediately. Browsing at faster speeds, she’d outrun him if she knew where he was going.

“What’s the hurry?” She glided next to Mario, running in parallel. She could see her legs and feet. Her legs were covered in bionic leggings, white, black, and gray, with just a hint of red, detailing metal joints, pistons and other industrial artifacts. Her feet were covered in glow-laced running shoes, each step leaving a digital footprint that could be identified and traced.

“The video of the climb and fall,” he said finally. “If it goes viral, maybe businesses will want to sponsor the content.”

Another notification. This time Mario checked the sender. It was an advertisement for a smart car: autonomous, with maximum communication capabilities, friendly, personalizable and, of course, electric.

Mario deleted the message. Yet the first one went unnoticed as he continued sprinting with traffic towards ThreeVee, represented as a megasize movie theater. It was a tronesque megastructure, with sharply angled architecture and searchlights waving across the digital sky: a landmark surrounded by hundreds of competitors.

But before he could get there Cherry received a notification. She checked it and stopped in the middle of traffic, hundreds of avatars zipping by or walking around her automatically.

“Wait, Mario!” Cherry yelled. Yet Mario continued on, sprinting past Bandcamp’s band camps and through popup ads for channels on YouTube. Then he stopped at ThreeVee and scattered the floating multishaped iterations that had taken an interest in him.

Tracking bots.

“What part of Do Not Track don’t you understand?” Mario yelled at the bots. Many of them scattered, while others merely evaded his swats and returned to their orbits.

On cue, an ad splashed across his visor to upgrade the Tron theme: “No More Tracking Bots,” standing out in bold electric green. For a few credits a day, he could have access to premium features including light cycles and a dozen other abstract modes of transportation.

The recommendation popped up frequently in the free version, but this time he decided to upgrade. His surroundings immediately shifted to the highest possible resolution.

Fetching a bright, electric green baton from his harem pants, he transitioned into a light cycle; a 5th generation personal transport bike. Using a few basic mental commands, he beelined away from ThreeVee, merging with traffic to track Cherry’s footprints.

________

The light cycle may have been a cosmetic upgrade for browsing, but handling one was an out-of-orbit experience.

Using the BCI controller, Mario increased the speed of the vehicle by pushing its front and rear ends further apart. The front wheel was locked forward, so steering was done by tilting the entire bike. When attempting certain maneuvers, a pair of small fins would spring out just behind the vehicle to aid either balance or braking.

A throwback forward, it was a ride worth every credit.

Cherry’s footprints became more vibrant until they stopped at Waterfall. As Mario rode the bike into the site, vanishing in a spark of electric blue light, he remembered the unchecked notification winking in his heads-up display.

_______

Waterfall was crowded with visitors.

Mario skipped up the steps and looked around for Cherry. Then, he opened the newest notification to read its message, noticing that the one he'd ignored was from Waterfall.

“Hey,” it was Cherry. “Did you get a notification from Waterfall?”

“Yeah,” Mario replied, switching to live chat. “Thought it was spam.”

Cherry appeared in the top right corner of his heads-up display. “Where are you? There are too many users outside.”

“What’s going on?” He looked over the crowd. Visitors were walking, running, and climbing ledges to reach the top ledge, where the water fell.

“Meet me inside the Laundry Lady’s house,” she replied.

Weaving through visitors, Mario slipped through the door, entering Escher’s House of Stairs with a start.

_______

“Whoa,” was all he could manage when greeted by the home’s surreal interior. He’d never seen anything like it: upside-down and rightside-up staircases ascending and descending to doorways. More than 40 curl-ups crawling the stairs and rolling around, coming and going through one of more than a dozen open entrances and exits.

Cherry was straddling the carapace of a curl-up that was clipping into a wall—a glitch likely caused by the influx of activity. Other curl-ups followed their program, doing what Escher had imagined.

It was an impressive and logic-defying masterpiece and, except for the strange ticking sound made by walking curl-ups, it was quiet.

“What’s up?” said Mario, still perplexed by the home’s interior. “Why’d you come back here?”

“Check your messeges,” she replied.

Mario opened his inbox and was greeted with Waterfall’s Terms of Service.

“These Terms of Service govern your access to and use of Waterfall.” Mario read aloud.

“By submitting, posting or displaying content on or through Waterfall, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce such content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed. This license authorizes us to make your content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree—”

Mario shook his head. He didn’t remember agreeing with anything.

“I never—” he started.

“Keep reading,” Cherry urged.

He continued to read, some parts to himself, other parts aloud.

“...that this license includes the right for Waterfall to provide, promote, and improve Waterfall and blah blah blah...”

His eyes glazed over until he read, “...such additional uses by Waterfall is made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the content that you submit through Waterfall as the use of Waterfall by you is hereby agreed—”

A curl-up bowled by Mario, almost knocking him off a ledge.

“...as being sufficient compensation for the content and grant of rights herein.” He finished.

“So...what does this mean?” But Mario knew what it meant before Cherry could rejoin with, “There should be a video attached. Watch it.”

Hesitantly, he checked and saw that his video had been included in the latest advertisement for Waterfall. A video he was being compensated for merely by using the site.

The video had been edited, but much of it was there: his view of the regular flashing an obscene emote while calling him out for using VeeVue. The view of his first unsuccessful cat-leap to the highest ledge, which made him gasp for air. Laughter and mockery from regulars. The bet that he’d fail again.

Then, the fall. Mario stopped the video.

“Wow...” He said, preparing a response. But Cherry hopped off the sunset orange curl-up.

“Yes, they stole your video—” She began.

“They stole my video...” Mario repeated in dismay.

“Yes.” Cherry said. “But check outside. You’re popular!”

Mario was confused until a few visitors entered the house and looked in his direction.

“Hey! It’s him!” One of them said.

“That was an good run,” said another. “Where’d you get those parkour gloves?”

And another: “I recently installed a new BCI controller. How long before I’ll be able to jump like that?”

_______

Mario wasn’t sure how to respond. Being new to the full dive VR experience, he’d assumed less about his mental ability to get around.

"I, uh, fetched the gloves from Precision,” he started to answer. He then realized why they were impressed: training a brain input controller was a difficult process. The advertisement had embarrassed him, but it also showed prospective visitors his ability to move through virtual space using a controller.

It turned out Mario’s ability had taken most visitors some time to imitate, the majority failing the first jump-kick for need of more practice.

“How do I get out of this place?” Mario looked around, confused.

“Take an upside-down left over there,” Cherry pointed in a vague direction.

He spun around while she laughed.

“Dork. You get out the same way you came in”.

Another curl-up rolled by him. This time he stepped out of the way of its path-finding program.

“Precision?” The visitor remarked. “Their gear’s priced higher than space junk!”

“You’re just poor!”

They argued as Mario exited to the waterfall, where visitors seemed to have doubled in size. He looked over the crowd. Newbies were awkwardly climbing, falling, and running about practicing with their BCIs.

He’d started a trend. One he needed a clue to promote.

“Hey!” Someone said, pointing. “It’s the guy from the ad!” Everyone within range turned in the direction of his avatar.

“No it isn’t,” a visitor objected.

“Yes. That’s the dude who fell. Hey, Lance!” they shouted at another visitor who’d been trying climb a wall. Lance paused to look at Mario.

“Isn’t that the guy from the Waterfall ad?”

Mario was speechless as word of him spread exponentially from visitor to visitor like some kind of virus. Nevertheless, a clique of regulars cast their doubts:

“He’s not that good.”

Mario glanced up. The regulars were sitting in their previous spot on the ledge of the third level.

“He fell, remember?”

Someone booed and Mario felt the blood rushing to his face. Suddenly it hit him: he could do it again. He could complete his run to the top of the cubes.

He changed outfits, control scheme, and sucked in air from muscle memory.

“He’s gonna run!” Someone yelled from under the small bridge. “Get out of the way!”

Just like before, Mario ran towards the wall and jump-kicked to the bridge. Then he sprinted, leapt, flipped and climbed his way to the top ledge.

“Whoa,” the two regulars stood up and made room for him.

“How’d you do it?” One of them demanded.

“Cheater,” came an accusation. “He hacked his controller.”

But the climb had been challenging and he struggled to focus. Balance, he thought.

This ledge is mine.

________

Mario stood. So long as he didn’t move, the water current inched him towards the fall.

Balance. He concentrated while eyeing the graffiti-tagged column. Then, he sprang towards it and climbed compulsively. The crowd looked on and, from ground level, Cherry saw her friend climbing higher and higher.

“Yeah!” She shouted as Mario reached the top of the cubes and...

Vanished.

________

“What?!” Bryce yelled into an empty apartment. He’d crashed back to the VR dashboard, his GPU running hotter than a nuclear summer.

It took a minute or so for him to reorient himself with being back in the real world. He removed the head-mounted display, unpaired the brain input controller, and checked the time.

It was 3 o’clock in the morning.

A ringtone sounded. It was Alexia.

“Bryce? What happened?”

“I’m having some technical issues.” Bryce put on a pair of smart glasses, which settled comfortably in the small groove in the bridge of his nose, made by the display after hours of wear.

“They’re saying you were kicked for using a recorder”.

Bryce removed the glasses, rubbed his eyes, replaced the glasses and peered through a window. City lights strobed as his pupils adjusted to reality’s infinite depth.

“Staring at the city?” she guessed after sending him a message. “Looks like you’re about to crash in real-time.”

“Yeah,” he resigned. And with that he disconnected the call.

After commanding Google Home to shut off the lights, Bryce checked Alexia’s message. It was an invitation to M.C. Escher’s Relativity.

He laughed, saved the invitation, and hand-rolled his wheelchair to bed.

______

Hexel art by Andrew Hicks

[yaboyyjay]

RACING SUN

Before the race, I’d searched for the ultimate custom blade (the anti-gravity racing machine, not the traditional sword section). Powered by retrofitted jet-propulsion systems, blades defy the lithosphere. They bullwhip racers through relative sound barriers and yank them around switchbacks at supersonic speeds that numb the extremities.

But results were scant.

Now I’m sitting in a retinal implant-rattling test rig. Caution strobes may as well dot the thrusters, punchlines to a joke called Hooder Aerosports.

“Crooks. All of ‘em,” grandpa would grumble while running hacks on a blade belonging to Cayn Huges. “They’ll throttle your credflow and put you on wheels - for a fix!”

(Cayn was blademaster champion - back when bladerunners were called pilots. He’d made at least as many enemies as he had friends: people who'd liked him better in memory. Hirelings of a hireling had hired gramps: told him to backdoor into Cayn’s blade and disrupt its co-pilot A.I. They liked to pay with illegal credits and… that’s all I know. Because grampa locked his memories in Acer Naim’s preformatted neuro strata. Then dumped the key in a password protected engram, buried in the neurons of 1 of 3,000 clones that operate discreetly out of an He3 aerostat factory).

Anyway, the four-eyed brothers at Eden Courier Custom might say my ride’s closer to a prototype than their spacetracks in microgravity will allow, but what do they know? To be frank, I’d rather be saddled in a cool, muted Lowd 451. Olive drab, racing stripe so dark your eyes just slide right off it. A converted mobile weapons platform strapped to Devcou DC 5’s twin-thruster system. Then I’d have a chance against suicidal mechanoid, Sun Mateeb.

Sun scans me from a Barracuda blade, mounted high in Emmet Barant’s ultra-light space frame skinned with chromatic cowling. It watches me, a traditional female face nanofused to circuity: convincingly brown eyeotics piping exabytes of visual data along fiberoptic nerves to Nova CoreTek’s processing unit, situated posterior to a nanotube infused olfactory set. It covers its left eye analogue with an unskinned hand and that’s when I know it’s rogue.

I answer with engine revs, flicking switches to appear indifferent and unintimidated. But the mechanoid’s working off of microexpressions that betray my terror: images analyzed and interpreted at the speed of light, with error-correcting prediction models coded by machines. It knows I’m sweating under these heat-resistant nanofibers. Also, it knows I’m sitting in a flying stovepipe, if it prefers to think in such terms.

And we’re off.

I drop the hammer a trillionth of a second before getting the signal to lose as fast as possible to Sun Mateeb. The mechanoid powerboosts off the line with zero turbolag, soaring several yards ahead, using potential and kinetic energy to drive compressors in the Barracuda blade’s turbocharged superjet engines. I upshift and slip into its slipstream, making up time, but Sun cuts right and puts my face in a vaportrail spilling off its left flank.

How’d I get myself into this? Simple tradition: my father was a bladerunner. His father was a bladerunner. His father’s father held a prestigious membership in an invitation-only Jet class, featuring match racing with Diebek-built Z-48 “Koschei” superjets, racing at speeds in the 1000+ mph range. So you could say racing’s in my blood: a vestigial but prominent drive to drive for sport. I was born to blade.

But Sun? Sun was designed to die.

Assembled in a Zarokhli-Anin autofactory on San Kei, a single H97-3 model could fly an explosive, pilot-guided monkey wrench into a migration project and wipe out 70% of its population. Their use in the San Kei conflict was almost mandatory: they were sent out by the thousands to cripple in coordinated suicides; to sink capital ships for the San Kei Front; to put every vessel in the system on high alert. When the war ended, active units like Sun were left to find other ways to fulfill their function.

I back out and nearly clip the hub of a massive, industrial-grade cast iron pipe. We’re racing through a narrow, V-shaped tidal riverbed in the irradiated Mastan shipyards; a steep-walled ditch littered with AxiCorp powercells and warp engine artifacts. The kind of place where one runner’s luck is another runner’s miscalculation. I zig-zag my blade back into coherence and zip unto a broadway that’s overcast with military corvettes. Their floodlights wash across the racing line, oscillating to and fro like emergency spotbeams. Sun dips into a watercourse about a klick distant and I’m running flat-out. I try to keep the mechanoid busy, but it’s me against a .000 reaction time, and the reaction time is winning.

So I do what any self-respecting bladerunner would do. I improvise.

First, I activate the blade’s co-pilot A.I. and link to the Interplanetary Network. Then, using an old trick my dad taught me, I run a program that lets me authenticate into Sun's Barracuda via Hedgemony Throneworld’s low orbit comsat array. The program is hardly new: cornerdroids use a sponsored version to alert co-pilot A.I. of obstacles that would otherwise go undetected by organics. In my case, it’s just a matter of tricking the Barracuda’s co-pilot A.I. into responding to a hazard that doesn’t exist.

Suddenly my blade trades paint with a hullplate, panels buckling as I send a faux alert to the Barracuda’s co-pilot A.I. Meanwhile, Sun’s running lean to conserve fuel cells, so I maximize my advantage with a timed boost that puts me back in its slipstream. Then I wait.

And wait.

When you’re racing a suicidal mechanoid, things can get real messy, real fast. I might be in it to win, but Sun Mateeb was programmed to do one thing. My grip tightens around the yoke. What if it tries to do me in with a suicide move? I narrow the gap between myself and the machine as thick, black smoke spits out of my left engine. Sun doesn’t want to win, I realize. Sun wants to –

The Barracuda screams and dives into the ground, kicking up regolith as the co-pilot A.I. tries to duck under a non-existent overhang. I overtake Sun at mach 2 and activate my blade’s autorepair system, which drops my speed long enough to give me a passing glimpse of its cold, inert visage. It regains control of the blade with horrifying precision: self-correcting programs jerking it back into a stable state before my brain can process the event. I panic-boost and veer wildly to keep it from latching on to my slipstream.

We break into the final stretch with me in a split-second lead, Sun trailing close enough to boost-ram me into the next life. I check the rearcam. It’s trying to pass. I nail it. It’s filling my rearview. I try to lose it. It anticipates my action potentials. My nerves are static. Then it downshifts and falls back, receding into the noisy background of the camfeed. I plow through the finish and lock the airbrakes after about 25 yards. It takes almost that far to stop.

As the cooling fans wine, I check my rearview and spot Sun several yards distant. It appears to have stopped. Somewhere, beyond the ditch, a Titan Crane groans as it lifts a ship out of dock. I check the Network to view the postrace stats, and the winner is…

“INDETERMINATE?” I repeat aloud.

I check the other postrace stats:

Mata Wai International. Winner: Gabriel Vorsh

San Kei Eliminator. Winner: Jenna Ferrante

Cayn Hughes Testimonial. Winner: Angul

Sun Mateeb’s Gutter Run Challenge. Winner: INDETERMINATE

Something’s not right. What happened to Sun Mateeb? My rearcam shows it on approach, gaining speed. Then it hits me: the mechanoid is going to kill me.

I scramble to reactivate the controls, but the blade’s in queue for pickup. By luck, I manage to free myself from the blade’s tight cockpit just as Sun forces it into early retirement.

The concussive blast boots me from the wreckage, banging me up and leaving me for dead. As I slip out of consciousness, watching flames consume the blades, it starts to make sense. I check the Network again and there I am: The official winner of Sun Mateeb’s Gutter Run Challenge.

And yet, somehow, I doubt it.

[yaboyyjay]

A retired officer of DynCorp special forces is standing with a slighly irked stoop in the doorjamb of his home, glaring at a chromatic rock fest that has spilled onto his front lawn.

Damn Chromers, he boils. Treating STAY OFF holomarkers like an invitation to host Sodom & Gomorrah on my gen-enged NovaTexas Common. Well, enough’s enough. He disappears for a minute and steps out brandishing a telescoping, Zeus-provoking tactical asset from Terazon International.

But the scene draws closer to his home, “Baboon Torture Division" firing sinister supersaw leads at the clapboard siding of his humble farmstead. 

So he lines it up, aiming down the sights, keying in strikes from laser-wielding satellites in geostationary orbit. Funny looking kids steal front-row peeks at the hardware, undressing it with flickering eyeotics. Then he orders it to spot beam several hundred terawatts into the sky, to punctuate a great 20th century American war cry: ”YOU KIDS GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN!“

_______

Don’t Try This at Home

[yaboyyjay]

The Grid wasn’t a place for loners.

Gridrunner, Eve (hacker handle: Eva), was learning this the hard way as she slotted an EMP module while being lit up by a pack of Aimbots. The Aimbots hailed from different servers, rival corpos, and while they’d normally turn on each other for control of datablock zones, they’d unite as one to take out a hacker.

Eva had gone in solo – a gutsy move, but one she’d pulled before. She knew the risk and the reward. Besides, she didn’t like sharing loot with her unit and considered her hack space to be a personal zen zone.

The gridrunner crashed the Aimbot party with an EMP mod, showering the grid with bits of code. Then she went for another server, Made in DNA. Made in DNA held a whopping 42 terabytes of biz dataviz: infographics uncovering an exploitable relationship between hundreds of marketable trends in bioaugmentation and nanotechnology.

Eva wanted it all. So she slotted a jump mod and neo-hopped to the top of the server, briefly taking in the epic, neon-burned metropolis. Below were datablocks as far as the eyeotics could render. Like windowless buildings, outlined with big, fat, neon tubelights; their walls painted true black. Above: data points suspended in metaspace, glittering here and there, like variable stars.

Back in meatspace Eve’s dog, Chewy, was pawing at her glowlaced G-kicks. “Just a minute, Chew,” said the gridrunner, watching bits of data as they streamed across the skydome. “One more server and we’ll be sittin’ pretty for a week. No, a month!” When the dog left Eve to work, she hauled out a new toy: Leo the Scorporate Raider.

Modeled after a scorpion and rendered by an undergrid hacker known only as “The Acebreaker”, Leo was coded with the maditude of a mutant pseudodog. The kind that bites stuff made of bytes. Once unleashed, the minion would hone in on anything with virtual legs and teeth and blast them to bits. This shiny piece of software was the grid’s most coveted piece of robot code: to own Leo was to own the grid.

Eva loaded the minion and brought it on deck. It was larger than expected, on the order of about 10Kb. Most of the data was in the tail and stinger. The stinger packed a malicious executable: a web attack vector, rendered as a beam laser that could penetrate any anti-hacker software on the grid. Eva slotted the payload and prepared for a hack spree.

First: take down the notorious Nanocom Entity, a company known for wrecking its competitors with backdoor biz and hostile takeovers. Rumor had it they ran an underground cat-fighting ring, using live mutant felines So Eva had to do it for great justice. Next: takedown Bioite Group, Smash/Riot Corporation, and Made in DNA. In that order.

Nanocom exploded with bugs. They spilled over the top of the server and spammed the grid: dozens of copies of copies scanning for intruders. Eva smirked and opened fire as the bugs made their way up Made in DNA’s data tower, path-finding like savages with an unquenchable thirst for hacker bits. She picked them off one by one with signal-killing pieces of malicious code – payloads designed to pong erratically whenever they struck any part of the grid.

Eva was in the zone, running the edge. The Undisputed Queen of Hack-Fu. Just a few more derezzed bugs and and the server would drop like a drug-addled meatpuppet, following a 24-hour braindance binge.

Then she saw something in her periphery, splicing itself into her line of sight like it belonged there. But Eva was too busy trying to force Nanocom offline to take notice; too hopped up on adrenaline to come full stop and run for her life.

Then it was too late.

Suddenly Eve was back in meatspace, her little fist balled up tightly in a powerglove that had all but stopped responding. The deck was fried. Pale smoke escaped the VR station from awkward places as the runner deactivated the eyeotics.

“Damn it”, Eve muttered, piecing together events. She’d been kicked off the grid by the TF-147/J S.H.A.R.K.

She’d reached the END OF LINE.