>From: fongg@bucrsb.bu.edu (Matt Riggsby)
Subject: Fairy tale
Date: 7 Mar 91 20:48:10 GMT


	Annoyed with the traditional everybody-gets-screwed endings typical
to this genre, an acquaintance of mine demanded that somebody write a
cyberpunk tale in traditional fairy-tale format.  Here is one.

	Once upon a time, there was a little girl.  Lonnie's street name was
Opcode.  The word was repeated in binary ASCII holograms over her
jacket, minute red and green lines and circles dashing and jumping over
her arms and torso, reflecting tiny islands of on-off code on her
mirrorshades as she checked the glowing Sony implant watch just under
the dermis of her right hand.  Her cheap plastic surgery ears, modeled
after the sum total of four generations of sex goddesses of the Far West,
were deaf to the constant pained living robot's scream of West-side
bad-side downtown Lower Hell/Manhattan, take your pick.  Leather
jackboots that had never been part of a cow clicked over the ancient
concrete, partially muffled by the newspapers and the soft residues of a
civilization slowly losing it.
	Lonnie to her parents, Opcode to everybody else, late to Laredo.  The
thick case filled with dry ice and plastic vials of thin fluid, smuggled
 pharmeceuticals with names long as a bullet train rail, bumped against
her hip at every step.  Laredo was waiting, no doubt standing in the
shadows of the crumbling skyscrapers.  She could see him in her head,
just as clear as sensebox reality plugged into her brain.  Hand under
leather jacket on the butt of a cheap Brazilian knockoff of an Indonesian
copy of a disposable plastic Italian autopistol.  Leaning cool on the dirty
glass and aluminum wall, eyes sharp.  She turned the corner of Seventh
Avenue and there he was.  She checked the watch again.  Ten minutes late.
Not good.  She pushed through the crowd.
	"I'm late," she said.
	He straightened up from the wall.  "Ten minutes, but who's counting."
	"Thanks for waiting."
	"Hey," he said, coming closer, "I happen to love you, remember?"
	"Yeah.  Thanks for that too."  They embraced, the flashing technicolor
crowd pouring past them.  Rastas, Yaks, Maffs, street soldiers, all of them
ignoring the tiny scene.  Opcode and Laredo, contrary to popular expectation,
lived happily ever after.

If you think you can do better, you're welcome to try.

Watch your ass,
-M

Death to .sigs!


>From: fongg@bucrsb.bu.edu (Matt Riggsby)
Subject: Old joke
Date: 8 Mar 91 22:26:35 GMT


If you did not like my previous post (the fairy tale), you will certainly not
like this one.

	"Replacement," the black doc had said, the green phosphors reflecting
in fuzzy caterpillars leapfrogging up his tiny round glasses.  Affectation,
surely.  "Probably the best option.  Cheapest."  He had brushed back his mop
of hair again, white hair, Warhol's hair.
	Ratz had shrugged.  "How long?"  Curling smoke drifted from the Cuban
cigarette between his fingers.
	"Five years," the doc had estimated, confident Pakistani face framed
by a forgotten American pop-artist's hair.  "Maybe two without."  Ratz had
shaken his head.  No point.
	"Scotch," the teenage hustler demanded, wearing sunglasses to defy
the few lights.  A display of lights bouncing under the skin of his hands
kept silent time to the Ethiopian pop that had been running through his
head all day long.  The credit chip hit the bar, and Ratz remembered a time
when it would have been a worn paper slip with numbers and the portrait
of a national hero.  "Two," the hustler said, and the whore on his arm, as
neatly packaged a vision as surgery could make her, snuggled a bit closer.
Ratz poured with mathematical precision.  The boy and girl went away to a
booth in the back, conspiring to make synthetic love later.
	Scared pink plastic lay in sharp relief against scared wood on the
countertop as Ratz rested his old bones.  The few customers all served in
the dim bar room, the light at a level in proportion to the decay.  Ratz's
world was dying, and Ratz along with it.
	It was the tiredness at the end of the day that had sent him, creeping
earlier and earlier, grinding down his smile of Slavic metal as he poured
beer for a crowd of expatriates like so many shreds of crumpled confetti.
Dr. Chandar was surprised to see a man so old in his fifth floor walk-up
clinic.  "The heart," he had said, brandishing a printout in a language Ratz
had heard perhaps twice before in his life.  "Geriatric treatments must
start early, or too much wear sets in.  Hard to replace, harder to repair."
	Ratz didn't care.  Never rich, never able to afford the expensive
treatment, while every year one or another of his patrons would make the
big score and transcend the Night City reality.  The sailor, the Yanamamo
with the long hair...the artiste and the woman with the mirrors over her
eyes, all those years ago before things changed.  Foreigners washed in and
out of the Chatsubo as sand pushed by the tide, leaving only Ratz standing
like a rock, bare even of barnacles, bare of wave tossed seaweed.
	"Build me a house of stone," the small, sadly drunken man at the end
of the bar sang quietly to his glass of Kirin.  Ratz looked at him.  The small
man did not see, but his act of looking made him seem to forget the rest of
the words.  He hummed a folk melody into the Japanese beer, stopping only
to take a swallow at intervals.  Was he trying to regain his lost song? Ratz
mused idly.
	Ratz was dying of great old age while the world around him was being
replaced.  He had opened the Chatsubo when scalpel-sharp minds of Chiba's
black docs were establishing the city's name as the center of black market
medicine.  In Ratz's lifetime, Chiba had become almost respectable, so like
a moving blade the cutting edge moved on.  Morocco?  Sri Lanka?  All
pushed on in a tide of arcane new technologies.  And nobody came to the
Chatsubo any more while the constant hum of biz faltered and fell silent,
like the little man and his Kirin.
	Eight men stormed in.  The dark, immaculate uniforms cut shapes of
black on black against the dim decay of the bar room.  In an age where
small weapons killed quickly at large distances, their large sidearms
seemed gauche overstatement.  As they rousted out Ratz's few remaining
customers, a woman with a suit precision cut in Athens stepped to the bar,
ignoring the chaos.  She showed a badge to Ratz, his hand almost on the
shotgun.
	"Visitor liaison," she said, and Ratz's eyebrows reached new heights.
Expatriates from all over the globe he had had, but never before one
of...them.  A man jumped over the bar, taking the shotgun.  The young
hustler with the prostitute tried to resist being removed, and was now
being carried out unmoving and bloodied.
	Five years ago, they had come, the aliens, and they too had done a bit
to speed the death of Night City.  Tall and attenuated, atmosphere-maker
packs strapped to their backs, like chitinous giraffes going camping.  They
came to trade and to study culture.  The streets of Tokyo, the Sprawl, Los
Angeles, Paris they walked surrounded by security teams, alien limbs
articulating at unfamiliar angles.
	"Say as little as possible," the woman was telling him.  His face was
an attentive mask, but it cracked every few moments as his eyes flashed
to the door, hoping to catch a first glimpse.  "Answer any questions asked,"
she said.  The little man scampered unresisting through the front door.
The woman recited a short list of subjects to avoid.  The subtext read that
causing problems with the alien would cause greater problems for him.
Ratz listened impatiently.
	It came in, ducking its head under the doorway.  It was followed by
six more men in uniform.  It was a squat, dull red tower, and it approached
Ratz with the slow deliberateness of a glacier.  Sitting, the alien's legs
folded inward.  It collapsed like a folding fan until its head was on a level
with Ratz's.
	An auxiliary limb unlimbered itself to touch a keyboard that swiveled
out from the alien's backpack.  Boneless digits brushed over phonetic
symbols.  "Sample...Cerveza."  The synthesized voice was carefully
gender-neutral and spoke English with a faint Italian accent.
	Fascinated, he poured a beer, mechanical arm pulling down the lever.
He set the glass gently down on the bar.  The alien produced a small box
and, opening it, pulled out a thick sheet of transparent plastic.  Its tiny
digits wrapped the sheet over the glass and smoothed it down the sides.
Slowly, the sheet crinkled a bit over the top of the glass and clouded.  The
sheet now formed a solid seal.  The alien handed the glass to a guard and
returned to the keyboard.
	"How...much...purchase," it asked, free of inflection.  Ratz named a
price.  It was an uptown price, the price he wished he could charge.  The
changing world had taken his clientele, and his greatest effort could not
cover the smallest part of the loss.  But the world's governments and its
alien guests would be paying, not the poor hustlers of Chiba's dying
underworld.  The woman laid a credit chip on the bar.  The chip was black
and gold with a Geneva bank's symbol on it.  It was a work of art in its own
right.  Ratz quickly charged the price.
	"Sample...Yettelsborg," the alien ordered.  The synthesizer spoke the
Norwegan name with the same faint Italian accent.  Ratz poured another
beer, and the alien repeated its performance.
	"Don't get many aliens here," Ratz observed.  The woman glared.  He
didn't care.
	The alien reached for its keyboard again.  "At...such...price...it...
does...not...surprise...me."

Insert the drum roll of your choice.

Watch your ass,
	-M

Death to .sigs!