From: macar@nimitz.mcs.kent.edu (Mike Acar)
Subject: A new post
Date: 29 Nov 1995 06:59:10 GMT

Well well, lots of talk of death in the Chat... Death of all kinds. Death's
nothing new in cyberpunk. Anykind of reply that comes down the chute will
be appreciated, just about.
Now for the stuff:

A new day in the chat, with all the locals at their favorite places and poses,
all their beings just the way they want, and somebody sees a new rag on the
stickerboard, hardcopy fanfold pinned hard. "Take a look," the spotter says.
And so they do.
--

        It had been a cold night, and the blood had frozen on my hands.

        "Why do you do it?" he asked, and I froze.

        Then habit resumed, as I moved my hands against each other, feeling 
the grit of the soap rough between my palms. Hot water poured fast onto my
hands, running in lines down my arms as I moved to wash my face and neck. I
thought about his question, asked before, answered before.

        "We've been through this," I said quietly. I took the towel off the
bar it hung over, and as I pressed it against my skin, I turned to face him.

        My brother was a skinny little guy, pale, but he was one of those
animated people, always alive, always with a little hum of movement, even
when sitting still, even when he was turned sideways in his chair, one elbow 
over the back, hands together folded, asking his bigger brother why he killed. 

"You know why," I said, still quietly.

        He sighed, across the large room. He was seated in front of his 
console, the two big screens set on either side of the desk's center, one
set just a little higher than the other. He'd been working earlier today, 
winning bread, and now tiny metal insects flitted back and forth from screen 
to screen in tightly angled zigzags. My brother was a geek, you see, and he 
did video editing for those who needed it, cutting up commercials and mixing 
documentaries. He also did the odd bit of cyberspace shuffling and consulting, 
bringing companies online and maintaining their systems. He made good money, 
tying bits of reality and unreality together with equal ease, making people's 
dreams- Or rather, polishing them, shining the raw pebbles into lustrous gems. 

And what did I do? I asked myself that, often enough, and asked it again as I
stood there, watching my brother massage his scalp, walking his hands over his
head like flesh-colored spiders, pressing his fingertips into the roots of his
hair.

        "It's a cold world,  little brother," I said, gesturing vaguely out
the room's big windows, "and getting colder." The moon stared at us through
the glass, bright, a pale, cold yellow through the polluted atmosphere. "I
just help to heat it up a little more by letting the heat out of people and 
back into the air, where it belongs." My grin met his silent look, and then 
he shrugged, turning back to his work, to his world; to other's worlds. 

Suddenly angry, I turned, looked at myself in the mirror over the sink, 
wondering what he saw, what I saw. A face, somewhat lined, with red hair, 
buzzcut, making a thin frame. A strong face, dark blue eyes looking out of it;
I always thought my eyes held something, a deep look, a hard look, a warning 
of a look. But then I was hardly an objective obeserver. Suddenly angry, I 
leaned forward, gripped the sink hard, threw the towel over its edge, and 
walked- well, more accurately, stalked- into the kitchen to make something to 
eat. The kitchen was no more than a little space closed off by counters and 
cabinets from the open, high-ceilinged space of the apartment, and it was 
dimly lit by small flourescent tubes mounted under the cupboards. I poured 
some coffee, since my brother always kept a pot hot, and then started making 
myself dinner: Noodles, with some stir-fried vegetables, and a couple pieces 
of beef. Routine again, like washing my hands, and my mind drifted.

        "Why do you do it?" his voice echoed, and I thought about, about 
tonight, about the world.

        Tonight I'd gone out, in armor and insulation, knife and bo staff in 
bare hands, my mask over my nose and mouth to keep out the cold. I went out, 
to stalk and play amongst the streets and blowing snow, air washing cold 
through my lungs, and I was one with the world, inside and out. The city was 
shadowed and tinted dark, and I laughed giddily, then sheathed the knife and 
sprinted down the street. Slowing, I brought my bo into a defensive position, 
with the pick end outwards at about mid-chest, ready to stab, and moved 
cautiously forward. My first playmate was crouched in the middle of the 
intersection, fidgeting quietly, his head darting from side to side; then he 
saw me, and his eyes locked mine. He straightened, tall, and powerful; he was 
dressed in leather, with highlights shining on the black creases. A ragged 
mohawk draped over one side of his face, and he pulled a katana from a 
scabbard hung over his shoulder. He held it straight in front of his body, 
perfectly centered, then rushed forward with sudden speed- god, fast, he was- 
and the sword snapped up above his head and then down towards my skull, but I 
was lucky: I whipped the bo up, blocking his blow with my weapon's middle, 
whirled it parallel to his own, and pulled down hard, catching the top of his 
sword with the crescent-shaped blade placed points outward on the other end of 
my staff. I meant to keep the bo spinning, and catch my opponent on the head 
with the other end as it turned, but he was faster than I thought: he let his 
wrists go limp, but pulled back on the sword, so it simply slid out from 
under my trap, and then he whipped his arms up to his right shoulder, hands 
next to his head, and the sword arched forward like a scorpion's tail, out, 
across, and in front of him, deflecting my counterblow. We both pulled back, 
breathing white vapor, appraising each other. Then we clashed again, fast and 
flowing.

        I didn't kill him; he was too fast for me, although I did give him a
good slash across the arm, and he didn't feel like pursuing as I ran, seeking
different prey. I danced with many others, though, demons of the streets,
cruel and wild youth, old capable killers; sometimes only a couple of strokes,
sometimes long duels. We were all there, running loose and crazy through the 
streets, mad glee rampant, drunk with our connection to the world, killing and 
living- living by killing. And after I killed once, I killed again, and felt 
the hot blood run over my hands, then turn suddenly cold in the wind.

        My brother once explained to me that things weren't they way there 
are now- but that's always true, I guess. The world didn't spend most of its 
time in winter, with dirty, ragged snowfalls every couple of days. The 
explanation was something about pollution having the opposite effect than was 
guessed; instead of heating up the world, all the crap in the air blocked out 
the sunlight, and the temperatures fell after they'd risen slightly. My 
brother was a bit of a history buff, you see, often talking about a war or 
struggle or "the way things used to be;" I was never terribly interested in it 
as a whole, although some of what he told me was really interesting. What I 
understand about recent history, about why we are the way we are, comes mostly 
from what my brother tells me. He tells me that, more and more, people 
retreated from society, because it was decaying; fraying, not just at the 
edges, but at the center too, like cloth that was used too much, worn too 
hard. People retreated, into their movies, their jobs: they curled up in the 
trivia of life the way a hermit crab will pull itself into it's shell. They 
stopped talking to each other, stopped interacting at all outside of their
jobs and families. The cities decayed faster, since nobody cared about what 
happened outside their buildings, their halls, their apartments; the country 
declined for the same reason, until the country was gone completely. The 
government simply wasted away. Along the way down this happy little path, the 
members of the non-society which had come to exist forgot how to live; forgot 
to live. They only thought about their jobs, their TVs and movies. They got 
hollow and died inside. "Empty hermit crab shells," my brother would say, with 
a dreamy look on his face, and it's funny, in a way, to hear him, of all 
people, tell me this. My brother, after all, lives in his work, and his work 
is voyeuristic in the extreme, selling and buying and splicing together the 
dreams and works of others, living a life made of snippets of recorded or 
synthetic reality, sipping coffee and staring at a screen; or, on occasion,
wearing his VR helmet, looking around the room at phantoms: digital 
hallucinations in an unreal world. I love my brother, but I can't do what he 
does, can't lose the world that way.

        So why do I do what I do? It's not for money; I couldn't steal from 
my victim, the one time I tried; besides, I have no need for money, with my 
brother providing for me. Is it the thrill of the battle, perhaps? There is 
that, I suppose; the pride that comes with proving that I'm better than my 
defeated foe. But it's not the biggest reason. The feeling of being one with 
the world, of belonging to a great sleeping sentience that is hibernating 
through the winter, is a big part of it; but somehow, somehow the killing 
itself is more important, more vital. The killing in the streets never
stopped, after all; indeed, as people stopped caring, it intensified. When 
the government saw that the public didn't care, and that not only were the 
people in the streets not afraid of the killing, they were there for it, they 
finally gave in to the inevitable, deciding to line their own pockets rather 
than police coffins with what funds they had left. And the killing went on- 
goes on.

        That's why, I thought, as I stirred the noodles. I'd never seriously 
thought about it; that was my brother's department: serious thinking. All my 
life, the streets had been where people killed and were killed, where people 
really lived, and I just assumed that's where I'd go when I felt ready. It was 
the only place that seemed alive in this cold, polluted world anymore; the 
only place where the basics of life were acknowledged- not just acknowledged, 
but revelled in, played to the hilt. The abyss was not just to be stared into, 
but leapt into, because at least you could feel you were falling; and if you 
became a monster, at least you existed in a real sense of the word.

        Had it always been that way, I wondered, as I walked slowly from the 
kitchen, slurping noodles from a bowl, for the killers? Underneath all of what 
society placed on them, all the guilt and neuroses, the taboos and 
obligations, was there something else? Could there be a fundamental,
primitive being that defined the difference between living and dead by saying 
"This is me, and I'm alive; that is you, and you are dead"? I looked at my 
brother as I walked up to him from behind, his desk lit blue by his screens, 
bent over his keyboard; he was mixing a transition into two video clips. My 
gaze drifted over to my bo, flat on the floor, since leaning it against the 
wall would warp it over time, and I thought about how it would be to live, 
staring into a screen all the time, my life defined by the glow of the 
monitors, and then I thought again about how it felt to see a man dead on the 
street by my hand, his blood in a growing pool around him, while I stood, 
alive, watching him. I thought about spearing my brother on the pick end of 
my bo, or slashing open his throat with the blade. Death, life; would he be 
able to tell the difference? Would I?

        I set down my bowl of noodles on his desk as I came up next to him. 
Then I dragged a chair over to sit by him, and leaning earnestly forward, my 
elbows on my knees, I answered his question.

        "It's just what you have to do," he said when I was done, and I 
nodded. "But I worry about you, man. You're my brother."

        "I know. But if I die out there, it's part of somebody else's life. 
If I don't go and kill... Well, I die here, in a different way." He nodded.

        And the next night, again with the cold air pouring down my throat, 
rustling in my nostrils, knife in one hand, bo in the other, looking at the 
yellow moon, again I danced the line of life and death, again I played and 
fought and killed and lived hard and fast with other willing playmates. And 
again blood froze on my hands.

--
Mike Acar -=- macar@mcs.kent.edu -=- Reality exists through being perceived. -=-
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         -=- MARS Home Page URL: http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~macar -=-