Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Science Fiction
Type: Fiction
Pages: 411
Copyright: Oct 13, 2019
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
Cyberpunk Thriller. Blade Runner meets Enemy of the State.
Flesh comes cheap in a machine world.
Doctor Rick Stenslandt has always advocated against the fusion of man and machine. But after a near-fatal accident, he is forced to accept ocular implants or go blind, end up unemployed, and without social status.
But something goes wrong. Now he remembers people he has never met before—influential members of the corporate elite that governs the world. And they have all been murdered.
Worse, it seems he’s the next target.
On the run from the police and a pair of augmented assassins, Rick seeks refuge in the infamous alleys of the megacity. But to protect the ones he loves, he cannot hide forever. Now he must figure out his borrowed memories and his connection to the victims, before it’s too late.
If you love dark futuristic urban settings and corporate conspiracies, then you will love this cyberpunk read.
Uncover the truth today.
Excerpt
He needed answers about it, and there was someone who could point
him in the right direction. He had to make things right again. Not just for
him; no. This went beyond him.
He put his coat back on and cast a glance at Sherry’s hunched figure in
the other room, shoulders jerking slightly. He didn’t want to be a bad
husband. But that’s how she saw him now. He opened his mouth to speak,
but instead, lowered his head, stepped outside, and closed the door behind
him. He would find out what was wrong one way or another.
He got in the first mechcab he saw. “Main Heritage Road, Up Two,
” he
said to the speaker. He would get to the bottom of this. The cab picked up
speed once it entered the magway spiralling around the stacked megacity.
The dull patter of the rain and the hum of the magnetic beacons kept him
company until he entered Level Two.
This part of the city gave him the impression of two levels crammed
together. A jarring sequence of structures one on top of the other, with
narrow streets and barely-lit alleys that verged on exploding when three
people walked abreast. Plebeians splashed about in small pools of reflective
water—blue, red, yellow, green—the cleaning bots left behind them. Small
shops, barely able to fit the owner and maybe a couple of customers, let alone
any merchandise, lined the narrow streets and bathed them in a twisted
rainbow of neon lights. Buildings squeezed so tight they’d burst at the top, if
not for the disc-like level of the city on top of them to crush them down. This
was part of the foundations of the society the Matriarchs built. This was what
supported the world. The engineers had fused adjacent buildings together into
massive blocks, some several square blocks wide, and used them to support
the world above.
It put things into perspective as to who was doing all the heavy lifting
in the world, and yet, those living down here and the ones further down were,
in essence, buried alive beneath thousands of tons of nano-enhanced and
thermo-reactant glass, steel, super enhanced fibralloy polycrete with
nanoplastic polymers and who knew what else.
The mechcab stopped two blocks away from its destination. Rick stood
in front of the display of a shop selling second hand—perhaps third, fourth,
and fifth—non bio-fused replica body parts. Whoever got an enhancement
from here would look like they stepped out from the last days of the war, half
a century ago. Not to mention the second-hand implants were part of an
otherwise thriving para-economy the Matriarchs had vowed to crush, derived
either from cadavers or manufactured by an uncontrolled and unauthorised
assembly line with dubious health standards, and unregistered, custom-made
nanojuice needed to prevent the body from rejecting the implant. The best
tech empty pockets could buy. A real bargain, all things considered.
“Looking for something?” a skinny and tall man with lanky hair said. A
cigarette was sticking out of the left side of his mouth and the smoke getting
into his eye made him squint. “Got shit that’ll give you enough strength to
make these gadgets worth jack squat.”
Rick shook his head and walked past him.
“I know a user when I see one,
” the dealer said and eyed Rick’s hands.
“You’re in denial, buddy. Neurachems or stims?”
Rick turned and gave him a piercing look. A small tremor went through
his left hand. Had the hexatholene side effects started already? If he wanted
to get to the bottom of things and still be functional, he had to stay away from
it. On the other hand, it a lot of the edge away. And God knew he was on
edge. With everything that had happened, with what was happening between
him and Sherry …
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,
” Rick said and turned away.
“Hey, I don’t judge man,
” the dealer said. Rick stopped. “I’m here to
help you. I know what’s it like, I do. Anything to get you through the shit life
throws at you, right? Am I right?” Big grin. “Yeah, I’m right. You know I’m
right. What’s your poison, man? I got it all. Sparkle, 4-7, Tetra—
”
“Hexatholene.” The word came out involuntarily. The word was on his
lips without even realising it.
The dealer’s squinted eye opened and almost gleamed. He scanned
Rick up and down as though he was examining merchandise. “Phoenix?
Yeah, I got some. It’s gonna cost you, though. Not easy to come by, and with
the latest Matriarch regulations and all—
”
“How much?” Rick moved closer.
The dealer studied him once more and smiled. “Tell you what,
” he said.
“Seeing as you’re a new client, I’ll give you the special offer.” He fished a
vial out of his pocket and held it between thumb and index. It was half of
what Rick had in his office, perhaps no more than five or six drops in total.
“Six hundred.”
“Six hundred?”
“You find anyone else selling this shit for less, and I’ll let you rip my
arms off, man. Go ahead, but when you come back to me, the price will be
eight.”
It was a rip off, but he couldn’t say no. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.
Rick paid, then headed to his destination. He had wasted enough time and he
needed answers now.
The entrance to the auto shop was custom made and jagged, hidden in
an alcove the buildings formed. It gave the impression something had blasted
its way through. Large metallic chunks rested or hung around the shop, parts
of old cars, not magnetic, but the ones suited for the conventional roads of
lower levels. The occasional husk of a scavenged rust bucket from an ancient
automobile hung from the ceiling. A grinding and screeching sound of metal
—it could have easily passed for music these days—pierced his ears.
“Ben?” He took a couple of steps in.
The grinding continued.
Rick cupped both hands around his mouth. “Ben?” The metal torture
stopped. Something cold and hard pressed against him behind his ear. It
thrummed softly.
“Who there?”
Cold sweat washed over Rick. He raised his hands and tried to keep his heart from exploding. “I … it’s me, Ben. R … Rick Stenslandt.” He forced a
gob spit down his dry gullet.
“Doc?” The pressure on his head lifted. “Oh boy, oh boy, is that you,
doc? Oh, I’m sorry, I am, honest. Took you for one o’ them stim junkies, I
did. Took me two days to clean the previous guy’s brains from them walls,
hee hee hee.”
Rick turned, hands still up. Ben was grinning and glowing with joy
under a frayed yellow-blue cap and layers of grime and grease, like a fiveyear-old who got the best present ever, a smile that made his rosy and pointy
ears—perhaps the only place on his body relatively clean—almost twitch.
The red dot in one of his eyes jittered and danced as it tried to take in as
much of Rick and convince himself he was seeing true. From a pocket hung a
rag so dirty that it challenged Ben for who was dirtier. In one of his metallic
hands was an average-sized pulse rifle pointing down now that Ben
recognised Rick.
He had been a reaper—a sniper—during the war, with an unparalleled
kill rate, as he used to brag while he lived the life of an outcast. During the
war, one of the Matriarchs—at that time, nothing more than an upcoming
biotech company—had replaced both his arms with mechanised ones, and
had inserted targeting chips behind his eyes. “I used to shoot a fly from ten
feet away, no problem,
” he often told Rick. “But with these and the chips in
my eyes, I can shoot its balls off.” Ben always laughed about it, but the laugh
was forced.
“Oh boy, doc, am I glad to see you,
” Ben said and enveloped Rick in a
bone-crushing hug. He kept patting him on the back, swaying him left and
right. Ben gave off a strong smell of lubricant, machine oil, sweat, and
several other indistinguishable odours. “I never forgot what you did for me,
doc. Never. No sir, don’t anyone ever call Ben ungrateful, uh-huh.”
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