Okay, so I plugged at the short story concept a bit more and got a bit more than 500 words. I’m posting it here in case anybody feels generous enough to give me any pointers, since fiction is new and scary and slightly impossible at this moment in time. For a general plot summary, check two posts back.
P.S. Yes, there’s a fair amount of cursing herein, and while it’s against my personal ethic to engage in such without proper cause…well, I think there’s proper cause here. The times that I’ve used “bad” language, I’ve tried to make it consistent with the character’s voice, or at least the narrative style that tends to define the cyber-punk genre. Of course, if you can think of any alternative wordings that wouldn’t sacrifice the feel of the thing, let me know, I’m open to changes.
Looking down on the sprawl, you can swear it’s on fire. From horizon to horizon spreads the endless incandescent swell, the thin lines of shimmering light running under and into and out of the boroughs, warrens, the massive arcologies and company towers that rise like impossible mountains of burning yellow, blue and white. “The sky over NAC has never been black,” they will say, and they do so with pride; as long as anyone can remember, the view upward has been the same warm haze, sometimes cast on the underbellies of rolling clouds, sometimes stretching out evenly, a blanket over a city that has no need for sleep. They have no memory of the Outage now, though most were born early enough to have witnessed it – like everything in Arco, its history has been absorbed by the streets.
Sully started small-time, popping neon streetlights with a pellet gun from the back seat of Jack Ephraim’s black Honda two-door. Together they tore down the empty side avenues, Jack with two hands on the wheel and eyes on the rearview, watching Sully pivot the electric-blue pistol as they sped past each lamppost, then the crack of the gun and a pop overhead, and a second later, the sound of bulbglass splashing into the pavement. It was only for fun, then, no real plan, no method to the madness. Sully may have caught his breath once or twice at the shower of sparks or the flower of shards that sprung up from the pavement at the point of impact, but it was nothing spiritual, nothing holy, none of that Order of Saints shit, just a good time on an empty night. Jack, he hardly ever bothered to look.
When Sully was fifteen Jack died, wrapping his Honda around a telephone pole going a-hundred-and-ten down Magister Boulevard. They found his lank body slumped in a mangled heap thirty feet from the wreckage, a clownish grin still stamped on his melon-rind of a face. Sully stopped shooting lights for a while, stopped going out at all. He tended his homework minded his mother, biding his time until he could get his ass out of topside. After graduation he searched for months until he found a job in the city servicing elevator shafts that were the main thoroughfares between the topside arcologies and Arco’s vast urban undergrowth, the organic networks of neon-laced slums that grew like algae around the massive bases of the corporate titans. The light wasn’t as oppressive down there; the glow off the platforms still kept it bathed in a perpetual twilight, but there were corners, shadows, islands where, for a moment, one could feel forgotten.
He moved into a room near the base of the main tube circuit. The apartment was cramped and the job was shit, but it opened up a new world to him. Up until then he had only been topside, where the sons and daughters of the company families, his deceased father among them, were given reasonably bland pre-fab apartments in subsidiary towers in exchange for a lifetime of mind-numbing service. Pinkerton Place, his former home, had been as such, all concrete blocks and outdated upholstery. The kind of place where kids shot at light fixtures from the back seats of speeding cars and called it sin. The underside represented a whole new kind of frenzy, a crude web of business and pleasure left to fester unchecked by the authorities – as far as they were concerned, nothing existed beneath the platforms. Not a blip on the radar. Civilization blackout.
Tramp’s was authentic, not like the sham joints that brought down slummers for a weekend thrill. Collie’s was like that, and The Red Dog too – doctored up in contrived seediness, pretentious as hell; no real undersider would be caught dead there unless they were hoping to scam some topside snob out of a credit or two. The real places, the ones that belonged down here, were a tenth as slimy and three times as dangerous. Places like Tramp’s were where the real biz happened, the drug trades, the contracts, the escort services, kept tight under a lid of respectability that smacked of hard-bitten underside pride.
Sully sat at the clean-kempt bar inside Tramp’s, nursing a drink that had no name and bit the throat like liquid fire. It had taken Sully three years to punch past the sleazy veneer of the tourist traps and into the real heart of the play, the dance of the street that swept by unnoticed if you didn’t keep your eyes peeled. But now he was in. Tonight, if he was lucky.
“Good bite, yeah?” asked Creed, who was tending bar that night, like every night for as long as Sully had been coming here.
Sully nodded mutely. He could barely hear Creed over the thick stream of amalgamated synth-pop that bled from every corner of the room.
“You know that juice’ll curdle your blood in a month if you keep it up.” Creed grinned, white enamel glowing blacklit neon through the African darkness of his sweaty face.
“No shit?”
“No shit. Illegal up top. Medical who’s-whos won’t let it up. Say it makes you see things you never seen before, right before it shrivels your heart and sends you back to the Maker.”
Sully grimaced as he took another swig. Creed huffed at him quietly, more out of habit than of any real concern, then disappeared through a door behind the bar. Only after he downed the last dregs in a final gulp did Sully notice the presence looming over his right shoulder.
“Good evening, Sullivan.” A dry, precise voice, deep and careful.
Sully swiveled on the bar stool. “Jesus, man, you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Creep up like that? You did that last time.”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I did not.” The monolith of a man stood unmoving, his eyes hidden behind a strip of mirrored shades. He was impossibly big; there was no doubt in Sully’s mind that he used, and used often. No way a bicep could grow that huge without some serious derming. Intimidating as hell.
“Look, man,” Sully said, motioning to the bar stool next to him, “why don’t you take a seat? I’m not all about getting towered over, you know?” The man grunted and sat down, eliciting a metallic groan from the bar stool beneath his ponderous bulk.
“So what’s the Clinch say?” Sully asked, then cursed himself for not biting back his eagerness.
“The Clinch says you’re in.”
“In when?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight? Shit. What’s the game?”
“You are to meet at the utility shafts at midnight, number 14. You are to wear black. No weapons, no chemicals, nothing that could cause you problems if you get caught. Understood?”
“Hell, yeah,” Sully said, the quiver in his voice hard to suppress.
“This is a one-time run, a job from up top. He’s offering good money if it’s pulled off right, just right.” Sully nodded. It sounded like the kind of thing he’d heard of before: mid-level corporates with a little extra cash wanting to feel dangerous without being in danger, so they outsourced their schemes to underbelly junkies who needed cash for a fix. The doers get their high, the toppers get their rush, and everybody goes home happy.
“The Clinch thinks you can handle this one, Sullivan,” the man said, face unmoving, expression blank. “You have potential, he says. He wants to see it…bloom, he says. I do not know the word, but he said you would understand.” He did understand. Plants were a topside thing. His mother’s garden, though never successful, was one of the only things he missed about living up there.
“Tell the Clinch I appreciate the gesture,” said Sully, smirking. He was in. “Anything else?”
“No, Sullivan.”
“Midnight, number 14?”
“Yes, Sullivan.”
“Good.” Sully slid lightly off the stool, the metal wringing as he strode towards the doorway.
“One more thing, Sullivan.” Sully halted, heard the bar stool swivel. “The Clinch says he does not believe you when you say that you are in this for the money. He says that his sources tell him that you are comfortable enough, that you do not have a habit, that you do not have any expensive…tastes. He wants to know: where is your interest in his game?”
Sully stood at the entrance, his back to the behemoth, looking down at his shoes for a few seconds. He clinched his fist, slipped a hand in his jacket pocket, thumbed something thin and hard there. Then, without answering, he walked through the door and into the undercity night that was not night.
