Ascendance: A Cyberpunk Short Story
A cyberpunk short story, written in 1998 for a Summer writing class.
The luminescence of the net faded. Pure white noise flooded his senses, a slight spasm running through his body as the crackling feedback subsided. Jade tugged the trode out of his skull plug and took a deep breath. Reality, the place outside of the net… it felt so artificial, so empty compared to the gleaming electronic highways of the net.
Opening his eyes, Jade slowly stood up. He walked into the kitchen for a coke, lurching with the look of a sailor who has yet to regain his land legs. He gulped it down and felt himself regain the grip on reality in a wash of consciousness, the cold liquid running through him. Rubbing his eyes, he stumbled to a chair and sat down heavily.
The phone rang, intercepted before the second ring by his answering machine. Jade listened to the whirring of the drive as it recorded the message, teetering in his seat like someone with an inner-ear imbalance. He tilted the bottle all the way back, a slight stream of coke dribbling down his chin. Getting up, he tossed the bottle in the sink to give his dirty dishes some company. Jade walked over to his answering machine and tapped a button on the front, squinting as the screen lit up the room.
“Dammit Jade, you ever get off the net?” June was staring at him, or at least her digital recording was. “You’re probably jacked up on dust, just wastin’ your bloody life away, runnin’ the net for some desk jockey who promised you some credits towards a better deck or something.” June’s face creased with anger, “well fine, you can waste your entire life jacked in. I won’t give a damn either way, not any more. Some way to be there for the only person who ever cared, you’re such a sweetheart. Yeah Jade, this means that I’m not gonna be stoppin’ by for my cartridges, you can keep the damn things.” The screen went blank, drive clicking to a stop.
“Aww Christ,” Jade said, wiping the drive of June’s message. He walked back into the kitchen, took out a piece of pizza and began eating it cold. Jade wiped his mouth on his sleeve, wondering how his life had changed into such a wasted existence. He went to sleep, after peeling the backing off two tabs of seconal and sticking them to the underside of his wrist.
Blazing a trail through the glowing blue gridlines of the net, Jade felt completely at home. He floated through an electronic world, the plane that existed only as trillions of bits of data spread over the world’s computer systems. Jade banked right, soaring past pulsing streams of information. He flew straight at a marble tetrahedron, slowing only to flash a series of security passcodes at the watchdog progs. That was another interesting aspect of the net, the multitude of artificial intelligence programs. Of course, self-aware AIs were outlawed, but that didn’t stop most of the megacorps. And the legalized AIs, like the cyberdogs, were used everywhere. Acknowledging his request for entry, the cyberdog AI progs deactivated the corporate ice. The sizzling wall of ice opened for a millisecond and Jade swooped past the dogs into the pyramid.
Once inside, he was surrounded by gridlines, paths, channels in the cpu’s main program through which data flowed. In the net human consciousness was boiled down to a digital signature, a product of the interface between a net jockey’s brain and his deck. The interface translated thoughts into commands in real-time, allowing the user’s projected consciousness to travel over the plane of the net and interact with connected computer systems. Jade chose a path and was carried along to the inner depths of the pyramid. Gliding past various icons representing switches and terminals, Jade stopped at an icon depicting a flashing green orb. He accessed the terminal, searching through a database for the information he required.
Jade walked briskly down the street, hands deep in his jacket pockets. He held his head and shoulders just so, his step bespoke a certain attitude, and people simply melted out of his path as he proceeded down to Harvey’s machine shop.
“Hey Jade, what’s up?” asked Harvey, sitting behind his desk toying with a miniature gyroscope. The tiny axis spun, balancing the gyroscope perfectly on his fingertip.
“Hello Harvey, just a little business for you. I want you to make me a spring-loaded skulljack adapter plug, here’s a few specs for you,” Jade set a small cartridge on the desk. “And here, this should be enough, I’m gonna give you some extra credits if you can have it all done and polished up for me by tomorrow,” the plastic credit chips clinking in Jade’s hand, he tossed them to Harvey. Harvey set the gyroscope down on his desk, mini axis spinning away like mad, to pluck the chips out of the air.
“Hey, no problem Jade. What do you need something like that for, anyway? You think it will come in handy as a last-ditch escape when you get too close to that black ice?” Harvey pocketed the chips, laughing deeply from his large paunch.
“Yeah, something like that, just don’t forget to have it ready by tomorrow,” Jade flashed a smile then walked out the door, barely recognizing the faint chink of the gyroscope as it toppled over, its rotation finally spent.
Jade plugged one end of the cable into his deck, the wire spliced with his old trode plug and wrapped with black electrical tape. Pulling on the reel of the two-hundred foot cable, he pushed the other end with the spring-loaded adapter into his skulljack and walked to his window. Flinging open the drapes, he slid open the window of his twenty-second story apartment room and felt the cool breeze on his face. He walked back to his deck, touching the power stub and emerging from the void of static into the bright landscape of the net.
Jade slid across a grid line to a corner of the cube that was the cyberspace representation of his deck. Hovering over a small icon, he switched on a Chinese military program, the only worthwhile prog out of all the crap he found on June’s cartridges. Pausing, he wondered how she had come by such an interesting prog, dismissing it as the prog began to run. The net split, a rending of space. Half of his view was encompassed by the glittering data streams of the net, while the other half was occupied by his body’s senses. He felt like he would break in two, his consciousness struggling to deal with the fracture of input, the net spliced into his natural flow of awareness. Or vice versa, it was impossible to tell, his head reeling with the effort of making it all compute. With the little Chinese marvel doing its magic he was able to use mental commands to send impulses past the interface, to his body. He walked, jerking his feet out in front of him like some kind of wind-up toy, his mental capacities straining to become familiar with the unusual sensation of his own body while his consciousness was also in tune to the net. Jade forced his muscles to cooperate and managed to stumble to the window. He almost fell out, but saved himself with a quick signal to his arms, flinging his hands out to grasp the wall in a flurry of uncoordinated movement.
Staring at the ground, his brain was unsure what to make of a joint reality where one half included smell and touch sensations while the other half held only a spectrum of visual feedback. Jade floated to another icon in his cube, resisting the temptation to try floating to the other corner of his room. He activated the transfer program then, thinking back to the way he had stolen a copy from under the nose of the megacorp’s development group, letting it boot before he jumped. Still staring at the ground, he watched as it slowly crept closer, the seconds stretching out forever as he accelerated towards the pavement, cable trailing from his head back to the reel in his room. Jade attempted to keep his body from tumbling in the fall, allowing the cable to snake out behind him. He shut down the Chinese military prog when he was at about the fourth floor, then met the gruesome wash of white noise that followed with sheer gratitude. He felt absolutely free for the first time in his life.
June closed the door behind her, glad to be home and be able to kick back after a long and busy day. She set down her attaché case and stepped out of her shoes, relishing the feeling of the thick carpet under her toes. Looking for some of her relaxation cartridges, she remembered that Jade still had most of them, along with a lot of other stuff she’d left there.
“Screw it, I’ll just download some more,” June muttered to herself, sitting down in front of her battered old console. She jacked in, waiting through the blast of static. The familiar plane of the net appeared and June eased out of her cube.
Directly in front of her and immediately outside of her system’s cube was a horrible green crystalline figure. It shimmered with complexity, a jumble of fractals and a multitude of different facets giving it the look of a calculus professor’s nightmare. The thing shifted and pulsed, changing shape more quickly than the brain could follow.
“Hello June,” said a disembodied voice, sounding vaguely familiar. The green shape advanced then, gliding towards her effortlessly.
June retreated back into her cube and jacked out before the green thing could get any closer. She ripped the trode out of her temple and nearly fell over in her chair as she cringed away from her deck like it was possessed.
“What the hell was that? Somebody placed some kind of bloody rogue AI on my trail, when I don’t even know what the hell I did wrong? Damn, I hate crossing the megacorps, they must have muscleboys casing the bloody building right now!” June screamed, then kicked her deck off the table and began smashing it to pieces with her chair.
