WORST. MONTH. EVER.

and then the sun shone from below

I was down to my very last song
Didn’t even know which way to go
Couldn’t believe that this was happening
I said God please don’t put me back
I didn’t even see there was blood on the tracks
I was still compromising

And then the rain came and the sun went down below
And the city arose from the water it was off the shore
And I realized what was happening; I had to pay the toll
It’s true that you lose your mind when you gain control

But I was a fool to think I could play this game with you
Cause I was born to walk this higher road forever
There’s no understanding all the things that people do

Cause when this higher road comes down we'll be born together
I said
When this higher road comes down we'll be born forever
Yeah…

I was down to my very last friend
I was on highway seven again
Tell me why it’s so hard to stay
In your place in the arms of the one
Seems I got to close to the sun
I was burning
Burning, burning burning…

And then the rain came and the sun went down below
And the city arose from the water and the water flowed
And then I realized what was happening; You have to pay the toll
It’s true that you gain your soul when you lose control

Fool to think I could play this game with you
Cause I was born to walk this higher road forever
See there’s no understanding all the things that people do

But when this higher road comes down we'll be born together
I said
When this higher road comes down we'll be born forever
Hey…

At night I toss and turn, cause it seems that I haven’t learned
That the more that you fight and the more that you try
That’s the way that you making the storm
If I had my way, I would bring you back to stay
But you’re gone
All I got is the crown that your wore
Is the crown that you wore

chaos reflection

I’m at a hot creep show
Same old thing on the radio
Who’s that coming ‘round
Suffering popularity breakdown

I think it’s funny that
That I got harassed when I’m walking the streets
Walking down streets, walking down paths
With the kids in the back way I said

If you can’t dance to this it doesn’t matter
If you can’t dance to this it doesn’t matter

I was running around with my head in the sand
Looking for a pupil in a new fan
Told me before, baby move to your own dance
Stay off the highway...

Evil twin of fantasy

Lightning in the mirror - the ulcer on your tongue that makes you weep when you speak

silence overwhelms and static rebels

i can empty your heart

and fill your mind.

I stand on the precipice of revolution - Renewal, re-up. ecognise the problems and rebuild the city

greet the new scum with open arms and empty pockets

because it's all about the beat. feel the beat, dance to the beat, don't get caught up in the game

Life's a fuckin' party, don'tchaknow. Step over the threshold, it's more fun in here - The music is loud, the lights are bright and the cigarettes never end.

on the ground, progam flies

wet seranades, who is right? empty eyes, what's in your mind?

why do I sabotage everything I love?

[warning - contains explicit details on my ridiculous series of personal failures I jokingly call my love life. if you don't care or don't want to know, don't read it. but I have to write it.]

so right when i thought I really might be connecting with belle, when we might be about to get somewhere

i blow it by flirting with this other chick over sms for no real reason other then to pass the time.

and then because I'm feeling like complete shit over the situation
i explain it to both the best and worst person to explain it to - the personw ho has always been straight with me and knows who i am and what i need, but also the person who would probably stand to be the most hurt by hearing about me trying to date someone other then her and then hurting them along the way anyway

so i'm a fucking idiot, basically.

but i'm trying to fix things

i wanted to talk to belle, tell her in person how I felt instead of on the phone, or on msn. look into her eyes and explain everything. i've been back in the city for maybe two hours, just got home from the airport and I head over to hers to see her. I told her why I wanted to see her, she said yeah, i could come over.

i get there and she's sitting on the couch holding hands with rory. She barely says a word to me, except for 20 minutes later, when I tell her I'm going home (because I know if i stay any longer I'm either going to burst into tears or break someone's wrist, probably my own) she says 'it was nice to see you again'.

This is maybe two or three days after she was telling me how she wished I'd never gone away, how much she missed me, how much she cared for me.

i don't know why its turning out this way but it's NOT how it was supposed to happen. Did she say I should come over so i could feel how much it hurts to see someone you want to be with, with someone else? did she just not have the heart to tell me to stay home? did she not care?

one of the biggest points that came out of my acid catharsis at the last doof was the following:

Life's a party. Fucking relax. If you try and control everything you'll just mess it all up. Go with the flow and things will sort themselves out

I forgot that. I was trying to control things.

I can't force her to want to be with me. but when she says she does?

i just don't know how to take all of this. i left her place and texted her saying i didn't want to be a part of her life because she obviously didn't want me in it either

an d then a couple hours later texted her saying that when she wanted me in her life I'd be there for her.

i'm pathetic. i keep reacting. never planning, never thinking ahead. just living in the moment. i can't stop this cycle, it's like I'm running down a hill, and only just barely managing to keep my feet underneath me

i need to slow down, take a step back.

i don't want to pressure her into trying to make a decision when she's clearly not ready

i just feel like...

it's not like she's sitting in the middle trying to choose between me and rory. it's more like rory has come back into her life, picked up where he left off and she's trying to decide whether to leave him for me or not. and if I don't make my presence known, she'll never want to take the hard way out because she's happy now

but she won't be happy forever

people never change, and if they get back together, he will hurt her again

i just want to make her happy.

but if that means stepping back until she's learnt another lesson then maybe that's what it will take.

belle, if you read this... I just want you to think about what roads lie ahead of you

nobody deserves to be alone. but just because you're not with me doesn't mean you have to be with him. if you don't want to be with me, say so. but don't tell me one thing then do another. that just hurts, and I don't deserve that.

you told me you've never met any guy who actually expresses his feelings as well as I do.

so why do you have so much trouble believing me when i tell you you're beautiful?

you're unique, beautiful and breathtaking. you are like no other person i've ever met and you deserve the world.

I wanted to be the guy that could give it to you. If I'm not, then that's my problem...

but do you really think he's what you need? he's what you want - security, familiarity, an enigma that you know by touch and by smell... But what makes you happy now is only going to hurt more later

I can't predict the future. And I can't say I'll be there for you if or when he hurts you again

all i can say is that I'm here now

and i'm going to leave you alone for as long as it takes for me to get over you or you to get over rory.

but I know which one you want to happen

because you've told me you want it.

you don't give yourself enough credit, doll. You're stronger then just rolling over and taking the easy way out.

i just wish you could see that like I do.

so yeah, that's it I suppose. I'm going to leave you to your world because I'm clearly not helping you make up your mind by forcing my way into it. If you ever actually want to speak to me again, I'll be waiting, though.

~abayo

[chapter 02]

I finished the cigarette where I stood, contemplating the past few minutes and wondering what I was about to let myself in for. I walked back over to my desk and sat back down in the chair, letting myself relax into the well-worn grooves as I planned my first move. The picture sat a few inches away from my right hand, but before I went for it, I pulled open one of the drawers – I rifled through it, fingers pushing aside a spare phone, a snubnose 3mm H&K gauss pistol and a full magazine for the same. I found the G-reader lurking at the back and pulled it out, flipping open the little plastic cover on the gelpad omnisensor. I picked up the credit chit carefully by the edges and placed it on the sensor pad, closing the cover and then tapping on the LCD display while I waited for it to load up the results.

Not for the first time I wished I had gotten a cranial cortex implanted when I still had the money to – I could have jacked the reader directly into my brain via Bluetooth and committed the results to a longterm mimetic cell complex grown on a silicone ‘vertebra’ and installed right where my brainstem came out of the skull. No more forgetting girl’s numbers, or how many assailants were in the room, instant recall and the ability to jack into any of the public and private mainframes to look up the required info.

Unfortunately, I’d chosen to be a licensed operator. And under the legislation required to get the license, an operator cannot have centralised neurocortical upgrades – Rewiring the autonomic nervous system was fine, enhancing reflexes, reinforcing bone with titanium or muscle with carbon nanostrands, but I couldn’t hide a computer in my brain on the off-chance I contracted some strange hybrid machine virus, or an enterprising bodysnatcher decided to beam terahertz radiation into my frontal lobe and sever conscious control from my body. It had happened before, in the early days of bodymod and the private operators – The hardest of the hard, the bounty hunters who were almost as much android as the escaped synthmen they quarried had been almost overnight wiped out upon the advent of a new technique used to remotely attack synthetic nervous systems – The weapons the hunters were carrying could be turned against them. It was awfully messy, and the ensuing rebellion on the Mars colony almost sent the human race, for the first time, into interplanetary war.

Thankfully the situation was resolved without mass bloodshed or nuclear genocide. The androids on Mars seceded and now operate an open-space colony on the surface of the dark side, where the dead cold keeps their processors running at near superconductive performance, and the research and technology they develop is astounding. And back here on earth, the lawmen, the wandering hunters were all mandated by the federal contracts they operated under to have a fully-human brain so they could never be that vulnerable again.

It’s not to say that some don’t get it done – Minor mods here and there, for data smuggling or sometimes one of the new Penrith medulla stabilisers so they don’t snap under the pressure – But for ninety-five percent of the operators, myself included, we were cleancells. I had a few minor peripheral upgrades, no major work, just some stuff to level the playing field a bit.

But that left me here, sitting at my desk waiting for the genetic reader to give me the lowdown on who I was dealing with, and to then interface with my terminal and compare the gene sequences to those on file internationally to get an ID, threat assessment and financial statement on the enigmatic miss Molly.

A minute or so later, the terminal flashed an orange light to let me know it was ready, and I tapped the screen to bring up the report. I had to raise a credulous eyebrow, and I sent the report off again to double check. Minutes passed, and the same result came back.

She was human, that much was obvious, and the report confirmed it. A few skin cells, the composition of the oils left by her thumbprint and a scrap of mitochondrial DNA indicated European descent, most likely from the Netherlands, judging from the level – Or rather, lack thereof – of genetic damage caused by ambient radiation. Which meant she probably spent a lot of her time in one of the protected alpine properties with the gamma screens up to keep the cosmic rays out, and the air purified by custom bacteria that ate nitric oxides and lived in the pine trees. Rich girl, or maybe rich Daddy.

But whoever Daddy was, was a total mystery – And for that matter, whoever she was, was a mystery as well. Neither her print nor gene sequence turned up any matches in the public records which meant that either she and her family had bought themselves off the database or they were just so damn good at crime they’d never been caught.

I pondered this development and lit another cigarette, putting the G-Reader back in its drawer and slipping the credchip into my wallet. I reached out and dragged the photograph towards me, a six-by-eight blurry glossy of a man in a dark suit, sitting at what appeared to be a café in an upmarket area of the world somewhere – There wasn’t enough people around for it to be one of the sprawls, and the sky was too blue for it to be the martian colony. There wasn’t much detail in the photo, but he was white, looked to be mid to late twenties, shaved head, dark sunglasses. Not much else to say, not much to go on. He flipped the page over, and frowned at the words written in flowing sharpie on the reverse. The black letters held no meaning to him, and didn’t give him much to go on, but still… The name was ominous. It was only two words, but they were enough to give me pause.

Cigarette again finished, I neglected to light another, instead thinking it was probably about time for a light snack, something to lubricate the synapses and keep the body moving. I hated going into a case under-prepared, and given how little I had to work with on this one, I was going to make sure everything I could prepare, would be. I opened another drawer on my desk, wrapping my fingers around the cold glass bottle that seemed to absorb the light like a dying neutron star, and poured a measure of what for all intents and purposes looked like nothing more then crude oil, except that the drop that splashed onto the plastic able began to smoulder and blister the already marred surface in a thoroughly disconcerting manner. I picked up the small tumbler and rode the wave of a trepidous sip, letting the liquid seep into the crevices of my mouth and be absorbed. You couldn’t just drink Nubian Leopard Ichor, it had to be denatured by the protease enzymes in human saliva before the body could metabolise the complex amino alcohol without succumbing to quick rhabdomyolysis as your stomach lining came off in sheets and you started pissing out muscle fibre and kidney tissue. An acquired taste, for sure, and one that necessitated moderation lest the consumer particularly desire a rather extended hangover, to the tune of a prolonged vegetative state in professional care.

The effect was violently sobering. People regularly suggest coffee or strong stimulants to bring a drunk up to operating conditions, but all that really does is give you a hyperactive, paranoid drunk with liver failure. No, the real trick is to feed your body the Ichor, distilled from the cerebro-spinal fluid of the rare Nubian black leopard, a concentrated soup of neurotransmitters, proteins and bacteria that scoured the arteries and stung the synapses like a mouthful of angry bees until the brain was so… Unpleasantly awake that the very prospect of sleep brought waves of nausea to the gut. Leopard Ichor is dangerous stuff. It has been completely outlawed in more then one nation after several unfortunate accidents, mainly involving college students – it is said that more then two glasses and one can start unravelling time with his fingertips. Tasting of Juniper berries and fractal topology, I usually started a case with a firm belt around the frontal lobe from the bottle, and this one was no different. “Computer.” I spoke aloud, and the terminal in front of me automatically flipped into voice command mode. “Start a full-spectrum search of feedsites, RSS newslinks and bulletin boards for search term THE plus DOCTOR, exact phrasing.”

A treat for you, dear readers...

For the first time in a long time, I decided to put my hand to writing an item of fiction. Been meaning to do so for a while, but I've finally gotten bored enough to get around to it. So without further ado, I give you a rough draft of the first chapter of my new piece; for which I have not yet decided on a title. it's long, it's awkward and cliched, but yeah, let me know what you guys think...

[edit history - first rev uploaded]

my feet sunk into the wet sand, every step driving a pattern of fissures into the moist grit. the strap of the bag cut into my bare shoulder, and though I scanned the beach, I couldn’t quite see her, but then again the sun was in my eyes – the second time I’d been blinded in as many days, but I still had yet to figure out which would ultimately prove more fatal.

she – that cat’s mother, or thereabouts - walked into the leased cubicle I jokingly call an office, in the ferrocrete and plastiboard building that leant against the others on the block like an old chrome addict – Slouched, propped up by the rest of society. The quake back in ’12 had pushed up the foundations, enough to rattle those of us who lived and worked there (and Christ knows, there were enough of us), but hadn’t quite pushed us all the way out. this was not because we were stubborn, or that we particularly liked living in a building where roaches could carry off your baby if you didn’t keep a careful eye on him, but rather that the only other buildings we could have afforded to move into, went down in the quake.

a lot of things went down then. but I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, I think. every girlfriend I’ve ever had has always said I finish too quickly, so I think I’ll do my best to take this slow, from the top. After all, I’ve got all the time in the world, ahaha…

like I said, she walked into my office. I have an office because I have a business. Which mainly consists of sticking my nose into other people’s. I’m a street samurai – One of the best. No matter what the Wire may say, hackers can only get you so far. For sure, if you’re robbing banks it’s much easier to put a drill through their firewalls then their vault walls, and when it comes to industrial espionage nothing beats a quick-witted deck jockey and a good wetwired icebreaker, but you can’t beat someone to death with data. A virus can’t chase down a fleeing hype. Programs can’t hate, can’t get angry, can’t get even. That’s why cops are human. That’s why soldiers are human. Dirty job, sure, but it beats the hell out of working civil service.

So yeah. I’m an operator . The physical means to a well-paid end. Investigator, freelance gunsel, bounty hunter, courier, hitter, it’s all covered. I’m licensed and on record with all the required departments, which is a good thing to be able to show potential clients when they come walking through my door.

Which, as I said, is exactly what she did. Slim thing – Skin like milk and eyes like opals under the lupe – Iridescent blue, sparkling like finely-powdered scarab’s shells in white spirits. Her hair hung just above her shoulders – Red like the blood that hammered in my eyes as I drunk her in. She looked like she’d poured herself into the sheer black dress she wore without spilling a drop, moved like a bad dream and smelt like cigarettes and sleepless winter nights. I’d seen – and touched - enough of the vatgrown designer babies, and the chinese fleshmod jobs to know artificial beauty when I saw it, so you’ll believe me when I tell you she was real. All woman, on the surface at least.

I looked at her from my desk – I was leaning back in the skeletonised chair, jackbooted feet up on the scarred plastic table, unlit cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other. I thumbed the actuator, and a tiny pencil-point of star hot plasma arced up, smelling of ozone and casting an eerie green glow through the ensuing billow of thin smoke that I exhaled out moments later. Lighter returned to pocket, and I looked her over again. Waiting for her to speak.

She hesitated a moment, visibly. Appraising me too. I won’t pretend to know what she was thinking, but if she was anything like most women I knew, it was probably along the lines of “I’m going to kill Sandra for setting me up with this fucking cliché.” Then – She spoke. For a moment I wondered how on earth she’d managed to get here without being dragged into an alleyway, raped, and sold to West African slavers because her voice was almost childlike with innocence, but still husky with the smoked curves she was painted with. “Are you… Are you Mr. Baraqi?” She asked, clearly uncertain of how to proceed.

I nodded, and stood up, placing the cigarette into the small ceramic ashtray on the table and walking towards her, still appraising while trying not to stare at the firm swell of her bust, wrapped in a tight black ersilk with a hint of lace lingerie protruding from the edge, I held out my hand. “Mikhail Baraqi. Call me Hale. Freelance operator.” She took it and squeezed gently, rather then shaking. Her skin was twice as soft as it looked, but I felt the edge of her lacquered black nails – acrylic coat, organic keratin basebond but what felt like a synthetic ceramic between the two, probably one of those new sintered organic aluminium complexes. Very sharp. My mystery woman was not harmless – And that combination of high-tech implant with her polished, molten charm said only one thing – She was very good at convincing people she was harmless. Until she was close enough to make ribbons out of their face. That was the kind of dedication you saw in very few places, and in this part of the world, it meant either Yakuza or one of the corporate intelligence labs.

She felt me tense up and smiled, her nose crinkling delightfully. “Very well.” She released my hand. “Mr. Hale. I’ve been told that if I need to find someone, that I should find you first…” She took a step back and glanced around my office. I didn’t know if she was looking for security cameras or pictures of my family, and I wasn’t going to relax until I had her measure. Still, my gut said she wasn’t here to make julienne fries out of me, but then again, if she was a Yakuza razor geisha then that was entirely the point. “You’ve been told correctly.” I answered, picking the cigarette back up again and taking another pensieve, calming drag. “Husband absconded with the kids? Want to get revenge for what Daddy did to you when you were thirteen and he had one too many scotches?” I was starting to relax. Probably going to get me killed, but then again, if she was just a regular client then I didn’t want to put her off by seeming too cautious.

Her eyes flashed hotly and colour swum into her cheeks briefly. “No.” She reached into the small clasp bag hanging from her shoulder and dug out a photograph with a name drawn on the back in felt-tip marker. She put it down on my desk, stabbing it down with one hand, index fingernail piercing the thin paper and nailing it to the soft walnut-look polyethylene surface. “Why I want to find him is my business. Are you going to be able to do yours?”

I grinned wolfishly. She’d let her hand slip. Too emotional to be a pro hitter. “Yeah, I think I can manage that. Assuming you can muster up the credits. Fifteen thou retainer up front plus five more every two days. And that’s just to locate him. If you want me to bring him in, that will be an additional fee negotiated based on circumstances.” She contemplated this for scarcely a moment before nodding, and again her hand slipped into her pure before pulling out a small plastic card. “I can offer you forty thou in SJ-Zaibatsu yencreds or if you prefer pre-revolution currency, two ounces of Berlin palladium ingots.” I contemplated for a moment. “The fuck can I do with ingots here? Where do you think you are, Manhattan? Hookers like things I can stuff in their panties, not virtual stocks correlating to chunks of shiny metal in a bank in germany. Give me the credits.” I held out my hand, and she dropped the bankchip into my open palm. I tossed it onto my desk, I’d file it later. “Come back in a week.” I said, walking to open the door for her. “I’ll find your mark, whoever he is.”

She paused on the threshold, looking back over her shoulder with the kind of gaze that launched a thousand nukes. “Aren’t you going to ask me what my name is?” She whispered. I looked back at her, and hesitated a moment before answering. “I was going to pull your prints and any loose DNA off the credchip and run it through my sources to turn up a lot more then your name.

Why? Do you want to tell me what your name is?”

She shrugged, and in that moment her dress threatened to fall off her shoulders in what I’m sure was a impeccably rehearsed maneuvre. “Molly. You can reach me at the Casa Aura, room ZZ-13.”

And then she was gone. Out the door, into the night. Into the breach and down the rabbit hole.

God help me, I was about to follow her.