It’s been weeks. Still floating. Selfodex still reads R.
Sometimes, if you wait long enough, they’ll cancel the remote control, because mistakes are fairly common when you’re processing over a few million signals. I still want to believe that’s my case. I’ve just been stuck here. Can’t stop anywhere, so it’s pill meals all the way down. I can still get direct delivery even while R’d out, though. So it isn’t the worst thing. I’ve just avoided spending credits because I’m not sure what they’ll want from me, if they don’t cancel the tugback order.
Nobody’s hit me up. I spend most of my days taking my faulty arm off, tweaking it, putting it back on until it gets uncomfortable again. I should’ve seen a MedTech ages ago.
I slide off of my bunk, and walk barefoot across the cabin floor of the ship, to where my sink and mirror are.
“Scanner Lethal, Scanner Lethal, where are you?” A voice calls out.
“Right here.” I reply. The mirror unfogs itself, and I can see me again. I can see her, again. Her, you. Are we going to spend the cycle thinking about this, again? Haven’t we thought about it enough?
“You’re the only you.” Klep remarks. “I know that ocular dilation anywhere. Specifically, from the last times you’ve done this. It happens whenever you get re-cubed.” They say, in their typical comforting accent.
“You spend all of this time remarking that it’s not such a big deal, yet you take the time to remind me that it happens every time I’ve been re-cubed, as if I don’t remember all of that.” I retort.
“I… didn’t mean it like that.” Klep says, somewhat sullenly.
“I know you didn’t, Klep.” I start. I always feel immediately bad. Always over AI. “I’m sorry. Don’t think you upset me.” Something about AI and their position in this reality pulls on my heartstrings. I feel for them in new ways.
What separates me from you? What makes me any different, when I really think about it? I look myself in the eyes, and gently run my palm against the skin on my face. Living verisimilitude. Am I an animal? Can I be considered ‘evolved,’ anymore?
I’ve overstayed my welcome with naturality. In nature. I am beyond all things natural. I am beyond judgement. The only thing that denotes my own physical, tangible growth, is shrouded deeply in capital, now. I’m walking money. I am the direct result of The Midas Touch. Sudden uncontrollable imagery of human viscera flash in my mind, things I have never seen, generated imagery from within the cyberized portions of my brain. What is this? A sudden animalistic urge to bite and tear. It leaves me as soon as it hits me.
“You’re about to compromise the integrity of that appliance unit, if you grip it any harder.” Klep rings out.
At that point I realize that my fingers are beginning to bend the metal on the bottom edge of the sink I’m holding onto, and I release it. Sore. Like my arms are composed of stretchy razor-wire.
I spin on my heels, and settle into bed in the same black compression shorts and top that I normally wear. I look at myself in my floor length mirror, spinning around, admiring my figure for a moment, before I collapse backwards, rebounding gently off of my messy, unmade bed.
I kick my legs up over. And stare at the familiar ceiling, again. Panels, vents, wires. Everything is so dim in here. A floating cave of wires. A tomb, or a womb? Maybe just a ship.
I reach over for a bottle of sleeping pills that don’t really work that well. I take two with water.
“Hey, Klep, turn the particle alarm off.” I say.
“You sure? Just confirming.”
“Yeah.”
“Alrighty, then.” Klep replies.
A few moments, and then a blip, and a series of LEDs on the ceiling turn red.
“Particle alarm is off.” Klep reports. I reach over to my nightstand, and pick up a 10-gram cannabis concentrate pen. I still mentally laugh inside whenever I look at it. I can still remember when the whole thing was two units. You’d buy a gram or two in cartridges, and then screw it in. Nowadays it’s just a big… tube that takes up the entire length of the unit, the only thing on it is the mouthpiece, and then the actual battery unit, which is this tiny 1/3rd-inch long unit at the end of it.
They just produce it en masse, now. It’s more common to vaporize all of this cannabis concentrate now than it is any type of stimulant. 15 credits for the 10-gram pen, which is… monumentally cheap. As are all drugs sold on Stapporat Station. People call that place the galaxy’s convenience store. It’s my favorite place to be. It’s where I’d be docked, if I wasn’t frozen in tugback mode.
“Klep, put on uh… My Lightyear.” I start.
“By…?”
“By Tele…metrik? Yeah. My Lightyear, by Telemetrik.”
“That’s an old one. Do you want me to add vintage jungle to your average listening cycle?” Klep asks, as the music starts.
“No, that’s fine. Not this time.” I reply.
The familiar sounds of the wide synth begin to twang out, as I exhale. Songs of my… youth. My youth. Not my youth. My past. I’m still young. At least I look it.
I sit there, staring at the ceiling. I blink with an ocular gesture, and the SprawlNET feed for local and followed netspaces juts into view within my ocular implants, as if it were floating a few feet next to me. Always in view. The entire experience is… trippy. I’ve always felt that way about it. Relative to my lifespan, so far, we didn’t always have these. Before, you just used your phone. Most days, I don’t need to bring a phone anywhere with me. At this point… those things are desk instruments.
The medication begins to make me feel tired. One convenient thing about all of this, this… post-judgement state I find myself in, is that medication hits me within 120 seconds of taking it, now. When it’s time to lay down, it’s time to lay down. I place the mouthpiece of the cannabis inhaler to my lips, and take a breath. The apparatus suddenly puffs a single, sustained triple burst of super-concentrated cannabis vapor into my mouth, and I inhale it all.
Before, you used to waste lung capacity sucking in all of this vapor. Now, everything’s an assisted burst. Whatever the companies can do to keep you inhaling, I suppose. An option reserved for people who can’t afford lung replacement. But it really doesn’t matter to me, at this point. I just do it because of the sensory haptic feedback through the mouthpiece. There’s something calming about it. The second I connect to the FEC, a huge red message appears.
[SprawlFEC] AUTOMESSAGE: REMINDER: SELFODEX DISPLAYS ON R MODE ARE LIMITED TO A MAXIMUM OF 500Kt¢ FEC-CERTIFIED TRANSFERS. EIGS TEN CARD HOLDERS ARE ENTITLED TO AN INCREASED R-SELFODEX FEC TRANSFER LIMITATION OF 5000Kt¢. CURRENT TEN CARD STATUS: EMPLOY IN BAD STANDING.
There’s an eyeful. Earful. Mindful. I swear, I know this is all displayed on my ocular implants via the ChipWare, the small modifications quickly made to an implant, but I perceive it through the mind. It’s like a waking dream.
Sprawl is the wired, wireless, light-based hypernet. Sprawl runs it all, they say. A system so big, so continuously involved in one’s literal existence, that you barely perceive it as there, anymore. It connects everyone, by body, by mind, by existence. Each and every person.
I take another series of inhalations from the vaporizer unit. I watch as the vapor twists, it’s convoluted tendrils wisping across the cold air of the ship cabin.
t¢ is the symbolic nomenclature for the digital currency that we use for… everything. In context, cryptocurrencies were eventually relegated as… essentially intergalactic casino chips, at this point. The crypto-wealthy still exist, but their lives are almost totally relegated to gambling stations, now. They’re considered some of the best gamblers on earth. Some of the greatest, but most sociopathic TriConglomerate-level neurally-augmented data analysts were born from these gambler networks.
Some claim that they can influence chance itself. An entire esotericism movement was born from this. A lot of sleepertypers became these people.
I can feel it in my eyes, now. That familiar feeling. Being stoned for me solves most of my attention deficit problems. Despite my current state, being on my 3rd self-image, I’ve refused almost all neural augmentation for intelligence increases. The thought scares me. I don’t wish to be anymore intelligent than I am. At least… not developed naturally. I’m outfitted with a pair of Providence-IV ocular implants, with all the bells and whistles in terms of ChipWare on the left and right eye. Right eye sports a night vision ChipWare with the frame accelerator. Works well in space.
My left eye sports probably one of my most prized possessions, a SPEKR-NEVRIN OTAS-III. Optical Threat Appraisal System, 3rd gen - how you ‘get the spec’ on someone. Figure out everything they’re running, unless they’re outfitted with obfuscation measures. Which I am. I run an obfuscation unit on my stack, which is slotted to my brain. Main reason, because I don’t have strength-increasing augmentation. I look pretty tough, but in actuality, I’m a pussy. So, we don’t let people get the spec on me.
I listen to the percussion whizz through my mind, the reesey bass of Telemetrik gently resounding all around my cabin, at a low volume. I watch the distant megastructures and stations, ships, satellites, pass me by, through the windscreen. I continue to get stoned, and lie back, thinking. Thinking to myself, talking to myself. Thinking out loud.
A Kt¢ is what we call a kilocred. Individual t¢’s are… tiny. Most people work in kilocreds.
The FEC (pronounced feck) is a sub-channel of SprawlNET-GLOBAL, and stands for Free Enterprise Channel. Within this massive intergalactic netspace lies almost 100% of ongoing business, jobs, trades, requests. Practically everyone is a courier of some sort, now. A huge majority of jobs never require an interview or speaking to a person. Just a contract sign, and you go. All a game, running on Sprawl.
It’s not pretty, out here. It’s romantic, though.
I begin to feel exhausted. And satisfied. Euphoric, even.
“Klep, do me a favor and hit the lights. Besides the floor trim.” I mumble.
“Gotcha, Scan. Sleep well.” Klep replies.
“You too.” I respond.
TEN Cards… EIGS, EIBS, all this terminology. TEN Card means Triumvirate Employ Number Card. Every single person has a TEN. Synthetic, natural, somewhere in-between. At this point, if you were born anywhere that wasn’t the literal wilderness, you have a TEN. EIGS means Employ In Good Standing. Means you have an actual long-term job or career with a TC. Or a TC corp. TC is a TriConglomerate.
Take a deep breath…
…A TriConglomerate is a formation of corporations that respond to their “group” that responds up to The Triumvirate. The Triumvirate? Well. That’s everything - and nothing. So big you don’t see it, despite it being everywhere, running everything. The maintainers of SPRAWL, and SprawlNET. Socio-Perceptive Reality Augmented Wireless Layer. A fancy mouthful that means nothing more than both holo-layering for non-optical systems, and optical-system projected interactive… stuff? That allows one to interact with infrastructure. …Fucking everything is paneled, now. Nothing but statuses, and feeds, wherever you look.
In some places, you can’t even access entire cities without having at least D-Grade eyeware. Some cities exist entirely proprietary, and force you to have your eyeware chipped out with their TC’s software, to pass through the city limit checkpoint. Such is life.
I stare deeply, into the darkness of my ceiling, the dim lights of stars and hologram adverts drifting past the viewports, the cockpit canopy. I close my eyes, and begin to fall asleep.
Another world, another time, another inner universe…
