Hey there sports fans.
We're at week 4 of me posting the chapters of By Starlight. Since both chapters 4 and 5 are pretty short, I'm sandwiching them together for this post. We're at the middle of the story, getting everyone into place to then move into the ending. So, I can understand if this point isn't as exciting as what has gone before and what will come after. I probably shouldn't be saying that, but if we're honest with ourselves, no story is truly a non-stop action thrill ride. Even Shoot-Em-Up has a slow moment in the middle where Clive Owen gets to bang Monica Belluci in front of that baby they're protecting before busting caps into invading mooks. Let's not even get into a discussion about what a disappointment Liam Neeson's Non-Stop was. Let's just say it would have been better titled, "Full-Stop".
Besides the impending release of By Starlight - Before Dawn this Halloween, I'm also participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I'll be posting updates and such to this site to keep myself motivated. I'm writing the book I was planning on doing next, Some Call Me... It's a retelling of Sergio Corbucci's Django/Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo set on Mars with Steampunk cowboys. I've been itching to write this for the last few months, and seems more fitting than the other works I had planned next. Ultimately, I feel I write too slow and want to challenge myself to finish a novel in a month. If I'm writing something I feel strongly about, I hope it'll give me enough encouragement to power through and get it done.
But in the present, here is the next installments of my upcoming work By Starlight. I hope you enjoy.
four
After midnight, Tressie collapsed in her much cleaner apartment, worn out from the slog. Johnny chased and bounced around her all the way from the courtyard to stairwell, spitting out rapid fire strings of sentences that blurred together into an oil slick of language. Her encounter with the Holy Knights was brief, but Madre Leon’s gravity had shaken her to the core.
“There hasn’t been a recorded Succubus on the Base Plane of Reality in a hundred and sixty years...” Her words in Tressie’s mind louder than Johnny, “...and when it was, it was known as The Great Nightmare... hundreds of people in Hollywood and millions worldwide nearly made into husks for Incubi and Succubi...”
“--irreparable damage between worlds,” Johnny finished saying. Tressie blinked at Johnny who bounced on the balls of his feet. Synapses jumpstarted in her gray matter. Johnny’s expectant gaze meant he’d been reporting back with his findings. His pupils screamed he BlastedOff hours ago.
Tressie shook her dreads to clear her head, “What did you say about damage between worlds?”
“That creepy frag, Dr. Rattlesnake. He was all like talking about this Great Nightmare thing that happened like a hundred years ago or some such skag. And he thinks that’s why this Incubus or Succubus hopped between worlds and like sucked out Oscar’s brain or some skag then turned him into, like, eight trillion times the porno creep he probably already was." Johnny inhaled deeply. "And he’s not home.”
“You got all that from that witch doctor guy?”
“That and a major case of the wiggins.”
“Did he have anything else?”
“Yeah. 'Go away and never come back.'”
“That’s it?”
“Babe, that’s all that really stuck in my head outside of crazy headless chicken blood drinking and smearing. Then all the literal nightmare world through a hole in the air. And I swear I still stink like fragging patchouli.”
Tressie sniffed, “A little.”
“I knew it. It’s in my nose. But seriously, dadfragger did some for real Dr. Rattlesnake brand Vodou. And to be honest, I’m not sure I want to go back to the shooting range, like, ever again."
“I think something else is up your nose,” Tressie rubbed her temples.
“If you saw a bunch of impossible skag in a poorly lit house that reeked of hippie, you’d want a Blast too.”
“So we’ve got gun loving Vodou witch doctor, and a Universal Madre with a cadre of vigilantes under her wing. They’re both saying supernatural sex demon.”
“Wait. What vigilantes?”
“Did you know the church has their own volunteer supernatural hit squad?”
“Not until you told me.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tressie rubbed her sweating palms on the bed and exhaled forcefully, “I don’t think either of us are sleeping tonight.”
“Well, not with some nightmare invading sex devil running amok like Freddy Krueger's boner."
“No, not so much,” Tressie fired up her palmtop, synching to her graybox, “but I’ve been offline too long. I need to see the net’s reaction to this.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Johnny stopped pacing long enough to pull an exaggerated shrug. Tressie whipped his trodeset at him.
“Oscar supposedly paid a visit to a Lil’ Wolfie’s.”
“What’s strange about that?”
“Research. See if anything else has popped up regarding that incident or similar cases.”
“Similar to what?”
“Did the bad doctor tell you what these things do?”
“Yeah.”
“Then that’s what we’re looking for,” Tressie jacked in.
*
Silence...
The Raw glowed silently beneath Tressie’s soaring avatar. The net was still abuzz with forum wars erupting over what to name the event since The Fappening was taken years ago. Top contenders so far were, The Fappening II: Electric Boogaloo and Son of Fappening Strikes Back (the Revenge). A pocket in the light pollution dimmed over the red light district. Most of it was dead or offline. Only the sleaziest of Fap Farms forced their workers on cam.
After the flame wars flickered to embers and the experts chimed in with the science that was peer reviewed into oblivion, the neuronet consensus agreed they’d be dialing back to non-headspace internet to get their rocks off. It was theory crafted that, while the threat was still unknown, the possibility of being wired for the neuronet would most likely kill you while using porn. The elder generation chimed in with some nonsense about falling back on print pornography and actually having sex. Nonagenarian sex captured with archaic tech was trending on the oldnet.
With an ambient .WAV filling in the aching quiet of the net, Tressie took the long way to the center housing of the oldnet’s server’s. The monolithic pyramid shot a beam of light from its apex into the void above, stretching on for an unseen infinity. A speck before the pyramid, a lone avatar that was either an expression of glitch art or infected with nasty malware, milled about.
Tressie touched down on the edge of the user’s influence sphere, double checking her retooled Pharrel Inc. firewall’s integrity.
“Yo. You OK there, user?” Tressie said in general chat.
The avatar continued its ruinous flicker in silence.
“Do you have general chat off?” Tressie tried in /say range... nothing but her music player tuned to a steadily building breakcore mix. Hi-hat added a tension only bested by the general silence around them. The glitched avatar 180 flipped. The change was barely noticeable. Tressies’ diagnostic came back with no malware detected.
It’s point of origin was a hub that checked in across the street of Das Komplex. The user was running off trodes and a λ―Έλμ μ palmtop. The avatar's actions were similar to most devins stumbling into The Raw for the first time. It ran backwards endlessly onwards into the facade of the oldnet pyramid. It compressed against the sloped light wall as if searching for an entry point.
“You’re not going to get very far this way. Open up private chat to all users. I’ll guide you back to your launcher.”
“Be gone, meat.” The avatar’s audio matched it’s look.
“Fine. If that’s how you’re gonna play it.” Tressie was damaged if she was going to let some punkass devin diss her like that. From her toolkit she whipped out a scrambler to make the poor dumb bastard even more turned about and frag up their store bought slag in the process. The scrambler animation played out. Tressie felt a feedback pulse like a grenade going off in her skull.
ShotguNny55: Babe what happened?
ShotguNny55: You’re going ape back in meatspace.
ShotguNny55: babe?
ShotguNny55: Babe???????????!
Tressie saw the chatlog floating in her left peripheral. She wanted to tell Johnny that everything was terribly terrific and she’d never felt like she was going to die from cumming so hard in her life. Her biosign widget screamed as she redlined and receded in wonderful waves of overdriven ecstasy. Her heart rate climbed: 88bpm *blip* 98bpm *blip* 107bpm. Mental synapses firing on all cylinders. Prepare to evacuate soul in 5...4...3...2...
Nethaze.
The world blurred around the edges. Purple and white shadow sharpened to make a facsimile of Johnny Marko’s head. Skin felt hot across kilometers. Dull throbbing came through at the temples. Tressie heard herself gasping for air in another timezone.
“Tressie. Tressie, c’mon girl, don’t do this to me.” Johnny said through wads of cotton someone rudely jammed in her ears. The faders of her senses rose. Nethaze receded. The smell of sweat and sex and beer filled Tressie’s nostrils. Johnny muttered a quick, “Oh skag,” before Tressie loosed the few contents her stomach held.
five
Soft light rose and fell with the clattering blinds against the morning breeze. Johnny had been coming down and grinding his jaw for the last hour. He felt like taffy pulled through a pinhole breach in a space freighter’s hull. Tressie was sprawled out on the floor where she fell sideways post-vomit.
Her body seized up last night while Johnny was wrapping up fruitless crime research. He half-assed broke her fall by diving on his belly beneath her. Tressie’s hard dreads softened the impact on Johnny’s back as he got the wind knocked out of him. A couple snapped off at the ends.
Tressie stirred at last with sounds beyond the occasional night terror screams she made off and on over the last five hours. When she opened her eyes, she saw the ruin of her palmtop smashed to bits below a dent in the drywall. The stud bearing was visible beneath. Johnny’s left hand, wrapped in a bloody t-shirt, rested on her hair. The air still smelled of puke.
“You awake?” Tressie’s throat was the Mojave.
Johnny jerked his head upright, “Huh? You awake?”
“What time is it” Tressie rubbed away crud from the corners of her eyes.
Johnny craned his neck towards the clock, “six-o’-nine.”
“We still have a party tonight,” Tressie croaked out a laugh.
“Whoopie,” Johnny spirit fingered.
A long stretch of silence.
“What happened?”
Tressie went back in her memory. The scrambler, the hit, the bomb inside her nervous system. The Codex. “I found Oscar. Or the thing riding him. How did it even do that?” She sat upright, “It was like, the most violent orgasm ever.”
“Your whole body mezzed out. Only way I could think of to stop your graybox was bash it. Or your palmtop.”
“Thanks for choosing the palmtop.”
“Anytime.” Johnny drug his hand across his face, “You certain it was Oscar?”
“If not Oscar himself, it was definitely what we’re looking for. The red lights were dim last night. It was sitting outside the oldweb hub when I found it. The entire foundation of the thing is porn.”
“What was it doing?”
“Trying to get in, but it couldn’t. It was, like, stuck outside, trying to get in. Which says a lot about using the brain as a buffer for running software?”
“How so?”
Tressie sat upright, “When you’re online, you’re directing the action with thought. Machine-Brain Interface.”
“Yeah...”
“And it’s essentially an astral projection of yourself that stands in as your avatar in your launcher or The Raw. Which means that the neuronet is just the collected human consciousness given access to a bunch of server farms.
“Okay, so we have a sex demon consciousness riding in on a possessed person’s brain. What’s the big whoop with the oldnet?”
“The Incubus, Succubus, whateverbus, it can tell there’s something to feed on in the structure. But, it can’t access that structure since it’s not a true part of the neuronet. It couldn’t do anything to me until I made contact. Maybe it needs an open port to gain access.”
“So you’re thinking it was slumming outside the oldnet for someone like you ambling along to breach the gap?”
“It didn’t seem like it had an agenda besides, ‘in,’ but after all that exposition, I’m thinking that’s changed now.”
“So again, I repeat, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to party tonight. You know Das Komplex parties wrench the freaks from the woodwork.
***
Hours since the encounter. The dull roar of human revelry outside died at some point during the night. Gribelle languished in agony of hunger pains. Her borrowed new shell could only hold so much food before bodily functions forced its escape from either end. Gribelle’s hunger continued to pick away at an icy gut that wasn’t there.
She was collapsed on the swiveling throne again. Her sprawl through the plane of lights came up empty for feeding herself. This new frame matched her natural one much closer, yet lacked the working knowledge the Oscar frame held. Either way, the taste of sex sat in her memory, craving for at least someone pleasuring themselves in another apartment for a snack.
Gribelle longed for the ease of The Dreaming. Where all one had to do was stand there with an open maw on the plains and food came to you. In this harsh plane, one had to hunt and catch prey. One had to get themselves from one place to another and fetch their own meal like a damned domestic.
The thought churned Gribelle’s stomachs. A gurgle in the decaying physical one was followed by loud flatulence and loose stool. Gribelle hopelessly sat in her own filth, waiting for the slow death of starvation to come.
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