Hello again dear reader. With my next book, By Starlight - Before Dawn, being released at the end of the month, I figured what better way to entice one to read it than by letting them read it. Over the next few weeks leading up to the release day, I'm going to be releasing the chapters of the novella through this site. When the book becomes available (pending the completion of the covers), this site will be the first to let you know. I will also be reducing the eBook price of Urban Legends of the Future to the low low cost of $0.00 on both Amazon and Smashwords. Like Urban Legends, By Starlight - Before Dawn will be available in paperback as well as all eBook formats.
The following story is the first chapter of the novella that makes up the By Starlight portion of the book title. By Starlight picks up 25 years before Sucking Out Loud. We meet DJ/Slicer Tressie Unknown in the flesh and see Johnny Marko as a young, 17 year old punk in the SFV818 district of Hollywood. It's another story revolving around the Incubi/Succubi, so be prepared for sexy cyberspace fun.
Without further ado, I present to you: By Starlight.
one
“...And when the bass hits, we all feel saved.”
A thunderous rattle followed the breath of silence before plunging off the drop. Sine waves formed into a rainbow aurora over the black of The Raw. Sub bass frequencies emanated from Tressie’s audio app, visualized as a deep violet, stuttering in the motionless air.
Her avatar plunged towards the glowing streets of Pharrel Inc.’s servers. The neon yellow monoliths of raw data sped and spiraled about as Tressie maneuvered her digital self in a corkscrew falling for a perceptual forever. A huge bass drum sample exploded in iridescent light against the blank sky as Tressie touched ground with the beat.
The Raw was a ghost town like usual. Next-Gen, console cowboy hackers, toying around with the raw code of the neuronet, were a reclusive lot. Your average user jacking into the neuronet via trodes was dumped into their launcher. Each launcher resided safely within featureless block apartment towers in a sprawling digital geometric metropolis. Each piece constructed in a combination of human imagination and code saved in cloud server space.
Tressie felt more alive in her neuronet avatar’s skin than she ever could in her own. A lack of intrusive presence while pushing the boundaries of the next frontier was all a girl could ask for. Flying through a digital landscape, blasting a personal playlist and peeking into all the backdoors she could slice open was what Tressie reserved for dreams until three years ago. The neuronet transformed the former internet’s virtual reality into a collected shared dream where the user and data become one.
As the track’s hyper-distorted bass ramped into a compressed Amen Break restructure, Tressie felt like liquid light swimming through the streets. Occasional ghost flickers of user avatars popped across The Raw as people interfaced with connected devices. For those not ready for the next step in internet tech, most activity still took place in the oldweb servers. They resided in a pyramid, jutting from the center of The Raw’s landscape, blasting a Luxor light from the apex into blank nothing.
Driven by a DraB-Hop soundtrack, curiosity was Tressie's only guide. In the midst of her freedom, Tressie was still on the job. The job that brought her curiosity to the corner of jamstain.net’s virtual real estate in the heart of Silicon Alley's red light district.
A spurned ex dumped a load of Tressie's client's private nudes all over the site. It wasn't the highest profile job, but a noble one that paid. Tressie turned off her audio app visualizer and ran a sniffer.xpz. The sniffer's avatar materialized in the shape of a faceless rodent. It did its job of digging through Terabytes of data, searching for the code string Tressie scoped on her previous recon trip. The sniffer took its sweet time. If avatars could sweat, Tressie’s would be dumping buckets.
After tense moments with Tressie dreading having to find a new code string to unravel into a doorway, the sniffer dinged back its confirmation. Tressie opened her tool kit on the adapted old web hacking app she’d been tweaking with the past three years when the neuronet went live. Lucky for Tressie and her client, code was a universal language.
The app loaded in the shape of a poorly rendered katana--Tressie not being much of a graphic designer--that she brandished about with a Conan flourish. With a stab in the direction of the sniffer’s exposed weak point, code fell apart in a slash. It morphed into a hole in the red glowing digital landscape. Tressie had her in.
Inside, a branching network of millions of boxes represented each user connected to a netscene of jamstain.net. Each one racing to their own jamstains back in Base Plane Reality. At the foot of the box tree crossed with a brainstem sat the server net that crept out into pixelated roots.
Tressie launched another sniffer, tuned to the client’s photo metadata. Tressie’s avatar took a resting pose in lotus position, levitating above a membranous floor while the sniffer did its job. In Tressie’s HUD the sniffer’s results ticked off. Tressie scoffed at some of the file names that crawled past her field of perception, most likely ascribed by the vindictive ex.
The sniffer took over five minutes of real time as Tressie hovered undisturbed beneath jamstain.net’s main userhub. The external ICE was considerably light for what Tressie was expecting out of a porn scene. Her sniffer dinged with a job complete. Tressie pulled the Search & Destroy app from her tool kit to finish the cleaner job. The hub pulsed with an angry flash of red and an eardrum bursting alarm. A blocky rendering of a classic English Bulldog crossed with Cerberus spawned on top of Tressie’s position, pinning her to the “floor”. The watchdog.xpz replicated itself in a ring around Tressie with a periodic “REEEEEEEEE!” from the alarm.
Tressie’s mind flailed in panic. Every command she attempted was rebuffed with an error message reminding her she was engaging in illegal activity and to please wait for NetSec to reroute her. Tressie felt her intracranial temp rise from an overclocking graybox.
//Rerouting to NetSec in 10...9...8...//
Back in Base Plane Reality Tressie cycled her breathing, chilling her out like a nightly meditation session. This was a problem and the point of problems was to solve them. Sure being surrounded by a replicated watchdog was an issue for most feebs on the net stumbling into places they should best keep out of. But for a slicer like Tressie, it was time to party.
Tressie fired up a transmission filter to reduce her ambient data output. The final flaming error messages of death vanished into empty space.
//5...4...//
Tressie popped a source tracer and queued up her corruptor.xpz. The tracer marked the origin watchdog as the counter ticked //2...1...0//. Tressie plunged the corruptor’s wedge graphic into the blue highlighted flaming dog.
The virulent corruptor spread out in an arc through all the watchdog graphics. The primary dog avatar glitched in and out of vision, incapable of holding its graphical integrity. A bit-crushed audio file of a whimpering dog hit Tressie with a pang of guilt.
The corruptor ate chunks out of the watchdog’s code, unraveling it from the source. Each copy followed suit of being deleted. Tressie dropped stealth from her filter and made for the point of entry to make it into an exit. A smooth facade of light blocked her path. She launched a sniffer to find where to make the right cut. Inside the guts of jamstain.net, already on high alert, multiple watchdogs spawned as Tressie’s new sniffer, in search of a weak point, lazed about its protocol .
Tressie’s client’s files read 7% deleted and counting as fresh watchdogs charged her position. Her sniffer zoomed in random directions, coming up empty on an opening.
“Frag this mess,” Tressie said as she launched an ICE breaker from her toolkit. An icy blue cube unfolded into a blocky sled drill. Tressie hopped on as it blasted an escape route through the retaining wall’s thick ICE. Watchdogs snapped at her virtual heels. The music playing in her head swelled and cut to silence as Tressie broke free, echoing out into the infinite of The Raw...
“...And when the bass hits, we all feel saved...”
*
Tressie jacked out. Eyes blurred from nethaze, touch sensory dulled. From through a foot of cotton in her ears Tressie heard herself panting. Chill from the box AC blowing over sweat was the only clear sensation.
“Did we win?” Johnny sat crosslegged, tapping on an oldweb reader across his lap. He was speaking to her in the voice he used with his hundred and fifteen year old grandmother.
Tressie lolled her head to the side. The yellowed white walls of her studio apartment came into focus with Johnny’s electric purple liberty spikes casting thin shadows. Tressie grabbed a bottle of water and took a long, hydrating, pull.
“C’mon babe, don’t leave me hanging.”
Tressie loosed a refreshing, “Aaaaah,” then looked Johnny Marko in his sad green eyes. A grin split Tressie’s face from ear to ear, “We won.”
“Hell yeah!” Johnny pumped his fist in victory, “Can we go watch Akimbo now?”
***
A blood red sun, flickering like a dying flame, hung in a corner of the black void that was The Dreaming’s sky. A single star twinkled above the sylvan tree swaying at the edge of the desert.
Gribelle’s hunger ate at her entire frame. Burning out from within her core and sending every nerve into a spastic frenzy. She combed the desert of The Dreaming for anyone not attended to by her cousins.
The human world, for all its numerous inhabitants, was not always readily available in the ever shifting world of the universe’s collective subconscious. While Gribelle would love to chow down on the sexual energy of the myriads of beings that fluxed through the desert's jigsaw dream pocket, Incubi and Succubi were only sated by human and races long extinct.
The oily sweet succulence of humanity’s nocturnal adventures in kinky dreamland, was ambrosia to The Dancers of the Night Winds. The thought of a delectable human sex dream made Gribelle’s insides rumble with explosive hunger pains. Millennia feeding in safety since the Veil between Planes original rending, Incubi and Succubi had been the only other constant in the world of The Dreaming besides spirits. Spirits didn't need to feed.
The interior of a dumpy one bedroom apartment, with an equally dumpy resident in the beginning stages of unconsciousness, materialized in the desert. A band of metal sat upon the overweight and unkempt figure like a crown. Two discs rested on the forehead of the dreamer, their eyes fluttering beneath the lids.
The dreamer did not open those lids to witness what their subconscious had to show them. Instead they remained in a swiveling chair, limp as a boned fish.
“Dreaming about being asleep? You seem like a real catch.” Gribelle grumbled to herself.
Her hunger couldn’t wait for another moment like this to happen about. Gribelle’s ridged nose inhaled the bittersweet aroma of sexual desperation, almost collapsing in a drunk-like stupor.
“Don’t look like much, but you smell like a cornucopia of flavor,” Gribelle monologued to no one, gliding to her stirless victim. She rubbed her hands together in lecherous glee then splayed her fingers over the dreamer’s shoulders. Gribelle breathed in her prey.
Usually a vapor would rise from the body and be delivered into Gribelle’s nose and mouth. Instead, she felt a tugging into the dreamer’s body as if caught in a gravity well. Each breath brought Gribelle closer. Foreign and familiar energies swirled about their frames as Gribelle’s face made contact through the dreamer’s forehead. The face had no purchase to grab hold of and retard the process. Gribelle’s fingers gripped onto the shoulders of--what was supposed to be--her meal, trying to unstick their faces.
The harder she pushed away, the harder the force sucked at Gribelle’s face and body. The mental image of a garter snake trying to swallow an elephant skull flashed through her mind as she broke through realms. Gribelle was no longer in The Dreaming.
***
“Say goodnight, バカ." Johnny Marko spun in an arc, making gun hands, "BLAOW BLAOW BLAOW!” He somersaulted off the curb, landing in a clumsy action pose, "BLAOW BLAOW BLAOW!" He blew imaginary smoke from his fingertips, "Goodnight, バカ."
Tressie giggled behind her hand. She shook her dreds out of a hairband, letting them fall wild, “I’m guessing you liked the flick.”
“Hell yeah,” Johnny gesticulated. “Oh man, I could watch that at least infinity more times. That part where he corners Yuri, and she’s all begging for forgiveness for his wife’s murder.”
“Maybe the gods will forgive you,” They said in unison.
“Oh skag, that was sooo fraggin’ cool,” Johnny floor punched in excitement.
“Well, Johnnycakes, I’m glad you liked it--”
“--Loved it.”
“Loved it so much. But can we get your underage ass home? I don’t feel like dealing with the dadfraggin' curfew pocs for you.”
“What? No dip into the Cobalt? Laff Attack is playing with Incorpracide. We gotta go.”
“Won’t you see them at school tomorrow?”
“Dude, frag school,” Johnny caught Tressie’s twisted sneer, “OK, maybe don’t frag school. But they’re gonna be mad I was a no show.”
Tressie rolled her eyes.
“For being my super cool DJ--slash--Slicer girlfriend, you sure are weird about education.”
“Mama was a truck driver from the confederacy. Daddy was a professor from Providence Island.”
“Aren’t they still?”
“Not since dad was laid off due to low enrollment and shrinking budgets..”
“That would put a damper on things. You'd think your mom would be the one outta work with autodrive trucking.”
Tressie sighed as she stepped off the curb into the parking lot. “Can we head home? I’m pretty fraggin’ beat.”
Johnny returned the sigh with his own over-dramatic full body one, “Fine. But only because I love you.”
“We can have sex.”
“Fine. But only because I love you.”
***
Gribelle opened her eyes on a black featureless sky. There was no substance beneath. Straightening herself upright, Gribelle looked out at a section of The Dreaming she never knew existed.
Beneath the sky of ink stood an ever stretching landscape of geometric shapes constructed in pure light. They gave off light pollution that fed into the featureless nothing above. The horizon line of where the light ended and the night began was impossible to distinguish.
Wherever this place was, Gribelle was still very much hungry.
***
Tressie sat naked on her meditation cushion in lotus position. Her chest rose and fell with each cycled breath. Johnny’s light snoring made an unbroken drone that stood in for a white noise generator. While Johnny’s snoring was a familiar background for transcendental meditation mantra reciting, a foreign groaning emanated from Oscar’s apartment next door.
It was a long, sustained zombie groan, halfway between sleep moans and physical ecstasy. Tressie’s concentration broke every time it leaked through the walls like sonic sludge. As she wrote meditating off as a lost cause, Tressie rose to put on clothing and check on Oscar. She grabbed her discarded top from where it landed as Oscar’s moans stopped. She waited through seven minutes of silence. With nothing further from Oscar, Tressie decided whatever he was dreaming about could be followed up with in the morning. She climbed into bed and dreamed about flaming hell dogs and blood red suns in midnight skies.
***
Gribelle’s ability to distinguish between this electronic world and The Dreaming strengthened. Everything that felt familiar reinforced the strangeness of being elsewhere with how different familiarity proved itself at every turn. The biggest difference between The Dreaming and this faceless stretch of glowing spires was the immutable scenery.
It was hours before Gribelle bothered to look away from the environs and check herself. When she did, she realized that her smooth, purple-hued, pink Succubus skin had been replaced with waifish, lightly-tanned, human parts. The feel of her new body tingled with electricity when she tried to make contact with herself. While the body responded to her commands, it was as immaterial as the world around her. If only the hunger was as fleeting as the body’s substance.
Gribelle floated above the glimmering paths below. Along them, flashing ghost bodies teleported in and out of sight. Each blip was as random and different from each other as Gribelle’s original body was to her current place-holder. Each ghost as useless to her in this searing hungered state as the spirits of The Dreaming. Gribelle’s mind craved any form of sexual activity to feed upon.
As if the collective unconscious of the universe answered Gribelle’s call for help, she apparated within a box studded in many windows. Each one had a unique nude humanoid figure displaying their genitalia or various bits of flesh. A mark in the corner of each window read, “jamstain.net”. Some of the windows displayed various partnered sexual acts of increasing debauchery.
Gribelle licked her lips. Her new body didn't respond. Just being in the presence of extreme titillation siphoned sexual energy into Gribelle’s core. Though the residuals salved the constant burn, it stoked a greater flame beneath.
The images in front of Gribelle ran their course. She poked about the box around her to see what unknown pleasures this whole new world held.
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