Welcome back. Continuing on with promoting By Starlight - Before Dawn, we now arrive at the next step in the tale of Tressie, Johnny & Gribelle. Rising actions and fun with body mechanics await you in the text below. The covers are complete, the proofs have been read, and at least the eBook versions are available for pre-order. I wanted to stick with Halloween as a release date, opposed to releasing whenever, mostly because I think I deserve at least one release date to be Halloween in my bibliography. If only I could write fast enough to Long Halloween it and release a new horror upon the world every holiday. One day.
So, about those eBooks: Amazon. Smashwords. Each version has a separate cover. While the Amazon version is the "True" cover, I still like the Smashwords variant better. I fear I may be trying to make eBooks like comics. The paperback is still being worked on. The paperback sports much nicer formatting than the eBook. Both of which have better formatting than this blog.
Beyond cover variations, the Smashwords version of the first book in the Lilim Chronicles: Urban Legends of the Future, is now available for free. Non-related to the Lilim Chronicles, my poetry book, Pretty Words for Hateful Bastards, is also available at whatever price you want on Smashwords.
If you download, please review. But I've talked enough. It's time to give you what you came for.
Wanna catch up to speed? Here's the link to: Part One
two
“...And when the bass hits-/-Then you bring it back...” From the creeping subbass of modern DraB-Hop into a frenetic NeuroFunk mix from early in the century, cut up drum and bass samples ping-ponged around Tressie’s studio. She fought the urge to X-step in time. as she synched up and beatmatched an Ibiza-acid-house-hop track to drop right on the fadeout. Something anthemic and uplifting to end the night on before Johnny and DeMolition Lab worked everyone up with their OldxSchoolxHardxCore bombast.
Tressie set fingers--that were supposed to be reaching higher till they can’t get enough--to her rig’s trackpad, tapping to the snare hit. On cue, she spun the pad backwards, morphing and distorting the DnB into something like sandpaper working underwater. She held it to a count of three as echoes reverbed through the PA, releasing a thunderous, “bring it back...” that resonated into a pounding four-on-the-floor beat.
Tressie synched all four of her decks to the same song, each tied to a separate channel bank on her mixer. She tweaked the EQ of each deck, saving the custom settings for automatic recall tomorrow. It produced four separate mixes of the final track of her, “Unfamous,” playlist.
The sound inside the cramped walls of unit 301 assaulted Tressie from all sides. The direct mix in her headphones gave a clear idea of what everything meant to sound like. The subtle knob twiddling would be lost in the open air of Das Komplex’s courtyard, but the partygoers, especially those standing near the surround speakers, would feel the difference.
With Das Komplex’s somewhat-annual Infamous party tomorrow night, Tressie had to force herself to put some finishing polish on her set and keep out of The Raw. She ignored all of Johnny's messages from school. Tressie deliberately avoided trolling her usual forums for work and bit off the urge to scan her new mail for fear of jacking in out of habit.
In the midst of all of her DJing, the loss of connection to her Search & Destroy tracking widget itched in the back of Tressie’s mind. Last night's job was around 50% complete when she zonked out. When she woke up, the progress tracker was gone and the program unresponsive. Tressie still had the rest of the day to check in with her client. At the end of six minutes and forty-two seconds, the final moments of her playlist chanted out a final refrain.
Flying so high,
cut lines in the sky.
Never coming down,
never gonna die...
Tressie jacked in. Exiting her launcher scene, perception shifted into the wide open spaces of The Raw. Tressie gazed out at the area outside her launcher home point. Something was off. Like coming home to find all your furniture rearranged.
***
Gribelle had never possessed anyone before today. It wasn’t what she had planned while exploring the deserts of The Dreaming. Thankfully for Gribelle, those minds predominantly craved titillation.
Gribelle’s buffet turned out to not be all you can eat. In the middle of gorging on a rodeo-themed seventy-seven person gang bang through live cam, Gribelle found herself trapped inside the head of someone named Oscar that lived in a smelly apartment. From the little Gribelle could see through this Oscar’s eyes, his body matched the dreamer that sucked her into a glorious red-lit world of writhing sexy time.
Oscar stretched in his abused recliner, pulled the trodes off his head and rubbed where the contact plates met skin. Staccato music bumped and blatted in the apartment next door. Gribelle felt trapped in a box with nowhere to stretch. She could see out, but the conscious mind she crowded into was bustling with activity and early--midday--regret for passing out on “the net”. Though Oscar had no plans for today, he felt it would be a good start to find food or void his bowels. The order in which to do them turned into an internal debate. Gribelle’s last shred of tolerance for being a prisoner of the mundane expired.
Puppeteering a body was a new experience that did not come easily. Moving a hand meant learning the fundamentals of manipulating muscle, bone and tendon via projected thought. After several attempts, and Oscar’s resolution to defecate before eating, Gribelle managed to flex Oscar’s thumb.
Sitting on the toilet, Oscar found it odd his thumb twitched for no reason. Sure he’d felt his heart flutter, his guts rumble or have full body shivers while standing at a urinal, but his thumb never flexed on its own.
Gribelle, becoming more comfortable with the controls of this Oscar vehicle, tried for the whole arm. With a raise of the dreamer’s left arm, Oscar grabbed at the errant limb and jerked it downwards with a, “What the frag is going on?”
“Silence, fleshy meatbag. Relinquish control of this vessel,” Gribelle spat.
“Who the frag said that?” Oscar said aloud. Oooh skag. Great, I fell asleep jacked in and now I’ve been hijacked by a rogue VI. I knew this neuronet skag wasn’t safe.
“I said silence. I command you to silence.” Gribelle clamped Oscar’s hands over his mouth. “I have travelled through many worlds in a short time. I do not know which world I am currently trapped within, but I will not suffer it further.”
Silence for several moments. Sweat beaded on Oscar’s forehead. He flatulated. Gribelle gagged on the bathroom’s perfume of putrescence, as did Oscar. Oscar regretted last night's meal of convenience store chili cheese dogs.
I know you told me to shut up, but I can help with the smell. Oscar thought.
Gribelle contemplated this matter, “How so?”
Just let me use my arms again. Clearly neither of us is going to have a good time if you don’t.
“If this is a ruse, you shall pay, mortal.”
All I know is I woke up with schizophrenia, or a really jacked up computer virus. So to ease my, our, whatever, discomfort, please let me wipe and flush.
Silence.
“Very well, Dreamer. Free us from this stench.”
***
Tressie was finished expressing a range of conflicting emotions. Freaking out gave way to unfocused rage which mutated into utter hopelessness. Now, in cold logistician mode, Tressie had come to the root of the net's problem.
On the upside, her client’s files were deleted. A phantom memory on the greatwide net waiting to have it’s 0000’s converted to new data. Multiple file searches, sniffer swarms, and a few cache decryption sessions came up empty. Complete removal achieved, just like the client ordered. Where they went to and why Tressie’s tracking app had bricked was a mystery. She was certain it tied into why jamstain.net and hundreds of thousands of other neuronet porn scenes had gone dark for maintenance.
Tressie wrote herself into the admin list for jamstain.net. She created a superuser test account to go poking about in the scene’s safe mode. She discovered there wasn’t much of anything to keep safe. Usually a landfill of livefeeds and lasciviousness, jamstain's servers were picked clean.
Numerous user email complaints were about all the data left on the server. Ranging from misspelled rants about being a paid subscriber unable to access their beat off material to complaints about their livefeed performers dying in mid coitus last night. In the midst of those were a smattering of thanks from the necrofetishists. [STICKY] *** PEACE OFFICERS CLEANUP DEATH CAM BROTHEL MEGATHREWAD ~~~ was the top trending thread before the servers went down. Social media was already in the remix video stage of viral outbreak.
The admin mail was not much better. Mostly usernames trying to incorporate as many penis euphemisms as possible running around in circles asking, "What do we do?" No further info was gleaned besides sizable chunks of the net’s camwhores outside of jamstain.net also dropped dead while screwing.
Not content to let a coincidence go unnoticed, Tressie scanned through last night’s logs. All of the jamstain performer flatlines were logged at different times during an eight-hour block. All dead performers had one thing in common. A user MAC address logged in for a set of trodes, registered to user Oscar Valdez.
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