Caution: Street Walking Cheetahs.

The week was long and full of trials, its ending welcomed like a returning lover. But its end only began a brief respite in the face of ever rising odds stacked against me like so many decks dealt from the bottom. I kept telling myself my troubles were light, and that for each day passed through was another victory for life. But life was a tricky mistress, and she didn't like to return after she flitted off on a whim.

"Why are you talking like that?"

This week was a testament to what I'll do to release tension, and how I have no clue how to relax anymore. With dual-day jobs in full effect, I'm cherishing the moments I can take to myself whenever I can. Especially since work has always been my greatest generator of misery, and as such creative fire. I'm sure I've done more side project planning and drafting while on the job than my actual job over the last 16 years. It's like Bukowski working at the post office and writing reams of pissed off poetry and a book. As much as I hate working for other people, I do fear I'd lose all my inspiration if I ever had to give it up. Granted I'd probably become a shut-in if I didn't have to leave my house for work, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Getting a jumpstart on summer session for school, I'm taking a Noir Fiction class, I read The Maltese Falcon for the first time. I also have The Big Sleep (which I've previously read), The Killer Inside Me (reading next), Strangers on a Train and Double Indemnity (only seen the movies), and I've been falling back into my habits of film noir love. I was a little underwhelmed by The Maltese Falcon, since I had such high expectations of it. The structure and parts of the story were excellent, and the tropes it codified are some of my favorites in fiction, but Hammett's writing was pulpy in the, "I'm getting paid per word for a serialized story," unlike Chandler's more poetic prose. It was too descriptive while it was going for atmospheric. Also, the entire thing could have been a short story over a novella with all the conversations of everyone going, "We know you know something, spill it." "Well I know you know something, so you spill it and maybe I'll spill it." And repeat for 217 pages. Hammett seems like he was a cool guy with a lot of issues, but unfortunately one of his issues was writing dull prose for his cool ideas. I dunno, maybe I should read Red Harvest too, since that's hailed as his masterpiece. Maybe if I didn't read Chandler before Hammett I would have had lower expectations, but Raymond Chandler's prose is exactly what I think of when it comes to Noir.

And all this steeping into Crime Fiction got me thinking randomly about Vegas. I used to live there, and I have friends who used to and currently do live there, not to mention it's just a four-hour drive away from LA, so it's pretty much treated as our weekend retreat so we don't puke in our own city (that's what the rest of the week is for). And of course with Vegas comes gambling. I'm not much of a gambler, but I do like a drink at the end of the day. And with no last call Vegas for me was hanging out with people gambling while I got free drinks playing video poker. Or sitting alone in my crappy apartment playing MMORPG's. I really don't have many fond memories of the place, and they usually manifest themselves into story ideas, so this week I started some character sketches for my team of over the top Gambling Outlaws that band together by circumstance to take back a big score from someone cheating the odds.

I'm probably going to write it for NaNoWriMo this year, since what I've jotted down for the first scene is kinda in the vein of Some Call Me... which was fun as hell to write. I'm planning on doing it as a series of 10-12 or so vignettes tied together to tell the story in a broken manner. Figure with each scene about 3-5k words that should work as a NaNo entry. In reality it's probably going to be a lot more scenes that are shorter, but we'll see how it goes. I've been wanting to do more Villain Protagonist type works since By Starlight. Writing from a bad guy's perspective is much more fun, since you're able to go places only an anti-hero can. No need for any moral boo-hooing before the action, just quiet regret that they're used to choking down and getting over it after the fact. I'm definitely going for a Sin City type of vibe, but that's just my love of Frank Miller, and my unashamed nature to steal from anyone that comes across my path. Rogue life for life.

In gaming news, I played through Quantum Break this week, and it was well worth the wait. When I first saw the gameplay demo, I thought it looked like a sweet looking game with cool mechanics, and I was right. I don't think I fully utilized all the mechanics I could have, but I had a blast playing the game. If you're that interested in watching someone bumble through the length of the game (including the live action TV show episodes in between game acts), I streamed it all on my twitch.tv channel.

It was nice having time to relax for a tic and kill some time with a game, but I was also busy on the rewrites front. GASP, yes I also finished chapter 7 this week. I told you I was busy. I technically finished it this morning, but you wouldn't have known unless I told you anyway. So after this fair-lengthed post, you get more updates into my writing process with the second draft of a novel I'm trying to release at the end of the year before it goes to an editor. I think I should have had a better back up plan. Release 3 books one year and then nothing the next? That's a fail. At least I've gotten a lot of new content for a non-Lilim Chronicles release. We'll see. As of now, I'm just trying to keep all the chainsaws I'm juggling in the air without losing an arm.

"Did someone say they want to lose an arm?"

C:\>07_Look_Out_Honey_’cause_I’m_Using_Technology

     "Infiltrate Gene Works Inc. Research and Development intranet. Retrieve any information involving prototype biosynthetic organisms." Was the super important message printed across a sheet of dumbpaper, crumpled on top of its blue plastic envelope.

     Decker fired up his palmtop rigs, the trusty ole Minjung-Ui Him and a Roplaxive Ghost palmtop, given to him as a sign on bonus with his graybox. It was good for testing .xpz, but nothing made him trust RoPhar—what with the clause in his contract about logging his actions on company time. His diagnostics never detected any abnormal transmissions, but it didn’t ease the paranoia.

     Decker limbered up before he stimmed a Trip-mixed cocktail of nootropics and DeMos into his neck. He washed the creeping metal flavor down with a giant tumbler of water. Neurons tingled inside his skull as he choked down a Choco-Power VitaGlucose bar. Stims weaved their spell over his brain meat, ramping Decker’s perception to a halftime tempo as he became aware of the atomic makeup of his general area. He got comfortable in the newly ordered massage chair he rigged for tactile feedback. It was time to work.

The Raw; a constructed mental image of all the world's data that stretched on as far as it needed. Science fiction gave birth to the idea before the oldnet was even born. Its architects used the foundations laid by past visionaries to create a sprawling urban layout without any rhyme or reason to its expansion. Chunks of virtual real estate, flying their home server’s colors, dotted the landscape, filled with the avatars of all things connected, great and small. At the zero-point of axes X, Y & Z—housed in a massive golden pyramid that blasted a light into the infinite black above—sat the oldnet archive.

Few users ever spent time in The Raw. Instead, they filled their launchers, mock-up apartment spaces within towering complexes, letting the neuronet come to them. Outside their ignored imaginary windows, constructs of brilliant light represented the actual nuts and bolts of interacting with data. Cloud server real estate, jacked-in avatars, and electronic device VI’s, took up space in a place that exists in humanity's subconscious storage drive of the neuronet.

     Decker was on the prowl, jumping into the green lit facades of Gene Works Inc.'s server domain. With a quick search he found the URL of a Gene Works subsidiary that sold cheap plastic goods to the EATA. Under the pretense of bulk buying for a Brazilian plastics recycler, he picked the merchant's GWI backdoor lock. Decker slipped through the thin ICE and was in.

     Shifting into Gene Work's internal workings was worthy of marvel coupled with an aura of foreboding. The chance of minimizing his digital wake felt hopeless. He slipped into a transparent avatar skin, as if it would help against anything. It still felt like he was under constant surveillance.

     An objective indicator popped in Decker’s HUD. Digital maps were thankfully included in RoPhar’s mission file. Decker followed the arrow through a jungle green kaleidoscope maze. The walls were just-opaque-enough, rippling in pinpricks from constant memory reallocation. The tickle in the back of his mind, kept Decker wondering why he never came across any instances of live NetSec forces jacked into The Raw. Especially since ICE had a consistent track record of being sliced at some point. Realizing he was rooting for the enemy, Decker dropped the line of thought.

     R&D was positioned within a verdant green colosseum, built primarily of pillars supporting a distant ceiling. It was designed with a minimalist mindset for digital efficiency. Each pulsing obelisk held Gene Works’ collected data for an entire research division. And each of their secrets, to Decker’s dismay, were encased behind jagged walls of Glacial ICE.

     Aside from the obvious challenge, Decker's HUD guided him to R&D just fine but locating the correct data pillar was up to him. Directions like, 'infiltrate and find,' are easier written than to make so, even without roving security.

Decker positioned himself just above the center floor of the massive room. Across the distance, he could catch movements of three avatars doing work in The Raw. Lab geeks in different departments, burning the midnight oil.

Decker analyzed the pillars around him, searching for weak points in the ICE, hoping that his minimal data output would bleed into the binary noise of the area. Each avatar blinked out over the course of the next hour as they wrapped up their work. Feeling ballsy, and exasperated of coming up empty for his target, Decker sent out a scanning pulse.

     Decker's body back in Base Plane Reality sweat in its ergonomic leather seat as the GWI server presence weighed on his psyche. Decker's HUD tagged twenty-eight different pillars that contained information related to his search. No active sniffers came back in search of his signal, but it didn’t stop the heavy feeling in his drug-addled guts. Something was watching.

     Decker chose the most relevant pillar in the search, labeled: Post-Human Building Blocks. As Decker approached, his slicing GUI loaded. Three thick locks formed in an obtuse triangle spread across the side he faced. The first lock was practically in position and needed little adjustment. Decker guessed a standard 64-bit alpha-numeric code, something a net savvy teenager would use to lock access to their social networking profile. He tsked at that kind of laziness, expecting better from someone working at Gene Works.

     Decker's body in meatspace took a pull of water. His chest and neck grew hot to the touch as he broke through the second lock with the challenge more becoming his expectations. He took a little pride that the encryption protocol he enabled for Roplaxive’s servers was used at the world’s tech giant.

     The digital lock dissolved. His invisible hands fumbled with the final lock. Decker, thinking he had the puzzle solved, jammed the lock. Racing through the forest green coliseum of information, translucent circuit prints flooded with shocking pink. Newly colored lines rose in luminous intensity, burning through every aspect of the R&D chamber.

     A BurnCycle flamed into being. Its terrifying presence struck fear into the hearts of digital deviants everywhere, and now one sped towards the pillar in a fiery streak. Wanting to avoid neural burn scarring, Decker felt a practical application of force was needed to hurry things along.

     Decker dialed up a security tunneler from his toolkit. They were loud, crass and left evidence of forced entry, but he'd already been made. The tunneler shattered all security remaining on the Post-Human Building Blocks column, leaving a cascade of rendered ice shards on a hot pink floor. Decker initialized the transfer process into torrent seeds for later retrieval. The BurnCycle and pink/red hate light zeroed in on their target. Decker dashed himself up and away from BurnCycle contact, leaving a wake of macro driven data transfer.

     Decker tried to jump out of GWI's mainframe to a new URL, only to smash into a flaming pink corner, bordering Gene Work's digital emerald empire.

     Decker was trapped. He went down his bookmarks list, finding too many sites he frequented were hosted on GWI servers. For URLs outside, he smacked into pink illuminated walls. Even if it was poor form to log out at the scene of a crime, he couldn’t do that either. BurnCycle candles lit in locations he had occupied. Decker attempted to slice through the wall back to the rest of The Raw but was shut down at each turn. His GUI would launch only to be crashed in nanoseconds by one tricked out security VI.

     A BurnCycle popped behind Decker, activating its entrapment protocol. With a rehearsed action Decker hit it with a corruptor.xpz. An impressive visual display--programmed for no reason beside Decker's amusement--deleted pixel chunks till the virtual monster ceased to move, followed by a spectacular explosion.

     A cubed dead zone of virtual real estate was left in the explosion’s wake. The security wall was weakened down to Thin ICE status, giving Decker something to punch through. With a quick flick of a lock, Decker was free--

     --His eyes popped open, heart beating wild enough to move his carbon-fiberweaved chest. Ocular receptors misfired. Severe vertigo alongside aural and tactile disorientation from nethaze turned the world into an impressionist piece of performance art. He pulled himself all the way to the bathroom with every micrometer of his body screaming in agony. It really fragging hurt to move or think.

     With great effort, he propped himself over the toilet. A violent stream of sick carried the 14 cred lunch Decker enjoyed earlier out of his mouth. He moaned, hugging the cool surface, his temperature read 38.5ºC and that medgel conductors were repairing damage to internal systems. He wretched twice, then thrice, then cleaned himself off.

     DeMos were purged from his system via an induced sweat. His heartrate slowed to a calmer 98bpm and his temp receeded to a normal 37.2ºC. He splashed more water on his dark yet paled face and exited the washroom.

     He switched on the Ghost’s holodisplay to view progress on his torrents. Decker let curiosity get the better of him and copied the files to a smartpaper sheaf before zipping them to RoSynth's secure address. He laid back on the bed, letting sweat evaporate and cool him. Decker's Ghost sat a meter away with its black matte with blue and purple LED trim glowing as it worked transferring terabytes of information to the flash memory of smartpaper. In between each flash from blue to purple gave off just the faintest hint of shocking pink light.

***

     "We need to talk," Trevor rubbed his hands together against the cold that wasn't in the room. Decker was fresh from a shower while Trevor was already making the decision to be drunk.

     Decker shook a towel on his shaggy puff of black hair with a shock of rust orange bangs. "That's never a good thing. What are we talking about?"

     "Us."

     "Us?"

     "Yeah, Decker, us." Trevor spread whisky molecules into the air with a heavy sigh, "Our living arrangement doesn't seem to be the best for us, for me. I'm just dealing with tough skag. I need some space."

     "Whoa, whoa, whoa, you really just used the 'need some space' line? On me? I invented that line. At least the guys I used it on had the balls to give me an orgasm first." He stared at Trevor like an idiot, "Why now? Why all of a sudden after you give me this riot act of how we're going to lose our jobs if we don't get serious–"

     "–We? No, no my friend, you put our jobs in jeopardy." Trevor's gesticulation sent additional whisky splashes flying.

     "Dude, you're spilling all over–"

     "–What do you care? Rather hang out withfragging clones than your best friend?" Trevor slurred.

     "And you want to hang out with limpricks instead of your best friend." Decker took his towel and moved to clean the aftermath of Trevor's emptying glass.

     "Cut it out, Decks, just let the house get it." Trevor stumbled away and tossed the glass over his shoulder.

     "Look dude, I've gone through a pretty harsh ordeal like minutes ago. I'm not particularly in the mood for another go around of, 'Trip's pissed about something new', okay?"

     Trip mimicked Decker in a childish way.

     "Yep, you're advancing straight into manhood. Sail on, Jerry, sail on.” Decker saluted Trevor before wrapping his whisky soaked towel over himself. He continued, “Dude, I love you like the brother I never got to have. I think we're a trainwreck because you're too busy playing dress up instead of doing what you came here to do, like a fragging boss.”

     Decker knelt and wiped away the brown liquid from the hardwood with a towel corner. "You got passed over for a skag position by some goober with a ginger fro. With your own work, mind you.” He stopped dabbing at the wet spot and looked Trevor in the face, “You once drunkenly puked on a mime because they spoke. You used to have standards, man. What the frag happened to the dude?"

     "He can't even fit into his pants." Trevor stared out at the purple haze of the night sky. He traced constellations of pill, food and gadgetry adverts in the skyline. He caught the glowing blue on shadow of Decker's eyes reflected in the glass.

     "I can't help you if you won’t let me, Trip," Decker said.

     "I think I need to figure this out on my own first." Trevor said without thinking.

     "What does that mean?"

     Trevor sighed, fogging the glass a little, “I need some time to think on my own. You think you could get out of here for a while or something?" He stumbled towards the kitchen, passing by Decker who flinched at his presence. He filled his glass up with ice and water, "Just for a bit. Running from stuff isn't helping."

     Decker turned towards his friend, "This sounds a lot like a different form of running away."

     "No, really, it's different.” Trevor no longer struggled for words, “I've been thinking about this all day. I haven't had a break in human contact and really been alone since I got to the city. I've never really been on my own period. Let me try it for a few days. See what being with myself is really like."

     Decker mulled it over before speaking, "So, you really want me gone, huh?"

     Trevor focused on his friend, "Just for a few days, I think this will work. Absence and fond hearts and all."

     Decker smirked, "Always the poet and you don't even know it. Take some fragging system cleanser while I'm gone." Decker's short frame hugged Trevor's torso, "Your guts will thank you. I speak from experience."

***

     Decker arrived at The Bodylocker Motel in Clonetown with his multi-pocketed bag of gear and clothes, both of his palmtops clanking against each other inside. The capsule motel was recommended on a netscene Decker used to check prospective lodging by price. The bored clone behind the desk regarded Decker with the same caution it would give any guvvy, complete with feeling for the motel's gun taped underneath the front desk.

     "I need a pod. I see that you have weekly rates." Decker leaned on the counter away from where he thought the barrel was pointed. The innkeeper shifted his aim.

     The clone belched, ran its free hand across the stubble of its androgynous face, and took a long drag off a cigarette burning in a plastic ashtray. He breathed blue-gray smoke at Decker, "I ain't got rooms for guvvy trash. Take your guvvy problems and shove ‘em."

     "Look, prick, I'm not trying to start trouble."

     "That's not how it looks from my side."

     Decker sighed his weight onto his arms, "I'm having a pretty slagged night that didn't involve me doing anything with the law or people I owe money to. Now again, do you have a fragging pod for me, or is the vacancy sign a liar?"

     "The vacancy sign is burnt out."

     "Be that as it may, do you have a pod?"

     The clone hacked out a brown wad of tar and phlegm, "You're not going to go away are you?" It snorted its snot stuffed nostrils.

     "Not now, I'm not." Decker planted himself.

     The clone sighed, got up from its chair and buckled its pants. The died down conversation allowed the faint sounds of mock ecstasy to lay a sleazy backing track to the already awkward moment.

     The two stopped in the far corner of an upstairs hall. All the occupied pods were blacked out with privacy shades. Decker's new body dump glowed soft white in the center of some blacked out reserved pods. The clone handed him a tap key, then told Decker to piss off and not bug him again.

     Decker climbed in and choked back bile. It wouldn’t help the reek of stale piss, body odor and boozed up sex that permeated into the memory foam slab. With nothing else to do, Decker jacked into the net to kill time until the morning.

***

     The sun crept in through the living room window, spilling crimson and gold rivers over the unit's floor plan. Trevor had no idea what time it was, but his alarm was angry at him from the other room. He spilled off the couch and made his way to the bedroom where he shut it off. The house VI announced his return to waking consciousness and began its Rise-N’-Shine protocol despite the time being closer to midday. Trevor cursed everything and contemplated the plausibility of getting away with calling in sick.

     Once determined to get a move on, and beg forgiveness for being four hours late, the house announced a caller. Trevor spun around as his front door opened on its own accord. He felt annoyed at first that Decker had come back this soon, then puzzled at the guards and suits that came flooding into the unit. The Blonde, Bird, and Toad were in presence. He figured they were the invasive privacy type, but not to this extent.

     "Mr. Dawson, how happy it is to see you," The Blonde began.

     The Toad croaked, “It's unfortunate that things had to transpire this way, but–"

     "–You're being promoted.” The Bird sang, “Isn't that wonderful?"