So, new year. List of things for myself to do this year a few posts back. Talkin' 'bout all those goals, and achievements and some such jazzness. Well, I'm on the path to achieving said goals. This week, the story I finished, West Side Connection, is beginning its rounds for publication. And what this week's post is really about, I have begun rewrites on To Slice The Sky.
I'm currently working on Chapter 2. The introductory chapter has been touched and cleaned up like a good little chapter. And today's post is what stage it's currently at. I'm planing on working on one chapter every week or so. Hopefully more, but we'll see. But here we go... chapter one of my first commercial novel. Engage!
C:\>01_Decks_n_Trips_n_Hollywood
"Get yer fraggin' hands up, punk," a peace officer shouted from off camera.
Center frame, backed into a corner, "I got your hands, poc," the data thief pulled dual pistols from inside a shiny longcoat, studded in LED spikes, "right here."
Standard issue automatic rifles disintegrated him into a pink and gray mist before he could pull the trigger. His cracked shades were all that remained of the wannabe action hero. Indistinct bits wrapped in ruined PVC, and those pistols laid beneath on the concrete.
Someone mimicked a gravity bomb.
Hearty chuckle, "Nice one."
A high five slapped from the timestamp's direction, "Someone call public works. We're gonna need a cleanup." Sounds of someone entering the squad car, "Hey, JJ. You know how to make the dash cam zoom in? I wanna save this for my kids."
"Cripes, rook, just get closer with your body cam. Whatcha worried yer gonna get some on ya?" The rest of the squad have good hearty chuckle.
'POCS LAFF OVER THERE KILL,' The title, that got Decker to open the vid in a self-important rage, lost its flavor upon repeat viewings. He cared more about where that funny haired devin kept all the meat spattered on the pavement. Decker jacked out as the ventilated mirrorshade frames reappeared, center frame and intact on a smirking face.
Heat was the first thing to hit Decker. His body was splayed over an office chair that had seen better years, feet up on what passed for a bed. Sweat crept towards Decker's unused, yet tired, eyes. It got wiped away after seconds of guessing where it was on his face.
His neuronet access came through a Pharrel Inc. subsidized graybox, grafted into his skull and synched to a Minjung-Ui Him palmtop computing unit. Decker's modifications heightened the net's resolution from the basic, public option, experience. While Decker was a whiz at cracking and modding, his box stacked next to the premium models Pharrel offered, the limitations became obvious.
Nethaze still in effect, Decker pawed about for his mason jar of water. Decker's body occupied the only unaltered room of his mom's ancient South Hollywood tract home, cut off from the virtual intelligence and associated home controls. He cursed the primitive constructor of the house's lack of belief in air conditioning advancement. Nine month summertimes without climate control in this room was something he and Trip had always meant to fix. Not like Trip, living cool and sweet in Decker's sister's old room, was falling over himself to help.
Outside the house was another over-baked July evening in Hollywood-SFV818. Pharrel Inc. municipality zoning classified this area of the Western State Coalition as the former San Fernando Valley. Decker's folks moved to this place out of the trailer park stacks his third year at Performance Arts & Technical School no.299.
PATS299 is where he met Trip as reassigned lab partners in Applied Postmodern Physics for Games and Media. Over the semester they bonded over a similar love of classic experimental film, Khlụ̄̀nS̄eīyng music and the associated fashion of Vietnamese Street Punks. Trip, a tall and lonely kid from south of the boulevard, found Decker's streetwise bravado a generator of entertainment. Decker found his perfect foil in Trip, steering them out of the trouble Decker would suck them into.
Post-graduation, Trip was ushered from his family home after his parents converted it into a Swingers congregational den. The guys made up their mind to flirt with independence. They endured a cramped two-bed unit in an overpriced slum claiming to be an artist collective. Most of the tenants turned out to be slagheds and working girls, which made Trip and Decker feel much better about not producing any art.
A couple years later, Decker's mom decided to spend the empty nest years of her life on the road in the arms of her new squeeze. She was gracious enough to let the boys watch after her almost livable dump, with the only stipulation that they couldn't change the decorum.
Decker un-velcroed his back, thighs and forearms from the sweaty vinyl and duct tape chair. Decker stretched to his full 1.7 meters, pantomiming a yawn that never came. Decker grabbed his coffee mug and smokes off the makeshift nightstand then tromped off to the backyard.
With a flick of a disposable lighter he lit his smoke and exhaled towards the glowing orange sky. Sounds of the LA River flowing past his backyard helped drag Decker out of his Neuronet haze. Garbage, ethnic cooking, and cannabis hit his nose. The ability to smell confirmed Base Plane Reality, mankind's shared hallucination, had regained control of Decker's perception.
Blocky monochrome text widgets made up Decker's standard HUD. Each drag off his cheap smoke, followed by a swallow of molecularly recombined coffee, introduced a shifting series of graphs that hung in the air. The Augmented Reality graphical displays were ignored due to its unobtrusive design mixed with user apathy.
Decker had a knack for stretching limited technology with a little gumption and ingenuity. A skill that opened doors to freelance jobs, slicing for nobodies he found in juice bars on his nightly rounds, looking for low-hanging work. While a cred bump when things were tight, slicing was nothing that could be called a career. Decker's current firewall needed major upgrades before before it could handle more than Thin to Standard Intrusion Countermeasure Executables.
Pharrel Inc. capped out malware protection for free users. For all Decker's skill, he couldn't circumvent the locks without bricking his box. A cheating domestic partner's encryption trail capped out what Decker could pull off without fear of fried brains or severe viral infection. The skag pay working for no-class losers like himself didn't help when it came to upgrading his crappy piece of corporate government hardware.
Decker pinched the cherry out of his smoke with sweaty fingers. His mind danced with thoughts about what's happening in his life.
"Where does every thing lead to?"
"Where's my place in the grand scheme of things?"
"If a scheme of things exists in the first place why is there need for someone to shill coffee to neovogue rich pricks?"
Decker sighed, shaking angsty, navel-gazing thoughts from his head. He drug a forearm across his brow, leaving a darkened patch of sweat across his forearm. The home security app announced an arriving occupant accompanied by the clang of the screen door.
"Decks?" From the front door.
"Trips?" From the kitchen.
"Decks," from the living room.
"Trips," from the living room, staring straight at Trip.
"Hey, guy?" Trip greeted his best friend and housemate. "What's the good word?"
"Bored. Kicking around vidfeeds on the net. Watched pocs shoot apart some devin Slicer a few dozen times," Decker chuckled to himself at the memory playback. "Pretty sure I've become successfully desensitized to violence. Class?"
"Utter skag, glad it's almost over. But I've got great news. Beer?" Trip offered.
"Sure, what's the occasion?"
Trip fetched beers from their fridge with built-in molecular recombination technology. They'd yet to see a Public Works fine for the extra 10g of matter they received each month for Decker's vacant folks. Nor had they been sent up to "The Bay" prison colony SFB510 to fight for their lives on HoloVision in the name of entertainment and utilities fraud.
Trip smiled as he handed Decker an already open beer, "Last week of Pharmacology school and I've already got a career offering. Cheers."
"No way. Cheers." They clinked bottle tops. Decker took a swig, "Who's the job with?" He raised an eyebrow, cracking the wry grin that comprised the bulk of Decker's expressions.
"Roplaxive Pharmaceuticals." Trip's smile snapped back into place with more vigor than intended.
Decker let out a drawn out, melodramatic groan. He stomped across the living room and sunk into the couch. "House! Entertain me. Save me from my friend's corporate, sycophantic, stoogeitude."
"Activating HoloDisplay, Custom 5 immersion," answered back a soft digital voice emanating from environment speakers.
The holographic image of a well furnished living room flooded into the bare space. Environmental speakers agreed with the image about their current stuff sucking. They should buy some new stuff that doesn't look like it was salvaged from a recycling facility, "Because Pharrel Furnishing looks grrreat on you.™"
Trip walked into the middle of the display, "Exactly. We can finally live in a swank-ass luxury-condo instead of some tenement under the guise of an artist colony. Or, like, you know, your mom's house." Trip shrugged and gestured around at all the old lady tchotchke slag in the room.
"Why does that matter? I like it here," Decker looked around for the universal control tablet. "Where's the remote? Channel surfing by voice is sooo tedious."
"Don't ignore me, prick. We can live in Ocean City," Trip stopped containing his joy.
"The job is in Ocean City? Ugh, Ocean City is so '50s," Decker made a face.
"Inorite?" Trip intentionally mistranslated Decker's tone.
Decker put his face into his palms, "Why would you want to move out of Hollywood to Ocean City of all places?"
"Face it Decker, Hollywood is ham on a hammered deuce. The air practically screams in your face at how angry it is to have people under it. You go on and on and on how much you hate it here and you want to leave. This is our chance to do our big move up in the world," Trip took a sip from his bottle.
"All our stuff is here. You really want to try and cram what can barely fit into a Hollywood two bed one bath to a crappier Ocean City juke joint?" Decker drank deep.
"Weren't you listening to me? I said we'd be set up in a sweet corporate unit. I was offered a job in Pharmacology Development & Application. Where else am I going to go besides Ocean City for that?"
"Ugh, we'll be stuck around a bunch of prickfaced buds and Ocean…ers. They eat clone meat out there and have no respect for anything but money."
"Decker, be reasonable. Most of the meat you eat is cloned, and prions is cured, guy. And, for once we'll actually have money. We can have new things instead of MacGyvering them. We can buy our upgrades, your upgrades, your… headbox720, thing."
"C'mon dude, it's called a graybox. You know this. And seven hundred twenty petaFLOPS are a small part of its specs, thank you." Decker crossed his arms.
"You can probably transfer to a SBUX out there. It's not like they're exclusive to The 818. It's like you already have a job waiting for you," Trip said.
"What if you end up being embroiled in some kinda techno-thriller, corporate government, espionage plot and I have to come save your ass?"
Trip rolled his eyes, "You'd have to come all the way from Hollywood if you didn't move with me. Why did this have to turn into an anti-corporate thing?"
"You knew that I would do that before you brought it up," said Decker.
Trip's blood boiled inside his head. His short temper, belied by an external stoic calm, did not respond well to resistance for the sake of resistance. Trip gripped his sweaty beer bottle and took the most forceful drink he could. Foam bubbled out of the top, spilling from the neck, down his fingers.
It was rare when Trip and Decker had disputes. Most tense moments between them could be laughed away in a day or two. Both subscribed to how modern man had been conditioned: to choke down big emotions until copious amounts of alcohol and designer molecules were ingested. During the tenure of their friendship, Trip and Decker had come to blows three times. Each time, neither one had any proof besides painful physical evidence and rough ocular video from Decker's graybox. Trip's fist jarring the image and a lot of blurred stumbling made up the bulk of each fight.
Trip collected his thoughts as Decker eased into his side of the couch, thinking the debate over. A constant flow of commercial holograms swam around Trip's body and the wall behind him. Their continued silence gave way to Decker cueing up a PhreeStreem™ of their favorite movie, the 2071 Gun Kata classic, Akimbo. Keeping the language its native Japanese made it ideal to talk over all the exposition parts.
"House, pause feed," Trip stepped forward through twin dragons. Under normal circumstances, they would have faded in to be revealed as the eponymous Akimbo's back tattoos. "Decker, what are you doing, man?"
"Starting our favorite movie. Then we can hang out and chat about how excited you are about your soul sucking new promotion from delivery boy."
"Dude, for once, I'd like you to take me seriously," Trip's eyes narrowed.
"Dude, I do take you seriously. I'm just telling you, Roplaxive is nothing but trouble. Ocean City will only frag you up and leave you that way." Decker stood up and reached high to put a calming palm on Akimbo/Trip's shoulder, "And most of all, dude, you know you can't leave without me." Decker's trademark, 'please let me get what I want,' smile slipped from ear to ear.
And that's what caused Trip's self control to slip. "Decker, I'm tired of being held back by your fragging idealism."
The killer left hook that grounded him never registered on his ocular camera. The last sound Decker heard before hitting the floor was Trip slamming the front door.
***
Decker's jaw hurt.
Dusk was giving way to night. His vitals read that his concussion was mild. His biosings app warned of the onset of drowsiness and what that meant to his current physiological state. At least no brain or skull damage had been detected.
Decker fumbled towards the kitchen sink to get himself a mason jar of water. If he didn't see daily evidence of the purification systems, Decker would never believe what he was drinking was either ocean water or former urine. The benefits of living in a half-assed GeoTek Megalopolis of a bunch of jammed together urban sprawls along the I-5 freeway kicked against the walls of Decker's brain.
The effort of thought made him tired. He sipped some more water and shook his head. Trip arrested for drunk smashing up a series of awfully parked vehicles flashed through his mind, right before the thought of bed.
"Bed seems nice," came from a sleepy disembodied voice. It came from somewhere underneath the biosigns.exe alarms ringing in Decker's skull, trying to keep him awake in his concussed state.
***
Trip came back home after walking around with his fists balled up, breathing deeply and not thinking about much of anything. He caught his reflection in the ad emblazoned omniglass storefront of Famous Fab's #0001.5. He saw just how silly and terrifying he looked: a gangly, red-faced, '50s throwback street tough, ready to fragment whatever gets in the way. It had been enough to clear the sidewalk away from him. Trip's demeanor sagged at his appearance. He tried to shake off the rest of the residual anger with a bacon-wrapped ripper dog and tots. After braving Fab's hour-long line, Trip tromped back to the house.
On his walk home, Trip resolved to take the job in Ocean City. Unclouded by excitement or anger, Trevor "Trip" Daniel Dawson weighed the pros and cons of a life changing decision like a grown up. It wasn't the cool or fun thing to do, but Trip had to make a man's decision. After all, he was twenty-six years old. He couldn't go on living in his best friend's mom's house whether she was there or not. Bringing someone to a house that looks like an old lady's home squatted in by a couple of techno-scabs increased the difficulty of sexual conquest.
Trip put a mental foot down and formed a plan. He would come back home, have a long talk with Decker that wouldn't end in punching. This talk would explain how Trip had been working his whole academic life for this moment and that this career was going to be something that was a benefit to them both. But if Decker refused to be a part of it, he wouldn’t be. They would cry out their goodbyes, Decker would help him pack up his things and they'd part ways. Trip's plan reminded him of long past breakup talks.
All of that would have to live within the confines of Trip's imagination since Decker was in bed when he came back home. Trip loosed an automatic sigh of relief as he creaked across the floorboards.
Trip checked on his passed out friend. Certain the idiot ignored his biosign alarms, Trip dug around in his room for his stash of anti-inflammatory oxygenators. Decker would need them to reduce brain swelling, leading to an increase of blood flow and excess oxygen restoration.
He first crafted them for Regenerative Neuropharmacology class as help to reduce hangover intensity. It turned out that it aided in reversing neural damage to the point of rejuvenation as well, turning a hangover into a learning experience.
Trip filled an injector with the pharmaceutical and unloaded it into his sleeping friend's neck. He had to sneak back into the room a couple times to steal back some "borrowed" things, but Decker never stirred. Trip took one last look at his friend, said, "See ya, dude," and blew that popsicle stand.
Trip’s whole life fit in three green cylinders of copper mesh woven plastic, packed into his bike's sidecar. One contained a mess of chemicals that without a Pharmacology Neophyte Permit, and even with one depending on the peace officers raiding your property, could be mistaken for a street pharmacist or ecoterrorist. Trip started up his bike, waved goodbye to no one, gave a deep sigh and sped off to his parent's shag palace.
He hoped the hiring process of Roplaxive Pharmaceuticals was as streamlined as the application process. He was about to finish out his last week of PharmSchool in the last place he wanted to be: in the presence of the human wreckage he had for parents.
***
Decker woke up with a start, amazed he'd fallen asleep. The night sky and a quiet house greeted him. Calling up a matrix green clock to center vision told him it was time to bail.
He had the dream again. The one where he found his brother half smiling/half horrified lying dead in their shared room. A shadow in the black; an inky darkness complete with glowing eyes staring back at Decker. Decker had dreamt the same thing since he was eight years old after he swore he saw the same thing in reality. Part of why he chose to pop DeMos and nootropics to avoid sleep. When not being knocked out, it paid being besties with a budding pharmacist.
The night was in full swing. Decker's heart sank from the state of Trip's hollowed out room. He didn't realize he pissed him off enough to move back in with his parents for a week. Decker went straight to his room and put on a long sleeve t-shirt that was black at one point in its life. Slinging his gear bag over his back and strapped on his synched Minjung-Ui Him. Decker headed out to The Canby to try and pick up a slice job for the night and forget about Trip.
By the time Decker made it the block and a half to the bar, he didn't care if he got a fragging slice job tonight or not. He just wanted to fragment his head and forget about this boring to awful day.
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