We usually met on the second level of the mall, in the coffee shop run by some weird dreadhead. They didn't seem to mind a couple cyberpunk kids hanging out in the back, as long as we drank copious amounts of coffee. Also, the uplink was exceptional.
We had already fueled up and jacked in. Shelly hooked a tripwire into the shop's cams, to let us know if someone got too nosy, security in the mall was a joke.
"Yo check this out." bROOTal dumped a couple twilight addresses on the channel. Ain't gotta tell us twice.
0pid moaned "Sooo slooow! Where the fuck is that routing?"
I set up a jail, opened a connection, and data trickled in. We dumped checksums and partial payloads in the channel.
"Huh, everyone gets a bespoke stream, headers look like VR sims." Shelly had started annotating patterns in the binary and bROOTal had set a ghidr/ai loose to decompile the code. "There's connection code in there, and lots of crypto. What's a #veilid?"
"So, anyone wanna sample?" 0pid's avatar started wagging an eyebrow.
"Fuck it." I flashed a hard damper onto my interface and the world grew dim. Less pressure from the seat and the cup in my hand felt cooler. My vision grew a little blurry and muted. I fed the payload into the runtime.
The world vanished. No more seat, cup, or hand. No more vision. I floated in absolute blackness. Then a fractal of light exploded in the sky. Unfurling tendrils of complexity ate away the darkness, replacing it with pulsating constructs of nightmarish beauty. Nothing was dampened. My head hurt and I tried to remember how to unplug, but instead of my memories I found a face. Not a human face. A facsimile of one, nearly correct but wrong. Smiling a wrong smile with too many teeth. Speaking without opening it's mouth.
«BE. MY. GUEST.»
The headache got worse. There was pressure on my ears and my heart was racing. I couldn't breathe.
«LET. ME. HELP.»
The face grew a body with too many limbs and stretched an arm out to touch me. Just before the hand reached me, I snapped back.
I lay on the floor of the coffee shop, smelling vomit and tasting blood. My friends were staring down at me, and so was a weird dreadhead.
"You alive?" They slapped me gently on the cheek and I moaned as the headache flared up again. My friends grabbed me and pulled me onto a seat. Dreadhead threw us a pitiful look.
"So you're smart enough to find trouble, and dumb enough to not know."
They grabbed a coffee, pulled up a chair and sat at our table.
"Listen up, kiddos, today we'll learn the lesson: Fuck ICE."
#guest #wss366 #cyberpunk #writing #tootfic #macrofiction #microfiction #scifi
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