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ELECTRON DREAMS

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TALES FROM THE HARDZONE

The liberating promise of nanotechnology has failed. Unable to compete against the affluent nations of the Pacific Empire, the West has declined into stagnation and decay.

A disillusioned generation seek escape from reality via the only means available to them.

Welcome to the future

Welcome to the hardZone...


IF I SHOULD WAKE FROM ELECTRON DREAMS...

Her voice was the sound of white noise recorded on an old, worn-out videotape - a silicon echo, surfing the softZone, forever lost in the electrobabble of Radio City. Nobody knew where the voice came from or where it was going to.

How old was she?
What did she want?

Each night, between sunset and sunrise, the voice would return. People listened, straining to catch the fragmented words of longing and loneliness breaking the electron night, only to hear them fade into an audio haze.

And there, on the outskirts of the city, in the industrial wilderlands known as The Edge, sat Izzy Kandinsky. Everyone knew he was a wireHead junkie - even Zeb from across the hall. And Zeb never spoke to anyone or went anywhere - at least not in this reality.

Izzy was one of the first to hear the voice. He'd been mindMerged with Suzanne and Arana for nine hours straight, a mantric beat controlling the rhythms of their pleasure zones. Suddenly, they had felt the biofrequencies shudder. Then a fractal whisper - feminine, delicate, fragile as glass - had entered the Web. Like hologram ripples in a psychedelic sea, her words had reached outward, carressing the minds of wireHeads around the world.

No-one could hear the words clearly, but they could sense the pain in her voice, the longing in her heart. In that brief moment, she touched something deep inside Izzy's soul, and he was never the same again.

Night after night, hour after hour, in the darkness of his cramped apartment, Izzy listened intensely to her haunting, melodic tones. Until one evening, overcome with exhaustion, he slipped into a neon dream. And in that dream, he heard her voice. And Izzy realised she was calling him.

When he awoke, he knew what to do. Her signal would be fractured, weak, but if he could match biofrequencies, it might just be possible to hitch a ride and trace the signal back to its source.

So now Izzy sat, mindSurfing the Web, waiting, waiting, waiting for the voice...



The body was discovered several days later. It was a common enough death for wireHead junkies: a biofeedback loop had burnt out the neural interface and fried the brain's temporal lobes. This was one of the dangers faced when over-using the Web, but people took the risks regardless - and Izzy had been no exception. HardWired since the age of four, it was the only life he had really known.

Sat in his favourite chair, head back, Izzy's soulless eyes stared at the ceiling, his lips parted as if about to speak.

Bruno stood next to the body, looking nervously around the gloomy apartment.

"C'mon, Su, let's go, girl. I ain't seen no dead hardBoy before, an' it scares the shit outta me, you dig?"

Suzanne was kneeling at Izzy's feet, her head resting on his lap, her hand placed on his.

"Look" - Bruno was restless - "I thought we wuz just comin' to a brainMeet, man. I mean, this could be trouble fer us, and if there's one thing I don't need, it's more tr - "

"Go then."

Bruno stood motionless.

"Go on. Go." Suzanne spoke softly, quietly, without a trace of hurt in her voice. "Nobody's stopping you." She held Izzy's hand tightly.

Slowly, Bruno walked to a chair and sat down. He'd heard the tales of people who die while mindSurfing the Web, that their electron consciousness becomes a ghost in the machine - a discorporated soul - wandering the softZone. They say that, if you listen very closely to the dataStream, you can hear their cries of desperation and despair.

"Su, I just ain't smooth to this, " Bruno muttered, holding his head in his hands.

After a long silence, Suzanne rose to her feet and informed the recycling department to come and collect the body. She then tore the neural interface from Izzy's temple, pocketing the small, blue, wafer-thin strip.

By now, Bruno was waiting impatiently in the hallway.

"C'mon, let's go," he ordered, as quietly as possible.

Stroking his face, Suzanne looked one final time into Izzy's dead, dead eyes. Smiling sadly, she cried no tears as she kissed him on the cheek.

"I'll always love you," she whispered in his ear as she drew away.

Bruno was becoming more agitated as Suzanne finally closed the apartment door after her. "C'mon, girl, what's been keepin' you? Let's move!"

She said nothing as they walked briskly down the hallway towards the exit. A door opened ever-so-slightly as they passed, and Zeb guiltily peered through the gap.

"You seen nuthin', y'hear?" Bruno scowled back at Zeb. "Remember, you seen nuthin'!"

The door quickly shut.

As they left the apartment block, Bruno relaxed a little.

Except for the wind-strewn litter and the battered, old, abandoned cars, the street was empty; the buildings gutted and decaying.

"D'you think Izzy found what he was lookin' for?" Bruno asked. Both he and Suzanne had both been aware of Izzy's obssessive behaviour recently.

"Yes, he probably did," Suzanne replied. "After all" - she looked up at the cold, grey sky and felt the cold, grey rain stinging her face - "Izzy found what we're all looking for..." She then turned to face Bruno. "A way out."



Her voice was the sound of white noise recorded on an old, worn-out videotape - a silicon echo, surfing the softZone, forever lost in the electrobabble of Radio City. But this time, there was something different. Another voice, frightened, less delicate, yet guided by her soothing whisper. Across the dataStream they travelled, endlessly, forever, in love.




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Comments2
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the-Beas-tWithin's avatar
I love this. I love the image and the story. I wish there was more of it but probably there isn't, so I'll just have to read it again and maybe check out your other work.