skonen_blades: (didyoujust)
It was a total systems crash.

Jake’s smoking eye-holes were stinking up the place with the smell of roast pork. I felt the heat coming off of his head from across the room. His skull had been turned into a toaster oven.

He was jacked in when the viral power surge came tunneling down the wires, sniffing out any components that it could overload. Biological or silicate, it didn’t care.

Christmas lights, we called victims like Jake. Someone always got tagged. The time it took for them to cook was the time it took for the rest of us to hurriedly jack out. There was no way for skill to compensate for it. Some people claimed premonition but really, that was just superstition. Vegas talk.

Life expectancy with the raiders wasn’t high but the pay was great and the thrill was undeniable. It was Russian roulette for hardcore professionals.

The defense programs were mobile now. They’d find us and attack us, sometimes weeks after a run. No warning.

Poor Jake. But last week it was Kathy. The week before it was Forna. If I don’t stop this job soon, it’ll be me. Most people average six weeks before turning into a Christmas light and I’d been here for nearly three months.

I just couldn’t stop.

Standing there, looking down at Jake’s sizzling face, I understood why.




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skonen_blades: (didyoujust)
Headfirst into the mainstream with my lawsuit buzzing, that’s the only way to do it. The cold data can stop your heart. Bright red crosses dance around me, warding off viruses that can infect my setup and make it drain others.

So I guess crosses finally work against vampires.

The pile of reflexes and soft meat back in my room smiles as the brain inside its head sees the entire world in an agreed-upon colour code.

A filter of money, information, governments and public works light up the pinball machine on the floor of the e-net worldview. Flyers like me cluster moth-like around the bright, shapely nodes. We are superheroes but there are billions of us. We are gnats in clouds buying from the neon pyramids.

How little things change. Commerce uses creativity to drive innovation. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and really, what greater necessity is there above feeding one’s self? Therefore, one invents. One invents stories. One invents tales.

One lies.

I’m here to check up on how my lies are doing. People worry about powerful viruses without realizing that the most dangerous virus of all is the most prolific; the spoken word.

A simple paragraph of text gets past all of the defenses. It’s innocuous. I sprinkle them behind my glowing sylph of an avatar as I float down to the e-street floor. They follow in my wake like phosphorescent algae behind a boat in the hardworld. They are my dandelion seeds.

My body is dying back in the meatspace. I need a new one and I need backups. I need volunteers moved by pity and motivated by greed. I need the gullible and the feeling. I need bleeding hearts in healthy bodies. I want liberals that don’t smoke to travel hundreds of miles, knock on my door, and offer themselves to me.

I need a new body every year. I have no more in the basement. I have spent over eight months realtime honing my craft.

My perfect paragraph moves, promises, affects and drowns. It twists reason with emotion to give birth to plausible reasons. It manipulates logic by employing religion. In places, it tells outright untruths.

With luck, it will make you give your body to me.

I have a week left. Cross your fingers. Wish me luck.


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skonen_blades: (haBUUH)
This is the opposite of solitary confinement. It’s called tearing down the firewalls. They’ve removed my filters.

The receivers in our heads are tuned to accept the messages of friends. They are tuned to receive only the transmissions of the channels we’ve subscribed to.

My headcase was cracked after the sentence and my CPTU was virussed.

They brought the noise.

I’m stumbling through the streets with a rage of static in my head. Every trivial conversation is mine to overhear. Every phone call. Every voicemail. Every e-mail. Every h-mail. Every advertisement in the midst of every show on every one of the millions of the 24 hour-a-day channels. There is no rest. There is no pause. I have learned to sleep with this noise.

From every major network down to every teenager’s pirate station. They didn’t install any codebreakers so every encrypted message hisses like static. There are a lot of them. In front of my eyes flicker pictures overlaid on pictures.

I am blind and deaf with data. My own thoughts are only one layer amongst billions.

They will turn it off by remote three months from now.

Or I may turn it off before them. Permanently.



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