Cyberpunk
Date Published: 01-27-2022
Publisher: Black Rose
Welcome to Berlin. Population: desperate. In the throes of the climate crisis the green tech pioneers are king, and if you aren't willing to be their serf then you're surplus to requirements.
Carbon credit for sleeping on the job. That's the offer a dreamtech puts to Mara Kinzig, and she jumps on it. After all, the city ain't getting any cheaper.
Then somebody changes the deal while she's dreaming in the tank.
Now Mara has a body on her hands, an extra voice in her head, and the law
on her tail. Only the Vanguard, a Foreign Legion of outcasts seeking an
alternative path in the dust between the city states, might be able to help
her figure out what went wrong. First, though, she'll have to escape the
seething streets of Berlin alive.
Excerpt
A CITY TO LIVE IN
The man’s blood was on her skin and now she would have to run.
Grid lines on powder-blue walls. Metallic warmth from inefficient tech.
Light too soft for the horror of the room. She staggered back, away from the
man. Limbs clumsy, adrenaline spiking, breath loud. A shake of the head. No
trails, no blurred vision, nothing to suggest she’d been pumped with cybins and
this was only grim illusion. It was too sharp, too immediate, for her to still
be dreaming in the tank. There was a wetness on her hands, and when she brought
them to her eyes she saw fingers dipped in red.
One word struggled to the surface: Where.
She turned away from the body, saw a cylindrical rig hanging from the
ceiling. MR chamber. That explained the grid lines; they aided the neocortex as
it painted pictures. A stack of moulded objects in the corner, their purpose
unknown. Educational, sexual, leisure. Too much to process. She probed her eye
with the hand that wasn’t bloody. A thin membrane sitting atop her iris. Glass.
So she’d been sharing his mix. She removed one from each eye, dropped them on the
ground.
More questions. How long. What district. What city. What day. One
step at a time. She wore a jumpsuit, expensive, the kind a bleeding-edge NK
advertorial would flash. Pockets all over. Only one turned up anything useful:
an old denbar stick, not hers. She unrolled the razor-thin film, pressed her
finger to the screen. It displayed a balance at the top. In the minus on
carbon. How was it keyed to her touch? She couldn’t have been conscious when
they did it. Who was ‘they’? All so unclear.
Nausea took her in the legs, made her
shake. The man on the floor. She didn’t want to check him; touching the
body would make it real. But without carbon she was going nowhere. With a
dry throat she crouched beside him. She didn’t recognise the face. He was
white, thickset, senior, no features to help him stand out in a crowd.
He’d crisped his skin more than once, which meant he had money, but
the lines of age still showed through like cracks in concrete.
No pulse. Head resting in a pool.
She turned her head away as she rifled
through his suit. A newer model denbar was tucked into an inside jacket pocket.
Expecting nothing, she lifted his hand, pressed a finger to the end node.
The screen fired up. In a second she’d swiped his carbon—barely a
stack—and snapped the denbar in half.
Leave.
She stumbled to the exit, her body
still refusing her, and pressed her hand to the panel. Two squares of a
Torggler rotated out and she left the chamber and the dead man behind.
***
A corridor, the same powder blue as the
room, deserted for the moment. At its far end a camera blinked a single
red eye at her. Security could already be on its way up. She needed a way
out. Vertoo.
The command echoed around her head,
unanswered. She tried again. Nothing. They’d nixed her chips before she
went into the dream tank, but they’d said it would take only a thought to
get them back online. Then again, they’d also said she would wake up in a
clinic bed, and that hadn’t happened.
She dragged herself to the end of the
corridor and stumbled down a set of stairs into a lobby, also empty, with
a ceiling-to-floor lightwall. As she threw out a hand to steady herself,
she saw how the skin there had become thicker, more wrinkled. No longer
the hands of a mechanic. More like a fixer.
The lightwall flickered on when it
clocked her and an impression materialised on the screen. Glossy
bodysuit, large, glistening eyes,
peroxide stubble cut, erotic pout. It
gave her a good idea of what kind of place she was in.
‘Welcome to the Mardi Marquis.’ The
impression bowed. ‘How may I assist the master of the house?’
High-end system. She didn’t recognise
the name of the place. ‘Show me the way out.’
Her voice was husky. Maybe a side
effect of breathing perfluorocarbon for so long.
The impression blinked and a map of the
building appeared below it. A red pulse pinpointed her location. The exit was
close. ‘Follow the arrows, please.’
Pale yellow darts in the floor, barely
there so as not to disturb the ambience. She lurched after them, out of the
lobby and through more corridors in the same infantile blue. Still no other
customers or employees. Could be the place was closed. Could be the man in the room
had been the owner. She drew up the hood on the jumpsuit to hide her face as
best she could.
The arrows ended at another Torggler
door, the two squares already rotated out. She peered around the frame. Compact
foyer, muted floating screens with MR ads playing on a loop. Standing at a
welcome station was a man in a bronze dashiki, his mouth and nose obscured by
an air purifier, who was using a set of tongs to tease out the leaves of a
small biotope. Micro-greening. Cheap propagation tech to rapidgrow miniature
forests that—when cared for right—were supposed to suck ten times more carbon
out of the atmosphere than a normal tree. His looked like it was fresh out the
jar.
She ducked back behind the Torggler. No
way to bypass the guy without being seen. She could handle herself well enough,
but he would be carrying and he’d fry her before she got within ten paces. She
needed another way out. The longer she stuck around, the more likely he’d pull
up his room links and find the body.
Then a voice. Automatic, flat,
broadcast from a wall screen: ‘Check refrigeration unit one-nine-alpha.
Possible malfunction of diaphragm valve.’
She pressed her face to the doorway,
saw how the welcome station glowed a soft red. The man frowned at his biotope,
then muttered a confirmation. The station returned to its soft white. He
dropped the tongs, ran a hand through heavy dreadlocks, and left through
a service door under the floating screens.
Go now.
As she entered the foyer, the screens
flipped to graphic ads for near-death experiences and her adrenaline
spiked again. The welcome station greeted her in Chinese. Ahead, the exit
rolled open. No security loitering outside. She slipped through the door.
The bullet between
her shoulder blades never came.
***
The GenuSstadt couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else.
Poolers, parlours, head shops and 24/7 clubs, all part of a labyrinthine
kiez frequented by suits, futurists and fringe elements. It made her
uneasy to find herself so far away from the Lichterfelde dream tank she’d
dropped into before lights out, but at least she was still in Berlin.
The air was hot and dry despite
low-hanging clouds. She joined the manic press of people moving as one
over rubberised paving strips that turned kinetic feet into hot current.
The walls of every building spoke, sang, became amorphous strands of
colour. GLISTEN: aural hydration . . . . .
Grafts, Plants & Augs, 500 M . . . . . Linghai Algae
Industries is Hiring in Nanhui – your chance at a sustainable future . . . . .
CasiNine Flavour DJ Tour – SOLD OUT! . . . . . Next Left: Thebes House of
Ruin. The fervid odour of fried insect mash drifted out from the doorway
of a restaurant and made her stomach flip.
A few people eyed her, making her
either for a junkie who’d do anything for carbon or one of the women
who’d been kicked to the curb after Klaus Koje and Athos had changed the
world with their announcement. Some, the suited ones, pushed past her
like she didn’t exist. Despite how cheapjack the GenuSstadt was, most of
the citizens on the streets were growthers who took the maglev from
Potsdamer Platz to the kiez for a little entertainment in between work,
sleep and more work. Growthers had no respect for anyone who wasn’t on
their level; it came with the territory.
Then she was out of pedestrianised zone
and into a street packed with bikes, boards and shuttles. Motors whining,
lightwalls glowing. ‘Gravemaker,’ said a hypnotic voice. ‘Unwind the mortal
coil and drift into the Eternal. Apply today, expire tomorrow.’ A woman sitting
in her own filth raised a cracked tablet and begged for neweuro. A man, naked
from the waist up to show off a designer body, called out to her. ‘How much for
an hour, obsol?’
She continued on, crossing a bridge
that had once carried trains across the city but now heaved with bordellos,
hookup banks and implant resellers. At the next corner was a bullwagon, dark
blue with a wide white stripe down its centre. Three bulls flanked it. Their
features, approximately human, were blank, their augmented eyes forever
scanning. The inhabitants of the GenuSstadt gave the spot a wide berth and she
did, too, slipping back into the warren where no transports were allowed. Not
that she could lose herself in here; cameras were everywhere, recording
everything. Still men kept looking her over, leering, approaching. ‘Come with
me, lost one,’ said a religious head who walked beside her for a few paces.
‘Tenfive minutes get you threeten,’ said another. A rail-thin kid wearing a
cracked technicolour jacket brushed past, his message delivered in a whisper.
‘Cybins, blitz, krokodil, salts.’
She ducked into an unlit alley clogged
with refuse, kicking aside paper, plastic, rags, things that had once had a
purpose, until darkness shrouded her. She stopped. No mutters of human beings
living in the waste. No sounds of pursuit. If anyone had seen her enter the
alley, they hadn’t trusted themselves to follow. Dizziness hit and she fell
against a wall splashed with anti-gov graffiti. She sucked in dirty air,
overcame her desire to empty her stomach. Far above, an air conditioning unit
spat condensation.
They must have found the body by now, and the bull unit responsible for
the Mardi Marquis would be running the vidlink. They would identify her and if
it turned out she hadn’t killed him in self defence then she’d be scooped,
wiped and pressed into HPU servitude alongside the other perps underneath
Potsdamer Platz before morning. She thought back, but her first memory was of
her standing over the man. No way to know without seeing the footage for
herself.
In a panic, she rubbed at her hand
where the blood had dried. She’d have to go underground. And then? Find a
surgeon willing to work for the scant neweuro she could scrounge, have
them put her under the scalpel and cut her until she couldn’t be
recognised by sight. What about prints? Eye veins? Hand geometry? She
couldn’t afford work like that. Few could.
She tried to get online again, but the
response was the same as before. She balled her wrinkled hands, pressed
them against her stomach to stop the nausea. Then she rested against the
cool brick, concentrated on the dripping of the air con unit. Get a grip
or you’ve already lost. Remember who you are.
Your name is Mara Kinzig. You’ve been
dreaming in a tank. Now you’re awake.
And you’re a killer.
2
The carbon Mara had taken from the dead
man’s denbar was enough to get her back to her neighbourhood. She hopped a
grimy S-Bahn train heading out of the GenuSstadt and hunkered
down for the hour-long ride to Zossen
district. End of the line. Refuge of nongrowthers, neutrals, the downwardly
mobile. People not vicious enough to carve out their corner in the city
nucleus, but lacking the grit to try the survivor’s life in the dust.
On a screen in the roof of the
carriage, protected by a thick layer of plastic, a newsgram flashed images of a
factory in flames on the outskirts of Dortmund. The city cabal was placing the
blame on the Vanguard, a group on the Steppe that’d been making a name for
itself in recent months. Mara kept the hood drawn tight around her in case she
appeared next on the screen. What she didn’t need right now was some penner
trying to sell her anything. The denbar was as good as depleted, and she didn’t
have enough carbon even for a cup of matcha. At least the ancient carriage’s
security camera had been smashed. Small comfort.
The S-Bahn screamed as it took the
curves and the wheels scraping along the tracks sent vibrations down Mara’s
spine. Through a window that had been tagged in the black and red of the
Doomsday Troop, she could see the scrapers of Potsdamer Platz with their
rotating stack plates. Tower-to-tower gliders took off from pads close to the
top, while further down Maglev lines spat bullet trains in all directions: to
the Brandenburg Celestial Link, to the cleantech incubators in Frankfurt, to
Munich, crypto city, way down in the south, to the crescent-shaped Conurbation
that encompassed the
hyper-districts of Düsseldorf, Cologne, Essen, Bonn and Dortmund.
Mara had never been on a bullet train. Off-limits to no-hopers like her.
After the scrapers came the tiered blocks carpeted in plants and solar
film, populated by workers who did jobs Mara didn’t understand. Then the
S-Bahn passed over Auto 1, the artery that pumped the road trains with
their mutant crops from the superfields to the Marzahn Drive Yards.
As the train shook, Mara took stock of
her situation. Her last memory before waking up to find the guy’s body
was the door of the dream tank coming down and the gas being pumped in.
The question was why she was no longer on Ahe+d’s premises. Why had
they chosen a sleazy MR chamber to put her back in the world?
Nothing about it added up. She saw a whole lot of mafan on the horizon.
Jema would know what to do. But there
was no guarantee Jema had waited for her.
She’d warned Mara not to do it. No, not
warned; begged. LINK programmes couldn’t be trusted, she’d said. Too many
stories of citizens signing up, climbing into the tank and disappearing.
Yeah, some did their time in the programme and made it out, and those
were the ones Jema had tried to interview as part of her stringer gig,
but no dice. Their wrists were bound with red tape, their mouths stuffed
with NDAs. The dreamtech companies weren’t baichi. They covered
their bases. Plus they had the support of the city cabals and the
national government. LINK programmes were big business, with tons
of carbon riding on their outcomes.
Competitive, too. Candidates needed an
IQ of onedredthree-O just to get an interview. Mara still remembered
being approached as she’d drifted through a pooler, searching for a cheap
game that would settle her after a long shift. The advertorial had been a
tractable kid with kinky blue-pink hair that stood out for miles. Sidled
up to her, gave her a spiel about how LINK helped society and paid more
carbon than she could burn through for a year, then spun away, eyes
glazing red, her face already forgotten to him. On the way out a lightwall
had tuned in to her frequency and played an ad for Ahe+d. Because
four-O minds are better than one. The message did its job, following her
out the door and all the way back to pod she shared with her lover.
When she’d brought it up, Jema had gone feng feng. Why set a match to the
wood when it’s at its driest? Mara had had no answer except that she was
slipping down the ladder and didn’t want to see what that bottom rung looked
like.
Now she wasn’t on
the ladder at all. Someone had pushed her off.
***
The S-Bahn dribbled through the
nu-crete belt that drew itself tight around Berlin’s midriff, flitting in and
out of the shadows of huge structures that looked like bulbs of garlic. Built
during the green boom and left to rot after nobody wanted to live in them.
Nongrowthers and neutrals couldn’t afford the rent; growthers wanted to be
closer to the centre. The antiballistic glass fronts were cracked and sprayed,
and ugly wounds showed from multiple forced entries. They were guarded by
drones that put holes in anyone baichi enough to be found squatting there. When
the train pulled into the station closest, nobody stepped off.
Mara’s eyes burned. Drugged, not
drugged. She couldn’t tell. Head heavy against the plastic seat, every tremor
going through her as the train dragged itself along the tracks. She eyed
passengers with ashen skin. Low-level startup gophers whose faces still bore
the faint mark of hope that they, too, would make the jump one day. Exhausted
workers spattered with dirt and grease and dust. Tractable kids with eyes
clouded red as they sucked down content from all over Vertoo. Two real freaks
wearing lip plugs that interpreted the wearer’s subliminal thoughts as colours.
No danger from any of them.
The S-Bahn howled in a language from a
different century. More stations, more high-rises, more lights burning in the
semi-gloom. Mara allowed her eyes to rest. She wanted to be home.
***
Wake up.
Mara stirred. A voice had been talking
to her in her sleep. Giving her instructions, reassuring her. Memories from her
time in LINK.
Unsure. The contract had said there might be side effects. Nothing
about coming back online to find a dead body in front of her. The view
from the window told her she was close. Surroundings as green as they got
in the city. Most engineered in a lab. The idea of trees rolling off a
conveyor belt had unsettled her once upon a time, but no longer. The
insects had come up from the south, waged their war and won, and so now
the city had to create trees with bark tough like an Oranienburger
skinwalker if they were to survive. Between the patches of green were
towers, each one bearing pods that hung from sturdy plastographene
branches. Zero-carbon living over a few miserable square metres.
Airtight, insulated, all-over solar film, oval design allowing rainwater
to cascade down and collect in troughs that funnelled into a chamber for
recycling. An external biotope for offsetting, built-in waste processing,
a simple node to connect to district heating.
The biotecture design for the pods had
come out of a LINK programme.
The train pulled into Prierow station,
named after a lake that had dried up long ago, and Mara jumped out. Head
down, eyes keen, stalking past street hustlers looking to roll a mark,
hawkers selling gristle on sticks, HPU fodder that had so far managed to
evade the utility men and made their home where the shadows were
loudest. Fifteen minutes later she was standing at the entrance to her
tower, and the relief was strong enough to make her skin itch. Part of
the first wave of nu-crete biotecture that had washed through Berlin
after the Preservation Act, the outer surface of the tower was coated in
quick
growing moss that kept the air around
it cooler. The tinted hexagonal glass panels that leapfrogged their way
to the top were layered in scum. No way inside other than a security door
in the base. Not the kind of place that could afford a sentry drone for
overwatch.
Mara went to the vein reader next to
the door, opened her eye wide. The screen blinked red. She tried again
with the other eye. More red. Junk tech, only ever worked half the time.
Shuffling closer, she touched the scanner with the tip of her index finger.
NO ACC flashed on the screen. She couldn’t have been out of the loop long
enough for her prints to be erased from the tower’s system, not unless
Jema had moved in the meantime and scratched her from the records before
she left. She swallowed her nerves. Keep cool, Mara. Maybe this is what happens
when there’s a warrant out on you.
She stabbed the button for her pod. The
screen crackled into life, but remained grey.
The voice that answered was soft, but
alert. ‘Who are you?’ Mara could have rested her head against the door in
relief. ‘Jema, it’s me.’
‘Identify yourself.’
She threw back the hood. ‘It’s Mara,
Jem. I’m back. The scanner won’t open the door for me.’
The response was quieter. ‘Mara.’
‘I’m in trouble. Real mafan situation. I have to get off the street.’
‘Mara.’
‘I know you’re sore about how I left,
but I need your help. Right now.’
The com broadcast dead air.
‘Jema?’
‘How did you get this address?’
Cold pins pricked at Mara’s chest. It
was like she was in a dream. But that couldn’t be, because she was tired and
hurting and scared. Three of reality’s favourite calling cards.
‘I live here. With you.’
The response was fast this time. ‘How
do you know me?’ Humour her. If it gets you inside, do it. ‘We met when
you were investigating the disappearance of a group of mechanics and
technicians from the hire pool at the Marzahn Drive Yards. We’ve lived together
for three years, and we’ve shared a bed for two. Want to scotch me some more?’
She paused, sighed. When she spoke again her voice had no edge to it. ‘I want
to see you.’ Again the silence. Now she did press her head to the door.
If Jema didn’t let her in she would be lost. She’d turn herself in to the
nearest bull unit, throw herself on the scant mercy of the law. Nothing else
for it.
The com crackled. ‘What were Soléne’s
last words?’ Mara shivered, moved away from the com. ‘Why bring that up?’
‘Answer the question or the screen goes dead.’
She breathed through gritted teeth. It
hurt, even now. ‘She told us our bones are already dust and this
existence is a shadow burned into the path of time. Then she threw
herself off a walkway because she was whacked on cybins. There wasn’t
even enough left of her to scrape into a box. Satisfied?’
More silence. Then a mechanism clicked
and the security door rumbled open. Mara slipped inside before Jema could
change her mind. The air tasted metallic, but cool.
When the elevator deposited her on branch
two-O-five, Jema was waiting in the pod doorway, her crisped skin pale
and clean, and Mara was already prepared to forgive her for Soléne and
take her in her arms. But as she moved underneath the branch’s spotlight,
Jema’s eyes became wide, her body rigid. A ceramic knife appeared in a
porcelain hand.
‘Christ, mausy,’ said Jema. ‘What have they done to you?’
About the Author
Grant Price is the author of three novels: Static Age (2016), By the Feet of Men (2019) and Reality Testing (2022).
He has lived in Berlin, Germany, for too long.
Contact Links
Instagram: @mekong_lights
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this sounds really interesting, thanks for sharing!
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