Now I Lay Me...

I came, but I didn't want to; I came because I promised.

A cold, yet not completely unfamiliar, chill passes through me in the icy, sterile hospital corridors bleached white with diffused florescent light. It is the frosty fingers of death. And I am the harbinger. Ethereal moans, soft crying, and hushed voices whisper from behind closed doors ripple through the hallway, disturbing the calm façade of my presence of mind.

In the stolen white lab coat and glasses from a young doctor I knocked out in the ladies' room; my long, black hair pulled back into a pony-tail; and partially covered identi-badge, I stride to the desk attendant confidently. With a wink and a lust in his pocket borne of the idle chitchat I toss him, like the bone a master throws his hungry hound, he provides me with all the information on the dozaemon—John Does—brought in in the last 24 hours. Only three. Only one fits your tell-tale description: tiny, diagonal scar crossing bridge of nose, purple-dyed hair, I/O jack behind right ear.

Building Four. Floor Four. Ward Four. They already have your number.

My footsteps echo deafeningly through the corridor under the cold moon of the twenty-second winter solstice of my life. I steel myself against the ever-present, heavy-handed antiseptic hospital smell as it seeps solidly into my lungs. Try as I might, it's an effort in and of itself, to control the natural gag-reflex convulsing my stomach. My resolve though, despite my fear and hatred of this place—a place where my dreams have come to die—is unwavering. For there is no way I can just abandon you here.

You, who pulled me from the lost depths of my own dark self to a comforting, warm light, had no reason to play savior. No ulterior motive that I could figure, and I couldn't trust that. I balked. I resisted. What do you want?! You can't have it! I don't need you! I don't need anybody! You could have left me to be swallowed by the city. Forever forgotten by everyone and everything but the wind that howls the names of the lost down piss-wet, empty alleys. But you didn't give up. You knew. Raised and taught by Buddhist monks, you understood the hole in my soul. It was as if you were reading the very code of my life, looking for a loophole, something to give you enough leeway to go to work on me. You worked your way to the root access to my heart and healed me with time, patience and compassion. Compassion that people like ourselves aren't supposed to afford.

Fortunately I eventually screwed my head on straight. It had been so twisted by the fraudulence of hustlers and charlatans, who flavored me nothing more than a warm pair of tits on a bored night that I colored everything with the dim, spiteful visions of a society I no longer wanted to even claim. Then it pimp-thrashed me: it wasn't you who needed me. I had been squatting on my own shoes the whole time. Maybe it was your Cheshire grin, your baby-smooth skin, the way you sauntered into a place cool as a breeze, the way your fingers flew over my body... as if you were working the keyboard—gentler than moonlight caressing the night city—or even that yesterdecade disaster atop your head you pretended was a retro-mohawk. Maybe it was one of those, or a combo of them all. So much of you was irresistible, and now it's all flooding the hallowed caverns of my memory, back to me like a reoccurring childhood nightmare.

You made me a deal: a partnership against the elements of the city—natural and man-made. You tap deep the Binary, I supply the morgue with a steady workload. We go in together. We go out together. Always be there for each other. Always do the right thing by each other. Never abandon one another.

A steady, smart partnership lead to trust and love. We belonged to each other heart and soul, jack and trigger. We were hot as fuck, and fucked as hot as the sun.

That was three years and a millennium ago. Such a bittersweet short eternity, and yet I would not give one day even now, for anything, except perhaps... no, I close my mind to the impossible. No one can save you. Your once brilliant mind is a dying ember at the bottom of a poor excuse for a barrel, struggling to consume the oxygen around it even though it has nothing left to char. Soon, its grasp on this world will be extinguished. Gone. And soon, I have the utterly distinct feeling, mine will be too. Only what I must do remains.

I am here to keep my end of the bargain.

On the invisible streets of Greater Kanto City, I had shut my eyes to forget the life I'd run away from: a home with an absentee father, pilot of an open-sea pirate-hunting frigate; a home with a mother too busy with lovers and pachinko to give any more than a passing damn; and an older sister who sold my virginity at twelve to a balding older man she'd only just met at a street-side café in Kabukicho. 'Growing up' is stabbing pains of flesh meted out in tens of thousands of yen.

After that, all I could do was shut my eyes to the nightmare reality I'd chosen to live in. A shadow-crawling street girl down in the caverns of the monolithic earthquake-proof spires of ferro-concrete and plastisteel, as they scraped the very heavens in defiance. Living off the remnants of a self-devouring hyper-consumer society that so blatantly tossed out Yesterday for Tomorrow in fad-inspired binges of brand-new blinking tiger-print holographic see-thru plaztik moments that rolled through it like thunder. Everything burnt out of me like the flickering of dying neon. I shut down and shut out.

After you came, after you gave, after I learned, I began to believe again, and shut my eyes to dream.

I was busting and flashing a little ass in a grungy izakaya—drinking establishment—in Shibuya. The etchina kusojiji owner and his equally lecherous male patrons got their little squeezes in at every chance. If they were lucky, I mean real lucky, and the money was on the table first, I'd consider taking them into the back to grind their lap for five. It's not any kind of life. It just keeps you from starving.

You were tapping code for a two-bit company huddled under the raised Tokyu Line tracks near Gotanda Station. In the trains above bellowing over you, metal beasts of burden strained to maintain precisely timed schedules; their commuters-cum-flesh cargo packed so tightly their accumulated sweat rained upon the streets below adding a sickly yellow stain to the gray life below.

When the deep-sleep hour came crawling over the city, consuming it like the rubber monsters of childhood imaginations, a paradigm shift of modus operandi to dangerous Matrix-dives for persona who never even bother to give you a fake moniker. Change pace, change identities, change your life: pipe-dreams that bludgeon you in the jaw with the firm intention of mashing you into the cracks in the concrete to be stepped on and ground into the gritty powder that blows listlessly through the metropolis. We went for it anyway.

The .NFOpunk and the xGrRl. You, hot-hacking pirate of HDD dreams, fingertips blazing a swath of electrified wreckage and retrieval in neon across lesser and greater dataspheres with extreme prejudice, and I, blazing custom Dutch 9 mily in-hand, negotiating business on the bullet end of trouble. .NFO extraction team. Together we were absolute hell. Hustling our services, we made cheap, dirty deals, gambling hardcore on trouble-work other more experienced teams at least gave a modicum of consideration to first. It was survival, we knew it, so fuck it. We could command more, but if no one knows or cares, you're shit out of luck. So we kept pulling the trigger. Russian roulette. Pull we did, again and again and again, lucking out, profiting each time. One day we'd be noticed. Or so we hoped.

Hope. There are a million and two things to hope for on any run, let alone in life. Hope the job goes smooth. Hope you don't have to put in an order for more ammo at Jon w00t's Weapon and Ammunition Emporium Un-Ltd of Japan. Hope that another team doesn't try to horn in on the action. Hope that the client's target doesn't take it personally. Hope that the information the bossman wants—or even worse, the information, software or hardware the bossman gives you—isn't booby-trapped. Hope that you are not the feint luring away potential danger from the real team.

Hope is an indulgence that's not what it used to be when I was a little girl in soft sundresses in summer chasing butterflies on my grandfather's farm. Then the sun would gleam so brightly, warming my skin to the dark brown my mother would fret over when I returned home. And the dragonflies would bounce passed me, seemingly faulty guidance systems winging them on their unassuming way. But hope is all we can do; there is the price to pay for crime and love for wannabe-professionals on the fringe. And the price tag doesn't come with options, little thank you gifts, or redeemable point cards. And this time, we paid in full.

One minute I'm covering the entrance to an electronics shop in Akihabara, the next, I'm running through the back alleys, rain-drenched, cold, frightened, and alone... I had had to leave you there.

The contractman—an unwired gentleman in his early thirties and a suit to match, was privileged enough to have his likeness next to no less than two words in the dictionary—informed us the shop was a cover for two "former operatives" who had originally hacked for his clients but then pulled a real Fobar Jones. Deciding their lives weren't worth even an eighth of the good money they'd been paid, they tried to sell copies of the data cores they'd scored. So "go in, delete all files, all backups, crash the drive. Be extra thorough. Record the session." A direct assault. In and out in less than five hours. Nothing unusual. Nothing fancy required. No special equipment. No bullet ballets. Sounded like a straightforward case of blind greed, and we were the cleanup crew. Typical third-rate slap-hacks will fuck the pony every time. You don't tickle the merchandise and not expect to pay.

The shop was one of the hundreds that litter the area like the endless trash that infests the streets slowly molting into a part of the social infrastructure; Greater Kanto City's hot spot for every type of electronic goodie a person could think of, and quite a few more a person couldn't. And like so many stores, this one was embedded among the hive-like hovels, stacked in the back, at the crossroads of three streets that weren't even much of alleys.

Occupying the second and third floors of a five-story ferro-concrete jobber tucked obscurely between two other buildings, it had to be accessed via a spiraling metal staircase sheathed in flimsy rain-and-grime streaked plastic covering that was older than I was. The damn thing complained both flights up, and swayed like an Asakusa stripdancer working the pole. I'd have shoved enough yen in her panties to make the damn thing to stop if I could have.

The first of the floors was an assortment of hand-held high-def t.v.'s, cyber-reality headsets, digital radios, Flash harddrives, and microdisk players; all a soul could want in personal electronics. We both knew a couple of decent fences who'd pay good money for anything on the floor. And we were half tempted to take that chance. A deal's a deal though. We had a job to do and nothing was going to distract us from it. Stealing wasn't our M.O. anymore. It only flushes your credibility straight down the shitter into the Sumida River. Our clientele are a plethora of discerning persona living high above the wasteland of Great Kanto City filth in the rock-enveloped environs in the snow cap of the Mt. Fuji Archology. Stealing attracts attention. The kind of attention employers do not covet. Eyes avert and backs turn, and the police get involved. It gets all very nasty when the boys in blue start rolling the local stoolies for information. The next thing you know, everyone knows where you are, and you have no friends. 'Honor among thieves' is for those who can afford it.

The second floor also engorged with consumer electronics for the masses, but opposed to its more conservative younger brother, it was a garish neon hell. The entire floor was lit like a Bangkok soi at night. The only thing missing was the whores, and I wondered if they hadn't simply been stored for the night. Goods clambered over themselves to crowd the windows, like high school girls at a Johnny's Idoloid concert, poised to beg passersby to purchase them from intercoms set into the building's sheltered street-level sign. It was all I could do to even make the street out. Jama kuse! I growled. Injudiciously kicking aside a rack of protesting miniDVD recorders, I established an observation post which covered the stairwell and allowed me to look down three separate streets all at once.

The floor-to-ceiling glass windows wrapped the around the entire floor. Not much in the way of protection, but moving back into the shop I could hide behind the larger pieces of merchandise and hologram displays of entertainment industry personalities with very little difficulty.

The night was quiet; still as vacuum. The smaller shops close at 2100, so the human factor is filtered out of the equation with each subsequent outbound train, leaving the machines to fend for themselves. It wasn't hard to imagine that you and I were the only two alive in all of the city. I like it like that. No one but us. Not a soul mauling you while you shop, or hounding you for the money for the space in crumbling parking garage that serves as home. No older, sleazy men salivating cash to put their callous hands up your chemise. No 'talent' scouts, with their cheap suits and cheaper looks, preying on the naïve, greedy and desperate enough to work the sex industry fuuzoku parlors and video cellphone clubs.

Just us. A regrettably laughable and inconceivable concept when forty million precursors of imminent personal body space invasion devour every centimeter of that very sentiment.

Deep into the fourth hour, it started to drizzle. Pelting suicidally against the glass, the rivulets obscured my view slightly. Off in the distance, the lonely, bleating of the After-Hours Trains accompanied me on my rounds.

Downstairs in the back, you were secure, working your magic on the data. Twitching in command-specific motions that you had perfected over years of practice of your art, bringing up your menus, searching, cross-referencing, downloading, eradicating... Your face was touched by that slight smile you get on your face when you dive the Binary, or when you are curled up close to me at night. Long ago, I vowed never to disturb you during either. It's the only time you ever smile. A treasure to be safely guarded; locked away in my heart and your subconscious.

I was working my way around the second floor, when a blurred figure hustled through the rain, I stepped back and crouched to avoid being seen. In putting my unarmed hand behind me to keep from knocking into anything, my heart stopped. Cool, semi-gelatinous, like rubber cement...

I turned to confront two Bombay Boys auditioning the role of rigor mortis bums; propped up and stuffed into the displays. Very neatly I might add, almost as if someone actually cared. If I hadn't stumbled across them, I would have never found them. I'd have given any odds these guys were the two jokers who ran—correction—who'd run the store. "Let me guess," I whispered to the lolling heads. I chewed my lower lip and prayed the black-red painted down their necks and shirts was a trick of neon lighting and rain, but knew it wasn't. This was very bad.

With as much respect and gall as I could muster, I moved to insert a microchip reader into one of the corpses' skullports for any information he might dump, but got nothing for my effort but loose wiring and cracked chips from where the back half of his skull should have been. These corpses obviously weren't joy-hackers who had stolen Mao Chow's secret soy sauce recipe—the People's fast food restaurant chain has hardcore security, but they don't bother to even the score for breeched gung pao—these two had enough hardware in their heads and hands to buzz the hell out of any system they wanted.

My intuition screamed the obvious; someone had dumped us into something particularly nasty, and we'd allowed ourselves to wallow in it, unsuspecting, for more three hours now. Time to—

As if on macabre cue, a choking cough-gurgle and muffled thud from the open door of the office. I called your name. No answer. I shut my eyes, prayed a million times with the practiced ease of the condemned, took two deep, slow breaths and called again. No answer. I wasted no time throwing myself through the digital jungle, dashing down the stairs, and hurtling through the open door. Any pretense of professionalism I had went out the door and down the warbling excuse for a staircase the same time my heart crawled up into my throat.

You lay there on the floor, chair dumped over, skin, blood, and hair under your fingernails from where you'd clawed at the terminal jack just a moment too late. The monitor of your portadeck burned the hollow glow of snowcrash-system overload resulting in a hash of indecipherable symbols bleeding across the screen. It half peered over the edge of the workbench like a small child, finger in its mouth, wide-eyed and wondering what had happened. Still jacked-in just behind your right ear, the smell of burnt hair and... and I don't even want to think about it, hung in the air. Electrical discharge permeated my nostrils. Your hacker brethren call you 'd/c'; once meaning 'disconnected', now something closer akin to deceased.

I made the anonymous call from a telephone box two blocks down. All I could do was lay you out in the grimy gutter, and hide curled up in the shadows of a dark side street until they took you. My heart burst as forever passed while you lay there, still as the cold, wet pavement itself. I was helpless and so very frightened for the first time since we met. The pit of my stomach was hollow; my heart a vacuum, sucked empty by the shock-realization that it was over. Very over.

I tracked the ambulance here, to where they have brought you. I approach your room, but each step only takes me halfway closer to the door. Inside, I stand at your bed, looking down; there is nothing more I can do for you. You will not recover, you will remain like this for the rest of your natural life. A vegetable; your brain was brain flash fried by the counter-intruder program on the machine in Akihabara. It would have been much more humane if the attack program had just killed you outright. That may have been its intention. But it doesn't matter now.

Still as stone, I stand over you. The spell of the ringing din in my ears is broken by a faint voice in the background. I soon recognize it as my own. Though I have no love of organized religion or anything more than great disdain for those who raised me, some half-forgotten memory of a child's bedtime prayer parts my lips as I tighten the silencer to the barrel of my weapon...

"Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord, my soul to keep."

Pillow over your open, yet unseeing eyes...

"If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord, my soul to take."

Aim.

"Amen."

I keep my promise. I hate promises.

___

An old school cyberpunk piece circa 1997 dredged up from a scratched CD-ROM. Most definitely Gibson/Stephenson inspired. Probably hasn't withstood the test of time so well, but I still dig it. I hope you did, too.