CW: sex work, sexualization, religious speculation, magical thinking, stalking, conspiracy theory, imageboard culture, suicide baiting, guns, combat
slapping the paddle off the charging handle, the spring launched it along the shaft towards the ringed sight. 4.38 kg, 40.4 inches, each movement of this reload repeated until on the wired, it melted within the propulsions flown from our steps. in the real world, the battle rifle’s length holds itself level, grasping the handguard’s smooth surface that clasped the long barrel and i move forth, each gentle swing until it seemed that i was this viscous being that swam through the heat in the air. aches in my arms sculpted themselves in my mind so they floated within the memory of my internal os. back then, in deserts, mirages could ripple until the silhouette seemed to burn up in the light. even speedhacks risked locking the user until the animation completed which leaves a gap for a more experienced user to pick out to take hold of that limb, not to mention the psychic strain and the attack phasing through like a miasma unable to transmit any kind of impact. some thought of the real as a force so excessive it wiped everything out like a nuclear blast, a kind of awe arising from its aftermath that hung solemn even as its light began to dim. others thought of it as a guiding hand that would lead everything to its intended conclusion. an objective that loomed until all the electric signals would carve it out of our minds and all these nodes would surround it, chatter, and posts, amplified in this lattice until it even whispered into the farthest recesses. exxxon serpico, reonuxala, and goldman would be wandering somewhere in the wired, each of their connections drawn would pull into vertexes until a desire converged onto a single point.
message from goldman, deroca and lestrani, contact me to meet them at one of the southern state servers, the walls of my room pulled apart like putty until it melted into a copper sky, concrete floor furred into grasses underneath me, signals brushing my jacket before rushes into winds playing with the lapels. bronze paint splattered the boughs, leaves sharpened out of blurs that softened into tranquil acres, a lone tree on a hill within a blue marble. even after the ancient climate catastrophe ravaged the midwest, rebuilding efforts somehow saw the return of homestead ranches almost like these fairytale houses that they thought would return them to a primordial start after the droughts, the advent of electric signals clung to their skin with a kind of breeze that quenched the dry air. users in these servers cherished the belief that the real world was this home they could return to in these pastures and small towns almost governed by various statues of struggle and devotion with grey bulges of muscular figures crouched and crawling over marble podiums . a reverence for a so-called real that would be an example to everyone that no matter what, someone would fall to by their own humanity, pushed down by gravity of life or whatever they said in solemn moments. however, even in the real, these idyllic towns were no more than server satellites like many of the plazas and cafes within the faceless high-rises in the eastern continent. thousands of inhabitants lived in their rooms in the wired and could return to the real world within the house for small instances at a time. with help from tai shu, it seemed the cities haunted the midwest even more, the drone of frequencies resembled a slow cry from the hatches of electric signals that coated the rafters or fell into threads of meadows grown over drowned soil.
ahead of me, darkness stamped arches within gold that seemed to pour like a fountain where each stream hit each floor of the villa before flowing down into the pillars lined up along the colonnade and its balcony mezzanines. a kind of building one might imagine ancient conspiracies meeting within hidden rooms but no such thing would take place, only the active imagination and rumours that fueled its unnatural glow seared into one’s mind until all the mystery seekers could do is revere its agitated particles. castle walls surrounded a large field while a long driveway meandered slightly toward the single garage where one luxury car stood out front, parading the restraint of the inhabitants. within my internal os, two users join me on an encrypted line which hardly prepared me for the barrages of a motor, the user known as deroca riding an atv as he stood on the sidesteps, holding onto the handlebars, a single headlight within what almost looked like a wad of plastic that hunched over fat offroad tires. he hopped off, his head bobbing up and down, a black stripe ran up the sleeves onto the shoulders of his puffy white jacket, large braids of hair sailed around him within a small veil of electric signals as if he was immersed in water. next to him, another on a dirt bike the user known as lestrani’s shaved head shone in lamplight, a soft face like the flicker of an ember yet there was something stark and practical about her, like one of those transmission towers whose trusses make an alien structure, an array of which no part is ornamental. deroca approached but walked slowly around me as a smile crept to his face, about to put on any bout of comedy but i held out against it.
‘ohoho, so when did goldman have such lookers cause trouble there’
‘i’d rather the phrase collateral damage.’
‘leave them alone deroca’ lestrani sighed, checking the chamber of an m1911 converted into a machine pistol, long magazine jutting from under the main grip rising into its tail and hammer, a black beak of a crying bird off the back of the slide, a front grip like the horn of a ram and a long vented barrel extending from the blocky slide. yet she let such a weapon dangle off her finger, the weight of the extended magazine swinging it back and forth, moving between different states concealed within that aloof demeanour. deroca backs up and puts on some goggles, circular lenses with axes on each one, almost like a reticule where for a moment i would be at its center before travelling across its coordinates. like a show, even an op like this needs its costumes, mechanisms locked in with anticipation.
‘alright, so you know how this is going down?’
‘you tell me’
deroca pointed up to his forehead as we open schemata where our internal os flies up over the the courtyard, green bulbs of trees and embossed fountains sunk into darkness while signals etched the floor plans of the villa, mosaics of squares representing the various room connected to a large picture frame with l-shaped walls and an octagon in the middle in this kind of monochromatic cubist image.
‘exchange’s happening here. word is your exxxon serpico chaperones it. so will you. we’ll have you on lookout on the balconies’ he nodded before adding. ‘at least now you two have something in common.’
‘believe me, i feel it all too common to have to kill someone who is at least a bit similar to me’ i sighed. ‘besides, how are they letting us just casually set a sniper perch on their property?’
‘you know how these guys are. business casual. letting us rent the place. we can do whatever we want. call it uh, a kind of gentility. goldman has manners like that to get these guys to presume we using the space for good purposes. it’s just set dressing anyway. some users like this decadence’
‘it seems you’re doing things with the permission of whoever owns this villa but given i’m here, there must be something done without.’
‘permission…is open. it allows many things to happen. even after it happens’ he stated but his smile returned and i wondered if there was anything amiss about him. or maybe he had just seized that moment and claimed it as this truism. lestrani’s fingers grasped the grip of her colt machine pistol and gestured to us to enter the premises, as the gates opened. a woman in a bellboy outfit, silver buttons with a sun logo escorted us through the driveway and stopped at the door. the server for our meeting loaded as the door opened, letting us stride down halls belted in gold, red walls streaming around us, grey rocks surfacing out of the blood rivers until statues of men curled up in anguish appeared beside us next to the closed doors, some of them sitting down while spears impaled others, the expressions on their faces smoothed of any of the ecstasy these violences would bring, leaving only a kind of impending death amidst all these closed doors. tragic minded reveries in these mansions. lestrani and deroca took the stairs, and it seemed that being here was this solemn affair lacking any of the activity of most servers, signals charred at the globules of light emitted from the flames animated in the candles on the walls, something tempered until it reached a certain hardness like an ore. even the night was tinged in this otherworldly yellow like something burnt on the other side of the earth, scooping just a ball of the sky before seeing the little mountains within a cobblestone tile through the scope, my cheek rested on the g3a3’s stock bowled with the spade beamed receiver while my hand clutched the handguard. overlooking the courtyard, it seemed more like a coliseum with the surrounding colonnades where the mansion’s thousand rooms concealed the innerworkings that must have lead us here. deroca walked up to the fountain while lestrani stood always at the side. should anything occur, she had the optimal angle for her colt machine pistol to sweep the area. another party showed up almost on cue, a few burly guys whose large bodies stretched their three piece suits taut to suggest a purposeful strength without excess, a kind of subtlety that granted prestige. no weapons so they must have also had someone on lookout or they played this like the winner is the one who doesn’t need to act or show their power, but deroca looked undeterred as he chuckled almost like his guests were playing a charade.
‘looking cut as ever it seems’ he nodded to an unknown beat. while i glimpsed them on the scope, exxxon serpico stood at the side, black dinner jacket over white body armour facing lestrani although they must have known their revolver couldn’t hit both lestrani and deroca anyway unless they had planned something else as i lay the reticle right on them.
‘let’s cut to the chase. i hate having our time wasted’ said one of the men with straight parted hair, fade off to the sides like black moss.
‘what do you mean? this is the wired. this should be of no consequence to you. it was made to increase leisure time. anyway, goldman likes your distributions and we’ll take that offer’
‘what? that’s unexpected of goldman. when was he so charitable?’
exxxon serpico supervised the proceedings as both parties spoke about goldman’s terms but couldn’t keep his eyes darting very occasionally at my direction. deroca said nothing about a cue to execute nor if i should take them when the deal finished. lestrani maintained her vigil, hand twitching near her thigh holster and i keep the reticle ‘s center right at exxxon serpico’s head, the dot covering his head, the 7.62x51mm round that could smite it utterly into a slight throb of red whose spray salivated at the edges of that single shot. discussions continue and i keep waiting. this is the business of the wired, after all. no matter what, these connections and floes reign atop the most violent of acts much like a sky, or a heaven that merely watches the matters on earth.
steps throw exxxon serpico out of view and i steer the battle rifle until he’s at the center of the scope, his revolver clutched in his hand, its barrel dotted black on the center of the reticle. .357 magnum rounds swallowed all noise as it felt that we moved soft within it while i moved off glimpsing one of the suited men flinch at the sudden shots and draw their weapon toward deroca who only stood there yet it seemed there would be no surprise that overtook him. nonetheless, i brought up my g3a3 on the man and before he drew his weapon, three contractions of 7.62x51mm rounds shunted the men in suits, exxxon serpico retreated both lestrani and deroca, finally drawing a magpul fmg-9 folding submachine gun as he walks to one of the low walls, occasionally fired salvos of 9mm rounds within the darkened arches whose halls occasionally lit up from muzzle flashes sometimes punctuated by the shots of .45 acp from lestrani by the fountain. however, large calibre rounds obliterated the parapet walls where exxxon serpico lurked within the pillars of the colonnade, several discharges of gunpowder threw hazed clouds in the courtyard where the black arches seemed like the only shelter from this desert. i jump down, my silhouette carving itself into something solid that would soon be annihilated by the rounds entering the chamber from the various firearms from below. small lights blotted the haze and in my mind the hallways with their red walls flattened while i remembered the ground just within the colonnade and the flutters of wind at my jacket soon planed down as my contours stretch and the stone tiles catch me, rotating along the girth of the pillar to exxxon serpico who already runs off, my vp70m machine pistol raised up to land on an empty hall. taking pursuit i go down the open door, the halls rushed alongside in rivers of blood that the doors floated on it until reaching the foyer where a grand staircase wrapped around the sides as i go out the open door. outside, the nissan bluebird sedan, its rounded trunk tapered at the tail-lights whose red beams blink away as it pulls off, bulged rear quarter window to the sharp driver’s side while i bring up the vp70m.the front sights, shadows cast from within the muzzle flashes of each burst while 9mm rounds pounded away at the sedan’s body that shrinks away in the distance.
gone, that single pixel where exxxon serpico would be in my mind burnt up until the skies flatten ahead of me, the sedan remains and i step-transfer towards the portly rear bumper, moving along its circumference to clear the vehicle, the driver’s side door left open while the seats recline. goldman wanting a car like this so bad must mean either it’s encrypted with something within the body-model or merely symbolic. no one steals from the networks of distribution and supply of goldman incorporated. contacting deroca and lestrani, both give an all clear on their side and tell me to just tag the car on schemata so they can get it later. walking back through the villa, signals hiss before planing themselves to the walls, solid until stretch out into the ether, mirage that ripped at the floor until they slink away once i approach. in the courtyard, deroca sat on the octagonal rim of the fountain, the water that once sprouted arches similar to this villa’s almost seemed to evaporate into the signals that minted us, his knee propped up on the ledge, braids sailing within the air. lestrani stood by, following me once i get close as she spun the m1911 around with her finger in the rounded trigger guard until i only registered the swings of metal waiting on that sudden moment where she would draw that weapon, a single lance within its axis.
‘well, you fasho fashionably late for the credits.’ deroca scoffed.
‘i try to appear when needed.’
‘so, you got what you came for?’
‘did you?’ i ask but deroca merely chuckled.
‘goldman will be here shortly. said he’d like to speak to you’ lestrani added. ‘he said to go to the car and wait. he said to back the car into the garage of the villa.’
‘is he coming here?’
‘no, the dimensions of the garage will be analogous to the meeting place’
getting into the bluebird, i worried about its damage from the few bulletholes left by the vp70m but i doubted that it would harm whatever contents were within that car. raked windshield let ample light pour onto the dashboard with woodgrain trim under the gauge cluster within the wide cowl that wrapped the air conditioning vents. soon the gold cosmos of the evening dashed away into the darkness of the garage until a clinical fluorescence lent a glaze across the concrete as the walls stretched out into white, leaving rows of pillars spaced evenly throughout the parking garage, almost as if the light from the wired and the computers that were the columns of our fantasies. goldman’s open jacket fluttered, appearing from one of the pillars, his shadow behind him disappears once he walked off as if seared off the surface. signals carried our movements letting us stand there, almost trying to assemble clouds out of these motes that glinted around us.
‘not bad at all. i guess you boys at tai shu know how to do business’
‘just a formality’
‘always a formality.’
‘products move, people get them. information’s the same. just that some people get them off hidden ways’ i said taking one last glance at the car. ‘i’m surprised said nissan bluebird is even that valuable. seems like an asset you can grab’
‘two things, exchange rate and value. someone can derive some meaning out of it, just like a story. an object such as this can generate all kinds of stories.’ goldman walked around the parking garage. ‘the information highway has a lot of stragglers. unfulfillment. can’t say if it’s decadence or what. my advice to you, watch your back’
‘thanks…and i suppose you ought not to be a casualty neither.’
‘don’t you know? some people believe it to be fate - the way people search for things on the wired and find them. either way, i would a prefer a happy ending’
‘if so, you must be replete with fortune’
‘act as you may’ he said and it made him seem less like a major crime boss . in the end, we were simply users on the wired in the same way two people are inhabitants of a city. that instance of having something in common, which in the real world amounted to these faint whirrs and scratches within smoothed corridors, seeing ourselves tinge into their surface thinking these movements were like us, these small nodes pulsing through the arrays of where we’re going.
falling back, i log off letting the soft futon crease around my back as i stare at the room ceiling glowing in a spot of pockmarked aloe from my internal-os that loads a text only interface of the bbs system.
‘bump on the code’
‘did that one user get game-ended?’
‘say violent words challenge(impossible)’
‘donator at 49:23:29 on reonuxala livestream put a lot of money down on the stream’
‘see a lot of tai shu corpos there in her server.’
‘guy by username mothknight in particular, the other guys are actually there to work’
‘this guy is public-facing. why does he actually list his thing’
‘because he has money, do you have money?’
‘save up bros’
‘inb4 the code is just a count of how much money is being spent by all the anons here, in which case, stop it, learn finance and economics’
‘i think this anon should learn how to frot’
interest in the thread of reonuxala seemed but more like she was this figure haunting their minds, somehow leading to her as a necessary conclusion. in detective stories, this’d mean something suspicious, but even suspicion can be engineered. without much to do, i open a line to tai shu’s itejoji branch, my room extends to long grey corridors, fluorescence stretches from my ceiling lamp to illuminate the walls smooth and faintly translucent which made them somehow dim with something solid behind it, the ceiling almost these small spots amidst the searing light. within these glimpses, peridot grasses from sapphire fantasy grow within the grey overcast, an idol with serafuku steps and rotates into a spin flowing in milky rivers that polished the sparse apparitions of megacorp office workers, these silhouettes that these virtual spaces always appeared for, and they were the ones who saw these inhabitants in the wired, as the one these performances reached out toward, within the limits of the stage seen by these salaryworkers granted out of the tempered lights at the office that could shine on somebody, an event or happening that massed here and they could be a part of. client interactions had this new dimension, visualizing them with lines of contact, arches of sentiment or corners of direction, forming arrays in the way different users connected with each other. how had these numbers then appeared, merely as apparitions that could stick themselves to anything that resembled them and an event, the user who acted up at reonuxala’s server, to make these narratives unfold. i walked to mothknight’s office, wooden veneered desk whose pane curved at the side curved inwards in a kind of hour glass, a polygonal shroud obscured one of the edges, a palm tree shaded over his face but he lets the light shine on him, taking in the glow with his slightly pale cheeks.
‘hello foxtel, it’s good to meet you. i hear lots from producer’ mothknight extended their hand to me and i shook it. fast way to establish a connection.
‘friend of theirs?’
‘we do work from time to time. i’m surprised that you and i haven’t done work together either’ he said sitting down, settling so that any business brought up could appear as casually as the glimmers off the shelf, wood grain in these tiger stripes. he leans back into his chair, letting his head tilt a little to the side
‘different servers’
‘ah yes hm?’ he says , moving his hand through glints of signals, static expanded into read-only files, each sweep through deliberate, not letting a single motion go unnoticed. ‘so you do consulting work on plaza servers? i was involved with the development of some myself.’
going for a note of commonality was typical. a fast way to establish a connection. he smiled as if to say that he had an appreciation for my work although consulting was always rather vague to begin with so it seemed more like an empty expression.
‘a few of them. there was one i was at recently doing security operations for’
‘hm, which one?’
‘it was a pretty popular one. it’s the one with hosted by a user on the come up, the one styled with european buildings. it was part of the virtuos-personae initiatives recently, a reonuxala?’ i asked, mentioning the megacorp’s push for servers and hosts users could interact with, especially ones with distinctive personalities that could be matched with users they would appeal to.
‘you know her?’ he asked, his voice tense enough to establish distance. thinking of the socialization arrays, i had to assuage any suspicion to the nature of this appointment, branching it off into a less direct line.
‘only in talking of work. she has nothing but praise for the work tai shu’s been pulling for her. she’s been doing well. even after that one user being suspicious in her server. did you hear about it?’
‘yes.’ he stated.
‘well, i think i’ve seen you from time to time at the server when it was at the demo phase.’ i said, placing him somewhere in my mind as one of the many executives that showed up for reonuxala’s hosting. i remembered someone in particular who said little but when an executive got too close to one of the avatars, provided a slight yet stern reminder to them that they should demonstrate proper etiquette at any table, especially one that they helped set up. perhaps mothknight possessed a kind of internal order that relegated his manners to a mode of cool detachment.
‘i’ve also let the proper parties know to open inquiries and investigations into the matter…’ he defaulted.
‘good.’ i said. ‘i also apprehended someone who was causing trouble at the server as well. let’s hope this comes to a swift end’
‘thank you.’
after a bit of silence, he looked a bit dazed before looking up, stretching his arms up and walking around the room. this was the wired, so this kind of movement seemed like merely a show of humanity. we all need some time to get up and take a walk. but even this seemed insufficient as he stared off, only maintaining his dignified profile where the white light carved him and his tuxedo as a shadow, his face faint in the radiance.
‘how is she doing otherwise?’
‘fine, i suppose. but i think any help you can offer her would be a net positive. who knows where these things lead’
‘i agree.’ he nodded.
‘oh, yes, before i forget, i would like to ask about the new avatar customization for sapphire fantasy. a user i’m acquainted with is designing new outfits and i’m thinking they could be in that mmo or any other supported works under our branch.’ i run up a few models with the figurines kunakida sent, slit-tailed jackets flutter before concealing the bright contours of the mannequins. mothknight looks at them, spinning them. ‘with the audience of the mmo’s they would like someone in the culture rather than some dilletante so it’d have good retention and opportunity for user derivative work, community interfacing and the like.’
‘this style is quite interesting. may i contact them?’ mothknight beamed, latching onto this newfound topic that seemed more in line with the usual exports of his business.
‘by all means. they are in reonuxala’s server so you could see them in passing’
‘fantastic.’ he said standing up before me. ‘oh if you see samhain, tell them mothknight asks how the gifts i sent them were.’
‘samhain?’
‘the moderator from the mmo. she said she worked with you before.’
‘she did?’ i ask. ‘well, if i see her, i’ll let her know.’
logging out, the fluorescence shrank into my ceiling light, the white beams retreat until a dark indigo radiated from the walls. mothknight’s relationship to reonuxala was slightly touching, almost like a chivalric love that did not deign so much in affections but rather through material supports. from his asking about her, it seems that it might be more than just allocating assets and funding. before i thought more of it one of the motion detectors outside my room flashed a red square at the corner of my internal os and i opened the cctv feed from the door only to find a girl waiting there, even-cut bangs running a silken river to her shoulder, turning her head to look at the camera and giving a slight wave.
releasing the sliding lock, saturna walked in glancing at my small table, the workbench with the g3a3 dissassembled.
‘wow, a hime home visit?’ i ask.
‘very funny. can you learn some chinese with that’ she scoffed looking around before leaning on the wall. i shrink back slightly, worried that maybe i should’ve prepared my place for guests more. in the real, only withdrawals out here that kept us from all the good things, all of them seeming like the wired anyway.
‘whatever…it’s not like you to visit’
‘you entered one of the tai shu branches. you didn’t tell me anything about that.’
‘something to do with the consulting for reonuxala’
‘something that’s making you avoidant in telling me what’s going on’
‘it’s all on some stupid shit. unfounded claims.’
‘like?’
‘numbers’
‘go on’
‘some people are using numbers to connect something but are getting this tied up with reonuxala for some reason.’
‘why are you looking up the people involved in that story? shouldn’t you be working backwards? see where the numbers come from or why it’s even brought up in the first place?’ she said. it took me a moment to think of a response thinking about it in sum, there really hadn’t been any headway on anything lining up resembling a tangible association between reonuxala, the numbers, or mothknight. only this supposed rumour tethering all the talk on the bbs servers. ‘looking for proof that confirms or denies, is relative because someone is going to refute such a thing anyway, especially on a forum server.’
on the wired, the notion of proof merely floats in virtual space, continual nodes that one connects out of the rhizomatic connections sprawled out, and you can only glimpse in a flash where exactly it is put together, as were the several hits of red pixels flashing from motion detectors going off in the internal os like warning lights on the rooftops of high rises in a city for something that approaches.
‘someone’s here’
saturna looks unfazed, taking out her norinco type 54 pistol and holding it at her side. sharing the feed, a familiar looking individual in a stained tank top and revolver hulks over. pulling up the lobby reception bulletin, comm-check was missed 5 minutes ago so whoever was there must have been incapacitated. the building’s security operators would soon be notified.
‘who is this?’
‘it’s that user who stole that car back in palo shabba. exxxon serpico’
from the wired, encounters unravel after their contact, sometimes those floes would connect to others or circle back. dwelling within a node caused a desire for singularity, all the movements of signals to reach a certain point and to exxxon serpico, somehow, i was the end point in all of it, the real world and its solidity being this final place that shunned all the virtual spaces and their possibilities, the bedrock where each move made their testaments, constantly disobeyed by each interference. grabbing some body armour i clasped the plating onto myself until my body seemed removed from it, a second surface in untouchable parallel. chamber checking the vp70m handgun, i attached the stock setting it to burst fire, the polymer while familiar still unnerving having to use the real counterpart here, the wear on the parts that it would have to endure as i held the weapon, blurry sensations thickened into the slightly coarse flakes of the grip that sunk into my fingers, contracted to let my thumb sit.
from my feed, exxxon serpico stood at the end of the hall not moving, revolver down waiting for some kind of quick draw. not wanting to entertain such a thing, i take a bottle of soy sauce clinking the other glass bottles around it and open the door, throwing it but retreating back in my room as i hear it shatter. if there was more bandwidth in these apartment complex corridors, i could step-transfer and end this but by now, security would be localizing where we are and trying to cordon the area by decreasing the amount of bandwidth on this floor. from my feed, his revolver twitches but i peek out the edge of the door frame, pulling the heavy trigger, burst fire judders on my shoulders as I struggle to keep the sways of the muzzle from going off-target. looking back at my feed, it had been enough to push them back. sticking their hand out to fire their revolver, a.357 magnum round booms from down the hall, tearing into the far wall. saturna looks at my surveillance feed as well and tells me via comms.
‘i have the same access privileges as most building security forces. let me go around and divert him.’
‘why can’t we just kill this guy and get it over with. any cctv footage is gonna show him coming up here shooting up the place’
‘let’s at least get this guy alive. maybe he’ll tell us something.’
‘fine, i’ll cover you.’
smoke shrouds exxxon serpico but each pull of the trigger threw the peeled muzzle of his revolver which made the frightening power of those rounds diminish into the haze as he had no intention of trying to aim and wasn’t able to make controlled shots. this didn’t mean i could relax either as he was still quick enough to pull back from each volley of 9mm rounds that bit at wall where his silhouette slipped into the shadows. i remember some people describing firefights like this where the realization of a human body’s weight disappears in the moment and each contact felt like ghosts that haunted them, trying to make themselves real by inflicting death within the mechanics of gunpowder detonating, the slide going back to eject a shell casing and the resultant recoil. from the feed, saturna appears in the elevator and moves in and soon, i hear another 9mm round go offfarther down and three shots of magnum rounds deafen the space. opening one of the cctv feeds i glimpse saturna taking cover by the corner, unharmed. exxxon serpico lay on their back, the fabric of their shirt torn from the rotations of the 9mm round stopped by body armour as they crawled on the floor, body wavering in electric signals before disappearing.
running toward the vanishing corpse, i open my internal os and start to track him, his exfil having left several threads of static which i set as a connection to enter the wired, the corridor melts away while the fluorescent light recedes into this gentle radiance bathing a blue realm. signals pooled out, their tides unfurl but soon withdraw as the level of bandwidth only allowed my psycho-silhouette a certain breadth to reach out, depending on how many users were on the server. each of my steps glowed from the pressure exerted on the floor, almost like the way flesh goes white when throttled, and they felt all too much like the last staggers of a target. using neija, i close my eyes using the echolocation’s halo to spread out and i hear something firm from behind me, a finger on a trigger and one launch of myself propels me in a step transfer, muzzle flash casting a statue of exxxon serpico firing erratically, a brimstone retribution of .357 magnum rounds that pummeled the damned until there was nothing left, something righteous would always justify it. lights above rolled off the shaft of the vp70m as i push the stock at my shoulder, 9mm bursts try to skewer the contours where exxxon serpico fired from but already missed, rings marking where the shots hit on my internal os, having thought to at least use telemetry data.
‘how lovely of you to join me in my abode!’ exxxon serpico said over my comms but i cannot pinpoint his location. ‘i always liked fruitger aero like places. it really reminds me of better times’
green cells dripped into small globules looking almost like microbes and i imagined that back then, many thought of the wired as this new alien planet with all these unknown creatures inhabiting its endless blue but it would seem that exxxon serpico’s presence seemed like that of a minor deity of this world, the single resident of this utopia.
‘save the lily pads and blob designs for someone else. why were you looking for me?’
‘why, you were after me, right? it’s only fair i dole out justice and retribution’
‘i didn’t intend to pursue you further anyway. that car was all i needed from you.’
‘is that what goldman told you? he probably wanted me dead.’
‘he only asked for the car and dropped the matter’
‘you need to open your eyes and look at the big picture.’ he laughed
another barrage of .357 rounds scorched the electric signals until they left faint glints in the distance. holographic crinkles stretched into blue before disappearing, using some kind of mirage opti-camo. what an annoying way to fight, exactly representative of those countries in the previous centuries who used aerial bombardment to show some kind of imperviousness, the kind where operators and citizens alike watched ruins blow up on television and thought themselves removed from it all, as if nothing of that violence could even touch them.
‘first i inquire on that board about that girl and now someone wants to kill me. they’re after me it seems.’
‘who is’
‘everyone.’
step transfers melted me into the static around me until i reappear, flitting through the silences bored out by the magnum rounds into these small escapes from being this endless target, the one who is at the end of the gun. that’s the intrinsic function of a weapon isn’t it? the wired is the fraying of images until a user can travel through its strands into different worlds. each time i dodged him, there was a lull of a second where my steps touched the ground, and he would aim towards me, pulling the trigger before i can use the step-transfer to avoid it. flights of 9mm and .357 magnum rounds weaved around me on my internal os until they could slice this realm into pieces and i stopped myself still, sensing exxxon serpico, his finger must have hesitated on the trigger before eventually pulling it, hoping for the absolution of another dead agent hunting him in his head. all this in the thousands of movements about to take place, and in one of them, a .357 round nears my body, the tip starts to feast on flesh until i begin to slip back from a step transfer, lagging out, suspended within my melting contours, a moment peeled from the thousands of movements, the trajectory from the bullet’s approach sliced into the distance where signals shined off a crease in the blue as i draw up the vp70m machine pistol, motion regains its perpetual animation 9mm rounds jar me of my reverie until i manage to bring myself out of the sensation, clutching my side scorched from the touch of the magnum round but it was nothing, 3 rounds punctured the opticamo, red blotted up exxxon serpico’s undershirt as he crawled over to his revolver fallen on the ground. before i could reach him, he logs out, his avatar’s contours frizzing out until becoming threads that danced around, glimmering in the light. alone, and a little confused i let my psycho-silhouette bloom out, regaining some space within me as i open and close my hand, the signals caressed upon the palm into these slower movements.
logging out,saturna had already gone back into her own servers from my room, and the security net frosted the walls of the corridor, picking up data from the various bullet holes, steps and blood stains. a beige tab imprinted itself in the darkness as a silhouette filled it, their features carved in the meagre light, a clean shaven man with body armour clasped onto a white button down shirt with a 9mm m1911 whose hammer curved around the tail off the frame like a pincer.
‘my name is kurosawa, i’m part of the security team here. may i ask you some questions’
‘that a username?’
‘no’ he said but even then it wasn’t as if it made much difference. records of a user’s activity on the wired always superseded what happens in the real. even this investigation was just something that had to be done.
‘alright’
‘could you tell me who was trying to kill you?
‘rather direct aren’t you?’
‘just answer the question’
‘a user on the wired wanting me dead. took it too far’
‘far enough to try and track your real address?’
‘who knows who is out there. at least we went back onto the wired. that way, no one actually dies. at least he knows that.’
‘hmph’ his eyes darted blinking, perhaps logging that information in his internal-os. ‘well, we have footage of him incapacitating one of our staff and coming up here with his revolver. if he comes anywhere near the premises, the frost net should sound off and we’ll deal with him. try not to get any more users mad by then’
kurosawa walked away shaking his head and the matter just became as simple as someone on the wired trying to kill someone in real life. a minor tragedy that sounded almost like a degraded myth especially with its rare occurrence. something like an evil miracle that’d bring an end to the flows of the wired, beaded with their activity and the slumped palpitations within the rooms here, life as this impediment but what did i even know about either anyway, even as kurosawa disappeared he was little more than a security officer for this building who probably was just trying to close a file, or goldman just another user trying to make some gain through the conflict between me and exxxon serpico. narrowed down until we were only this kind of target, or rather a vector in these stories and how much our involvement shifts each vertex.
reaching my chest, there’s only a soft ache, nerves plucked from the .357 round that nearly gorged into me, thinking these could have been places where flesh peels back almost as if petals from a malignant flower but there’s nothing but the wavers within the emissions of light over me, frequencies and loops just beyond me almost like orbits where all these flickers of motion have passed. users call these kinds of things that happen, inevitabilities. systems of a life and its various operations, all of it washed along my open hand, closing it on an invisible wire that could meander through the stagnant warmth in this room, radiating out of us.