Frosstbyte

Just as a warning, the language is strong and the subject matter violent. It's based loosely on a cyberpunk world set about 60 years in the future from a game that I used to play. Comments are welcome.

There’s a point before which I don’t remember anything. A time back then. You know when I’m talking about. That strange hazy period when you’re alive, but nothing has solidified in your life or in your existence. That time when events seem to occur around you without any regard for who or what you are. A parent’s scream-maybe at you, and then again, maybe not. It’s hard to remember. Hell, my bet’s on the fact that they don’t even really know themselves. You remember pain, but you have no idea why. It’s just another bruise or cut or scrape. Something got to you and you didn’t have the wits to avoid it back then. That soft touch of someone you care about more than life itself. Someone whose face is tucked so far into the reaches of your memory that only a blurry picture remains, as if you are looking into a dirty window or at a Polaroid picture that hasn’t completely developed. That’s really what most of my life seems to me. It all happened before. When things were normal, when I could walk around and not be afraid to show my face or my hand or, worse still, my eyes. Those horrible eyes that saw beyond, into a realm I neither cared about nor wanted to be able to see, while at the same time failed to see any detail of what was directly in front of them. You wake up one morning, only to realize that it’s over. One of life’s moments has come and gone, and left you lying prone and fucked in ways you’d never thought previously imaginable.

I don’t blame anyone for all this. Hell, in some ways, I’m sure I’m to blame for it, although I can’t really say I know how or why at this point. Things back then were going well. My life’s never been easy. Ask anyone who grew up in Denver about that one. The town’s a fucking shithole. It’s a warzone filled with deadbeats and cocksuckers who’d like nothing more than to gut you like a fish and take whatever valuables you have left sitting on your bloody, stinking corpse. It’s a place where the lucky survive. Some places are where the strong survive. Denver’s not one of them. In Denver you can be the baddest goddamn cyberzombie or initiate ever to walk the planet, and if you let your guard down for even the slightest second, you’re done. Just another unidentifiable body that’s been stripped, mutilated and dumped into one of those pits they keep around for the cred-less. I guess I had just enough luck to manage to grow up without too much trouble in that hellhole.

I say that only the lucky survive, and I’m gonna go and be a hypocrite and take that back. Luck has a lot to do with it, that’s for damn sure, but it’s not all luck. For me it was a steady hand and a good eye. I suppose I’ve got to thank that poor fuck who was dumb enough to do whatever he did to piss off whoever he pissed off. That’s really one of the only clear memories I’ve got. I’m sitting there in some shitty alleyway-tucked in between a dumpster that hasn’t seen any service since around 2010 or so and the stack of cardboard boxes. I remember the sky that night, too, it’s the sky that always seems to show up when the shit hits the fan for me. It was that milky color that everything gets right as the sun’s just set. It’s not the brilliant colors of a picture perfect sunset, it’s that dead and faded glaze that hangs there, teasing you, holding the true force and beauty of life just beyond your reach.

I sat there in my box with a half rotten piece of chicken I’d found and a dirty plastic cup full of lukewarm runoff-a veritable feast, I would’ve said in those days and this fucking guy comes tearing into the alley, completely oblivious of anything going on around him. Now, I’m not the smartest guy ever, hell, I never even went to a school, but I can put two and two together, and when you see some guy turn a corner with a gun in his hand and a look of sheer terror in his eyes, you don’t bother to think or see what happens next. You just get small and pray that no one notices you. That night was the first time I’d really seen a man get shot before. I mean, it was a forgone conclusion that he was dead-I knew that alley like the back of my hand, and maybe twenty meters in was a chain link fence with razor wire covering the top. I can remember hearing the scream of pain and the thud as the guy hit the ground after he no doubt tried to dash over it in the dwindling light. Then came that awful screech of tires and the report of automatic gunfire. I don’t know what this guy’s name was or what he did, and I don’t care. Now that I think about it, the guys in that car probably looked at it in the same way I did, but for a different reason. He was some ass who’d fucked with the wrong people. They didn’t know or care who he was, they just knew that his life was better off splattered all over the ground than running around free. I couldn’t stop watching, even though I remember thinking that I should wrench my eyes from that awful sight in front of me.