Tales from Neon Black - No Words (Patreon)

Today I wrote a short story, inspired by working on my cyberpunk game and the Writer Emergency Pack.  The pack is a set of cards designed to help inspire creative writing or get you out of a slump. Each has a prompt or idea like "cause and effect" or "you can't go home again". I drew a random card yesterday in the middle of rewriting the rules for Neon Black. It was "stop talking" and this little short story/anecdote was the result.

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“You kids know that the Ziggurat corporation created neural links as experimental hardware for their test pilots? It was a way for them to feel like the vehicles they were driving were a second skin. Primitive cyber shit, live wires, thick ass cable plugged directly into the machine’s CPU. That’s all it was going to be too, if the corpos had their way. Just another story for hot shot corpo goons to tell to jerk each other off, pulling their van out of a dive an inch off the street and scaring the bejeezus out of some poor punks before they offloaded their thugs to beat some heads.

But my ex, Crash, she worked at a Ziggy R&D lab. She brought this thing home one day, all beaming and excited. I didn’t know anything about hardware back then, hell I still know next to nothing compared to her. Best splicer in Prime City back in the day, my Crash. Our apartment was humming with electricity funneled off the grid, and we never payed for the ‘Net. I knew enough not to ask questions. But one night she brings this thing home, this thick cable all spun up with gold wire and needle-sharp adapters and she tells me she has a surprise for me.

Now remember, this is early days for cyberware. Most folks had the neural slots to wire themselves into the ‘Net, but hackers were still getting fried on the daily with their homemade decks, trying to see all that data in real time. No one had cracked the neural interface barrier. Any time some splicer thought they could make their brain handle all that bandwidth their roommates would find them the next day, burned from the inside out. Folks were stuck seeing the ‘Net on slow mode. Hell, most hackers back then were still using screens.

But then one day Crash brings this live wire home. Like I said, I didn’t know the tech back then but I could tell this was different. She rigged this thing for a week, barely slept. I’d leave for work to go bounce at Afterlife, come back hours later to see her still at the kitchen table, whole place was covered in cut wires and smelled like ozone. Had me worried, worried one night I’d smell cooked pork in the hallway and find her slumped over that table.

I come home one day and she’s waiting for me in the bedroom. She calls me in, says it’s ready. Thing looks like a synthetic snake swallowed a fucking grenade. Loose wires everywhere, all this extra tech hanging off of it. She tells me it’s to handle the excess power, deal with the neural load and it takes me a while but I realize what she’s asking me. She had a neural slot when I met her, she installed mine after our first anniversary. She’s discarded whatever proprietary adapter Ziggurat put on the end of this live wire and replaced it with a neural link. This whole time she’s been splicing this thing so it can wire two brains together.

Crash says this could be it. Could change everything, if it works, and all I’m thinking and saying is what if it fucking doesn’t? What if we end up cooking on our bed and setting the whole stack of apartments on fire? But eventually she convinces me. She takes me through all the safety mechanisms she built in, breakers and switches and whatever. And I admit I was pretty curious.

So I say yes.

And we lay there, this heavy cable awkwardly laying between us. She gives me some piece of it to hold, “to ground you,” she says. First there’s nothing, and honestly I’m kind of relieved, like maybe she won’t spend any more of her time on this. Maybe we’ll get back to bar-hopping on our days off and shopping at the Melomart for useless crap. 

But then it starts. God damn. You know when poets write about sex? All that nonsense about blurring definitions and becoming one that makes it sound like they’ve never been fucked properly? Yeah? Well at that moment, I understood. I could look across the bed and see her, and at the same time I could see me through her. I could see my shitty makeup and the moles on my neck and how one boob was slightly bigger than the other. But I could also see how she didn’t notice that, how she didn’t fixate on the things I do when I see myself. How she just looked at my eyes, my lips, the way my hair framed my face. And she could feel that too, and the way I would count and recount the piercings in her ear, trace the slope of her neck.

God damn.

You kids think you got it good these days with your artificial reality experiences and synthetic parts. But I’m here to tell you that ain’t shit compared to a direct neural link on a live wire. We could feel all the little things that were wrong in each other that we never noticed in ourselves. She could feel how my hips were crooked, from back when one of the sockets slipped after I dived over a dumpster running from the cops. I could feel her headache from long hours working and not drinking enough water. We knew exactly what to do to make it feel better. Were to rub, where to push and pull. We were in a perfect feedback loop, exploring and experiencing every part of each other all at once.

We spent two days in bed with that thing. I remember when the power finally gave out. We crawled into the kitchen, sat in front of our fridge, and stuffed our faces with leftover take out. We were grinning at each other like teenagers. She said this was going to be big, and she was right. Next day she had all her splicer and tech friends over, arguing about voltages and heat dispersal. Few months later I could see versions of Crash’s homemade neural link at Afterlife. Folks hooking themselves up while they danced, as they fed each other drinks and kissed.

It was only a matter of time before Ziggurat burned us. It was all proprietary after all. Some nights, connected to Crash through that live wire, she could feel that doubt, that worry I had that one night I’d come home and she’d be gone. Disappeared to some corpo black site for enhanced interrogation. She would hold me and we would spend days like that, exploring each other until there wasn’t anything I couldn’t know just by looking at her. 

Came a time I didn’t need the live wire to read her. I could tell when she was pissed or when she was preoccupied with some technical problem. Shouldn’t have taken me so long to know her like that. But sometimes I thought I could tell what she was thinking before she thought it. Sometimes when I got home I knew what her mood would be before I even saw her. Knew she’d be frustrated, knew she’d be excited. Maybe that’s just how people get, they spend enough time around each other. Maybe we don’t need all this shit for that. 

One day I come home and the door to our apartment is open, the lock is broken, and Crash is gone, along with all her splicer gear and every neural link she made. I go around to her hacker friends to see if they’ve heard anything, but when they look at me I know. I know because the look they give me is the look Crash would give me when I asked about the live wire, when she wanted to tell me something big and dangerous was coming but didn’t know how. So I go home, fix the door, and get drunk. I get fired from my bouncing gig the next week for throwing come corporate suit off a balcony. But that’s another story.

Month later Ziggurat rolls out new neural slots, makes the live wire Crash had been peddling obsolete. The next year Ziggy releases their first neural link. Everyone pats these rich corpo engineers on the back for solving the neural interface problem, when a year before my Crash had it all figured out in our cramped apartment, running on nothing but cheap coffee and instant noodles.

So when you’re out running jobs on the ‘Net, skimming loose creds, running straight fibre into your brain, you remember Crash’s name. You whisper it like a fucking prayer every time you jack in to your cyberdeck because she’s the only reason any of this fucking works. The only reason anyone in Prime City can spend their nights connected to everyone is because of people like her.”