The Blind

PROLOGUE

In the impending year of 2035, things are different. The world has become one tremendous trash heap: full of corruption; tainted values and morals; technology; and materialism. As a refuge from the world that may as well be titled Hell, a distinct generation of cyber-jocks retreat into the sensory illusion of the Net – the perceptible void of data and computer constructs.

Through em-Ports (em for manifestation), these people are able to jack into the Net and elude the harshness of reality.

The issue is that: once the Net becomes more real, who can tell the difference between reality and illusion?

Enjoy.

***

Behind Angelo, the sky reflected the dusk of April 2035.

He drifted down the city street, hands concealed in his jacket pockets.

Towering buildings glowed in the light of nightfall, adorned with elaborate neon signs and hologram advertisements, exhibiting the social environment littered with notions of materialism and corruption.

Angelo marched by black markets set beside the streets, dealing with the latest in illicit wares and services. One more testimony to the way society had strayed.

Overhead, show lights pierced the low haze, stained by the vermilion of the twilight and the poison humankind had exposed it to for centuries. Before Angelo was the Sand – the blind alley of the urban strip called Old Tokyo, open to the ocean. Dusk: like a fire along the distant horizon far from the degradation of civilization, withering away beneath the silver sea, mirroring the steel sky.

The thunderous and distinct sound of the metropolis: it was what Angelo had become accustomed to, his ears had adapted to the Pandemonium that was civilization.

People filled the streets, shuffling along their ritual pilgrimages to their offices, or back. Their faces conveyed a tired, generic existence; haunted by the depressive decay they built upon daily. Surviving only as captives to wealth and power, they were breathing symbols of the Corporations that glared down from their skyscrapers onto the trash heap below.

Angelo’s face radiated with ivory warmth from the dusk, as he gazed up at a humble neon sign.

One read:

F.FIXERS

The sign was over a confined concrete stairway, wedged between an Arcade and the abounding mass of stalls in the street side marketplace. The steps were fractured and defaced with the movements of the myriad that had applied for the services of the Fixers. An affluent operation reflected in the scuffed concrete stairway.

Angelo began his way up the flight, still in the careless pace of his dampened state. The elated excitement and droning sound effects from the Arcade, mingled with the crude haggling of the market, flooded Angelo from behind. He yearned to reach the top of the ascent, to seek solace in the muffled quiet that the walls offered him.

***

The corridor at the top of the stairs was long and walled with mirrors. Tube lights ran around the roof, they fluttered.

The stretch was smoky. Angelo noticed an adolescent couple at the end of the corridor, kissing through smoky smiles, their crimson lips contrasting to their bloodless faces of drug abuse, cigarettes gripped in pale hands, individuals with nothing else but a false love. Diminishing butts scattered over the metal flooring, the lights like a beacon through the haze.

The climbing cloud cast back in the mirrors with playful flickering light gave an illusory effect. The soft, inarticulate sounds of the discord outside reverberated through the passage.

Mirrored doors lined the mirrored walls. Angelo looked at himself in one panel. Shifty images of his shell reflected back. He had flowing ebony hair, strewn all over his head in a youthful style. His face was innocent, but lacked the aura of a youth, except it was cloudy in a tone of depression. The eyes, pocketed in a droopy pouch, expressed utter hollowness. He wore a long black windbreaker of leather. It coated a white T-shirt, browned from the harmful atmosphere that slowly killed the inhabitants of the city. His jeans: bleached and slack, the style of a few decades gone by.

A sign over the door on Angelo’s left indicated F.FIXERS.

Installed by the side of the door was a small panel. Inscribed was “Manifestation Port 3314 (em-Port)”. It had no buttons, no keys, only an em-Link cable. Angelo pulled out the cable conveniently, a fiber falling behind the round device. With some effort, Angelo jacked the em-Link into a small port, the em-Port, behind his ear. Infinitesimal electrical sparks stimulated his neurons, portraying a visual digital world, one comparable to a dream, where all logic seems aloof.

Angelo had had his Port installed ten years prior as he lay on a bed in a dusty apartment, full of bloodstained apparatus, in a back street of New Tokyo - an exclusive Black Surgery specializing in em equipment. It was an excruciating experience, yet one vital to getting by in the contraband scene.

Francis, proprietor of F.FIXERS, a legendary Fixer (or what the brazen would dub a middleman), the one people come to for anything, was also jacked into the Net. He had purchased an illicit biochip from the market downstairs, a biochip shipped in only from India. The chip, dubbed em-High, gave the user an instantaneous high, for as long as they wanted, whenever they wanted. Withheld only for people with money, this chip was for hedonists. Ordinary people who could not afford the chip had to make do with conventional methods of getting the high they yearned for, forging lame excuses that “the real thing is better”.


The em-High biochip, embedded into the em-Link jacked into Francis’ port, abruptly disconnected the high and delivered a message to Francis.

The limitless void of the Net, comprised of data and shaping an alternate reality, an escape from the delinquencies of the world outside, was where Francis stood. The non-space began to blink red and a siren wailed. Turning around, Francis looked to his feet, no floor, no confines, yet a pair of sunglasses lay there. Francis picked them up and wore them.

Immediately, Francis’ senses were substituted by Angelo’s. A manner of reassurance Francis ran repeatedly to see what was stirring within the individual’s head, and to examine whether they harbored any firearms. Francis, knowing immediately, following the inversion, that it was Angelo; he pulled out of the Net.

The door slid open with a slight hiss, and Angelo proceeded inside, taking in the area. The door slid back shut behind him, beeping as it locked.

The small unit was jammed full of technical equipage, computers and voice activation systems, em-Chips and other devices, filling the room with a disturbing murmur, springing off the mirrored walls, volume accentuating the murmur to an even further unnerving hum. The walls were identical to the corridor outside - mirrored - and a long tube light enclosed the roof.

Francis sat in a hefty steel armchair, comparable to a dentist’s chair. An em-Link cable hung down the side of the chair, by the place Francis’ head lay, no longer plugged into his port.

Francis was unsightly, with scruffy chestnut hair, grimy and neglected. His face hung slack off his skull, his chin spotted by stubble. His aged eyes, bloodshot, and his face, whitish. Whether from the continual days in the unit perched before the computer, or the ceaseless highs, Francis looked sickly.

His teeth were awry and obscured by the innumerable cigarettes he smoked. His attire: designers and exorbitant, yet unkempt from unbounded days of wearing the same clothing.

He was not the same Francis Angelo had frequented long ago. A resemblance of youth, his apartment a haven for getting whatever you wanted with the help of the world’s finest and coolest Fixer.

“Why do you insist on makin’ your clients go through that check?” probed Angelo, after examining Francis’ state.

“Security, my man.”

“Well, I need some help. Need ya’ to set up a deal for me. Get me a place to stay… OFF the Yakuza’s list,” demanded Angelo.

“What? But I thought you were one of them?” uttered Francis, surprised.

“I was. But I fucked up,” Angelo rationalized.

Francis sat up on the chair with a smirk on his declining face.

“You fucked up, huh? That's not good, not good, my friend.”

“No, you really think?” Angelo flaunted scurrilously. “So what, huh?”

“Tell me what happened first, you dick. You don’t just come in here; get what you want right away. Talk a bit,” Francis requested, as he lay back down on his chair. “Sit.”

Angelo wiped a coffee mug right off a steel table and it smashed onto the floor, the coffee splashing onto the wall, sliding down smoothly, and gathering at the bottom of the mirror like mercury. Francis winced in disgust. Angelo sat.

“Yakuza hired me to hack into a system, steal a file from the Corporations.”

“And?”

“I fucked up, I told ya’. Got the file destroyed and so the Yakuza are on my ass for it.”

”You don’t seem very fucked up,” observed Francis, “I mean, you don’t seem to be in a hurry to get away from these people or nothin’...”

“Francis - what can they take away from me? What have I got to lose, why should I be scared? They kill me – they kill me - too bad for my damn soul. The reason I’m coming to you, is that I would rather not die, but I wouldn’t go so far as to prevent it from happening...you see?”

“What did they want?”

“A file. Don’t know what file… Must’ve been important—“

“Duh.”

“—For them to be so shitty ‘bout losing it.”

There was quietness. They gazed at one another, in a minute of sudden speculation. There was only the purring of machinery.


“What?” Angelo spat out, closing the silence.

Abruptly, Angelo flipped over. The Net was ambiguously cold; data crawling across Angelo’s skin.

“Construct?” Angelo called for the system build. No booming synthesized voice replied. “Francis! What the hell is this?”

Then, as soon as he had gone in, he was thrown into obscurity - brain-dead, but something kept tickling at him, data surging at him and within a minute he snapped out of it.

His next minutes of consciousness were of the 5 minutes in the unit, rewinding in his mind like a video, to the point where Francis had perused Angelo’s senses. Angelo deducted that he had been hacked. The prior 5 minutes to his momentary brain death was all the work of the construct playing out an illusion.

What the fuck is Francis doing? Angelo thought to himself in his dark consciousness. Stray irrational reflections and deliberations overcame him, he was conscious in the most enigmatic partition of his brain. Then he reappeared in the Net, a pistol in his grip.

“Angelo.” The voice of Francis came from behind him.

Spinning around in confusion induced wrath; he fired a gaping hole through the Fixer’s head. Brain blew out of the back of his head, then dispersed into the Net.

He reappeared in the unit. Francis lay on the floor, a needle in hand, his brain and bits of skull dispersed over the mirrored walls, pooling at the bottom and blending with the mahogany of the spilt coffee. The Fixer’s face was an inert image of anticipation and horror. Mother fucker. Angelo dropped the anonymous handgun from his hands.

An illusion or not, at this point Angelo did not care. His mind submerged him with a billion thoughts and questions, suggestions of betrayal and disgust burning in his heart.

I was hacked. Francis was with the fucking Yakuza. He tried to pop me with some shit while I was brain-dead. But his construct fucked up and I regained consciousness – lucky me. Too bad for that son of a bitch.

***

He rode a conventional train – neglected, no longer in its once assuming automotive beauty. The train jerked with the rhythmic snap of the rails. A faint azure light illuminated the carriage.

Angelo sat by the window; his eyes pinned upon the passing bricks outside the glass. The blue light made him nauseous. He felt drunk.

Behind Angelo sat a Japanese juvenile, with a colossal pair of headphones over his head. Angelo could hear the blaring music - voices of rebellion and anger. On the seat across the carriage sat an elderly woman with several bags by her feet, her head back against the window with her mouth wide open, wheezing in her sleep.

The steel enclosures of the carriage were heavily graffitied with messages of boredom and abandonment.


Angelo glanced down at the chair before him. On its back, someone had written in thick permanent ink:

FUK DIS WORLD!! ONLY I EXIST, UR BUT AN ILUSION OF MY OWN CONCIOUSNES


The message appeared overly philosophical for a piece of vandalism, but Angelo was enraptured by the conception. It was a unilateral argument, impossible to be proved erroneous.

The train had emerged from the tunnel. Scenes of regressing landscapes now passed by the cloudy window.

The countryside did not look like it used to. Urbanity was finally beginning to intrude the one place where everything was pure.

The sun gently rose over a forlorn rice field, the crops wilted and sooty. Platinum light entered the carriage; Angelo cringed as his eyes adjusted.

His illness vanishing with the blue light, he pulled out a Marlboro and lit it with a sterling zippo, quickly inhaling the murderously smooth smoke. He watched the smoke rise in contorted spirals, to meet the probing sunlight – pure and untainted. He felt he did not conform there…shutting his eyes: he lost himself in the golden light, the aroma of his Marlboros and the droning voices of the Japanese music.

[Not finished. Email me at [e-mail] or review to give me feedback. Please be constructive.]