Work-in-progress - Untitled Cyberpunk (Patreon)

Today I'm sharing a snippet of a work-in-progress. I wrote it on a day last year when I was incredibly angry. Angry about what greedy rich mother-forkers and their soulless corporations were doing to the world, angry about what callous politicians and how they cared only about themselves and their payoffs, angry about attacks on human rights and the ability of people I love to live as equal members of society.

I was so angry that when I tried to open my normal project I just couldn't find my way back in.

So instead, I opened a new doc file and I poured my anger onto the page. I picked up an idea that had been nibbling around the edge of my mind. 

As a child of the 80s, cyberpunk is like the machine language of my worldview. It's foundational, inescapable. So I turned back to what I knew, to the tool set I'd grown up with watching and reading in the genre that has become seen by some as passe and stale only because it came true.

So here's what I wrote that day. I have no idea where I'll go with this, whether it'll become anything. But it's exactly the kind of thing this Patreon lets me share with you all - something raw, something unfinished, a story that has its own story. 

I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please let me know. It's always easier to go back to a project if I know other people are interested in seeing more.

-- 

We stood on the hill where trillionaires used to take tea as we watched the once-shining monuments to greed and power burn.

As our feeds showed shares distributing across the world, watched the assets of the .001% filtering out to every one of the former 99.99%, the sun broke through the cloud that had consumed my life since I first learned how the world worked.

From urchin to errand-runner to scammer to hacker, every step of the way I’d been under the corps’ thumb, dashing from shadow to shadow to eke out a living.

We fought, and we killed, and we died to get here. Millions of us, all around the world, in twos and threes and tens and twenties. We used to be scavengers and opportunists. We were externalities the corps could use and discard.

Then we stopped killing and betraying one another long enough to realize that our real enemy was up there. The assholes in the C-suites and the space stations, the rich fucks pulling the strings and living large with gene therapies and designer augments. The monsters playing chess with millions of lives to pad out a quarterly earnings report. 

And the billions they used as their patsies. That included us. You couldn’t escape it, really. You either worked for the corps or you worked for people that worked for the corps. There wasn’t anything else.

Closest you could get was living on charity from people who had mortgaged their lives to survive.

It took years. When you’ve lived in the shadows, there was nothing more terrifying than stepping out into the light to face the burning light of the sun and to call it out for the false god it truly was.

And now we were standing with friends watching the end of the war that had become our whole life.

We won. We fucking won. They had the private armies, we had the risky street-job wetware, the open-source code. They had the skies, but we had the streets.

The corps controlled everything, and now the corps belonged to everyone. Equal ownership. Now every person on earth was a shareholder. Everything was in our hands, the people’s hands. 

But there was no time to celebrate. And there was work to be done.

Afterburn turned our mesh network to emergency services, dispatching airdocs, collating emergency calls and filtering them to do the most with the scarce resources available, set rally points for disaster response droids. As the war picked up speed, Afterburn and countless others had tried reaching out to the vestigial organs that local and federal governments had become, but those assholes were so deep in the corps’ pockets that barely a third of them even accepted the revolution’s calls. Afterburn would drive trucks full of relief troops up to flaming city halls and the locals would still be writing their hands about jurisdiction and their all-important partnerships with the corps.

Government cooperation or not, we had to move. Just at that moment, we had responders rolling out in seven hundred and eighty-two districts just in this Sprawl. The corporate bootlickers had forgotten how to govern, maybe they never knew. 

Nobody alive remembered what the world used to be like before the corps took over. No continuity of knowledge, but also no one locked into that old way of thinking. There was just the Corps and the Before. Corp-owned schools told everyone that the Before was chaos, corruption, inefficiency. Now they were in the After. Post-Capitalism.

Whatever the fuck that meant.

“Things are going to move very fast now,” IO said, thought-to-speech decoding in our comms.

“Histories say that right after the revolution…things get wild. People want certainty, they want stability.

After the Union fell last century, people turned to existing leaders, whoever could deliver food and keep the power running made themselves the new oligarchs overnight. We don’t move right, don’t convince people to work together, we’ll see that happen a thousand times over.”

“It’s too much. How do we even start?” 

“Same way we started fighting the corps. Reach out, coordinate. We can’t become the new overlords. I won’t let it happen,” Vic said. They were ex-corp.
Knew better than any of us what it was like on the inside. “De-centralization and interdependence. We show the world that we can put out the fires best when we work together, it sets the tone.”
 
Rezz detached her hair to let it run its self-cleaning routine. “We can repurpose some of the games. Plenty of folks already know how to allocate resources.”

“Those things are full of trolls and griefers. Games will not save us,” Walker said.

“But if we triple the number of people with mod privileges, they can clean house.”

“Not unless we keep pushing people to do better. It will take a lot to show them the way. Break old habits. I’ll work on boosting the profile of the moderators. Show everyone that people are stepping up.”

Because they were. And that meant that there was hope.