Derek_Brown

I'm bored, so here's a from-the-hip short. No editing went into this other than what MS Word says was a no-no. I know I left a loose end at the end, and the characters are two dimensional, but I'm used to novel length. That's my defense, and I'm sticking to it. Please forgive.
The Cold Fusion Reactor mentioned is from my novel, there's not much in the way of description about it here though. Think of it as a city block sized building cobbled together from the husks of all the buildings that previously resided on this specific city block with a score of miniature clubs inside that never close. It's in a town called Y'Bor City down in Florida around the Tampa area.

Disclaimer: There's profanity in them thar paragraphs.

***Edited***

He hated the morning. Really, he hated almost every minute of the day, but the morning held a special place in his heart most people reserved for ex-paramours that had been especially hurtful. Jake opened his eyes and was instantly awake.

“This is not my beautiful house,” he said in his grating baritone.

He tried running a diagnostic on his neural network and came up with some missing log files from last night but nothing telling him how, or where he was. The room was familiar, the lines of the architecture and screaming visual chorus of color called to an almost tribal memory. Something remembered by his meat and not his machine. Perhaps he had been here before. His pounding head proved too difficult a monolith to surmount and rationally think beyond right now. He turned his focus to the room around him instead of pumping the dry well of his short-term memory.

The room he awoke in was clean however, an instant departure from the squalid nature of his abode. Kaleidoscopic colors were painted on the walls with as much care for symmetry as a three-year-old might bestow. The colors were an offense to any who were design conscious. Fortunately, Jake was not that sort of man. He couldn't deny however, the sickening vertigo the swirling hues caused his addled mind. Something he would call a hangover under any other circumstances pounded at his temples.

Something, other than the garish room, was amiss as well. Any attempt he made to wipe his tired eyes met with an unseen resistance he couldn’t verify. Something held all of him restrictively in place. He couldn't see what the force was, as his head seemed to be outside his typically assured dominion too. All he could muster was to roll his eyes around in their dry sockets and try to take in as much of the room that was within his limited field of vision. There wasn’t much to see other than the mind-bending color pattern, somewhere, probably at the head of the bed, there was a window letting the unmistakable cast of bright morning light into the room. A wish that the curtains, should they exist, were drawn floated through his mind.

“Well, you’re finally awake,” a distantly familiar lilting voice said from outside his scope of sight. “I hope you slept well, you were quite the handful last night, let me tell you.”

The voice laughed a lilting laugh that ended with a speculative sigh.

Jake hadn’t seen the source of the voice yet, but he already knew he’d want to hit it as soon as he did.

“Why can’t I move?”

The voice clucked its tongue in a motherly fashion.

“Dear boy, we had to tie you to the bed. You really don’t remember, do you? Three fingers Tony and Brian brought you in here last night after you got dosed up with something ugly at the Cold Fusion. Brian thinks it was a nano-virus.”

A lithe woman dressed in a sari glided into view. She had a warm smile on her face and on second thought didn’t look like anything he’d like to hit. The skin God and genetics had seen fit to wrap her in was supple and the almost caramel colored. She had vaguely Arabic features with long curly hair that fell well past her shoulders in glossy ringlets. A singular sadness in her eyes made her look like a doctor that has to tell a patient’s family their father didn’t pull through. He could think of a few things he would like to do to her though that, depending on whom you talked to, still involved violence. A quiet voice inside of him cut through the last vestiges of the narcotic still playing tricks on his mind and reported that, on occasion, he got to.

Disjointed memories started playing in step time through his mind. He’d been hired to keep some Saririman from NuTek Enterprises alive last night. The greasy little rat just had to go to the Cold Fusion Reactor he’d heard so much about from up in his ivory tower.

“I hear that it never closes,” he’d said greedily in his cultured voice from the seat across from Jake in the back of the armored limousine. “And that the women there wear next to nothing.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think it would be the safest place for you,” Jake had tried to reason. “Why don’t we take you to a place that’s a little more your speed for your first time, huh?”

The man’s brow had furrowed, like most of his caste, he wasn’t used to not getting his way. When he made a request, it was his hireling’s duty to fulfill it without question.

Seeing that this man lacked the common sense endowed to anyone that didn’t live in the same gilded cage behind augmented muscle-boys and corporate protection, Jake threw his hands up in a yielding gesture.

“Fine, but I stick to you like epoxy. If you ask a girl to dance, I’m going to frisk her first and be on the floor with you. Got it?”

Jake, too, was used to getting what he wanted.

Donaldson smiled and accepted the loose accord then receded into the murk he’d ingested, allowing the hallucinogenic to do its work on the more pliant aspects of his psyche. Already, images of half-naked Asian women were dancing in his head.

The night had started out fine. Donaldson seemed happy with the location and Jake’s ability to usher them into the club without the usual standing about in line. With a drink in his client’s hand, they found a somewhat out of the way roost where he could see everything yet not be touched by any of the seedier denizens of the club.

Before Jake could react, it all went bad. A girl that looked like she’d been forged by Donaldson’s fantasy melted out of the crowd and confidently approached. Within minutes, she’d talked Donaldson into dismissing his guardian and resolved back into the crowd with Donaldson in tow.

Jake had kept a tab on him for as long as he could, but the client is always right. If they don’t want you around anymore, staying could ruin someone that relies on word of mouth advertising. He was about to leave the prick to his own devices and call it a night when he saw the girl and two meat puppets hauling his former charge towards the door. His first thought was, “So what? I’ve already been paid.” His second was, “If the little bastard gets himself killed, or worse, recruited by another firm, you’ll never live it down.”

“Shit,” he muttered and strode off to perform a little damage control.

He caught up to them outside sans the Barbie doll, his python fully automatic pistol was already in his hand.

“Hey, he’s with me,” he said and thumbed the safety.

“Yeah? Well, now he’s with us. You got a problem with that, pal?”

Jake remembered shaking his head they always chose the hard route when they had you outnumbered.

“Usually, no, but I’m on the clock and that means I have to keep his body from harm,” he began. The targeting reticule in his ocular implant found areas of opportunity and vectored firing solutions. These were fed to the implants in his arms and the rest was just a conscious decision to pull the trigger. “I have no responsibility for your welfare and this guy’s really got me in a foul mood so I suggest you move along on your tootsies before the coroner has to move you along in a body bag.”

Jake didn’t finish the sentence.

In his line of work, it was wise to keep abreast of the newest body modification that was available. When time and credit allowed, it was also wise to invest in these modifications. If he’d done so, Jake would have added a new passive radar that had recently been released by a Japanese firm he couldn’t pronounce, but hadn’t. Had he done so, he would have been amply warned that the genetically, and likely surgically, altered woman with the face that fueled teenaged fantasy was behind him with a pneumatic pistol loaded with a drugged dart. The rest was a confused smear he would be piecing together for years.

He was going to have a lot of time on his hands, he was sure, to mull over where he’d went wrong. He learned that his ward had been recruited, that the bastard had planned it and used him as a fall guy, by Innovative Designs Incorporated last night. Losing a client to the Reaper was bad enough, but to have them taken from under your nose was a career-ending mistake.

“Jake, baby, I’m really sorry,” she said, snapping him out of his recounting.

“Huh? Why are you sorry?”

She looked at him with those sad eyes then at the floor. Without looking back, she walked back out of view. He heard a door open and a moment later whisper closed. A few moments later his bonds were released.

“I’ll have to tell them you’re awake, but I can give you a few moments head start before I do.” A voice said on his headphone.

“What? Tell who?”

“Your employers have been calling. At first I denied even knowing you, but they are very,” she paused. “Persistent. Jake, I love you, but I can’t protect you from this one. Run.”

He took her advice, vowing that he’d clear himself or kill that louse Donaldson trying.

ToucanMan

I tried to finish it, God knows I did.
I'll give it another try when the font is right.

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"A toucan can't keep toucankind ticking, but two can."

Derek_Brown

Sorry, I had noted some complaints about ease of viewing. I honestly thought I was being helpful. I'll have to fix a few other posts now.

anetjie

I dont know....it didnt float my boat...I dunno what to say, or why i'm posting...
keep trying
---Anetjie

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What will it take to show you that it's not the life it seems? I told you time and time again, you sing the words but don't know what it means

Derek_Brown

That's okay, thanks for saying something. At least I know someone read it. LOL.

Sareth

I liked it, personally. It appeals in that anti-hero in a jam sort of way. Definately the start of something.

I like the style you write in. The descriptive language is very appropriate to the genre, helping mold a very strong feel.

My only complaint? There's something odd in your punctuation. Sometimes it seems like you try to tie clauses together that just don't mix by the simple use of a comma. A little disjointed. But over all? I like.

Derek_Brown

Thank you Sareth. I agree, perhaps I should try simplifying the sentence structure, or break some of the wordier sentences into two.

gohn67

Hey Derek,
Maybe start off with him opening his eyes. Then do the internal dialogue stuff. Also I think you should take out instantly, but that's more a matter of prefernce. I don;t like using many adverbs becuase they are kind of weak and when you could think of a better way to show that.

Kind of clunky, "he was in was clean"
I think that's the main problem for me with this piece. THe wording of setnencs is kind awkward for me to read, and made it hard for me to get into. I think it's kind of wordy also.

I really like this line.

The memories, falshback thing here, came out of nowhere. Why does he suddnely choose to flashback at this moment. Maybe a space break also to make the flashback more clear. Sometimes using "had" isn't enough. But I think that's mostly me htough.

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ToucanMan

Very good story and well written too. I said I would read it and I did. And I'm glad I did.

There's a tiny problem with the following sentence: (The skin God and genetics had seen fit to wrap her in was supple and ----the---- almost caramel-colored.) If you remove ----the---- and add a dash between caramel and colored, the sentence becomes a beauty.

Also in my opinion lilting voice and lilting laugh are too close for comfort.

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"A toucan can't keep toucankind ticking, but two can."

Derek_Brown

Thanks everyone!

This is what I'm here to get, unbiased, both barrels blazing, reviews of my work. I know that I run on at the mouth (or is it fingers in this medium?) This can lead to some mind-bending sentence structure. I'm worried about saying less, but need to, I feel learn that sometimes less is more.

Again, thanks for the earnest reviews. There will be more on the horizon and I may even start editing them for content before posting. LOL

Rock on,
DB

Chris Miller

Hi Derek,

I enjoyed this story. It is well written and moves along nicely. Perhaps I am biased. I really love the cyber-punk genre and the character and scenes here come across as pretty real.

It is not a short story per se. It is more of an excerpt from or detailed hooking outline for a novel. I’d probably check out this novel too.

I think you should make the genre clearer sooner. Read, for example, the first paragraph of Neuromanser by Gibson, the premier cyber-punk novel. You drift into the action and plot too slowly for a short story or even for the beginning of a novel of this genre. I’m left a little confused by the ending, but that is probably just me being lazy. In a novel you kind of expect everything to be wrapped up nicely for you. So in this sense, the piece is a short I suppose.

Anyway, you are clearly a writer. I admire your thick skin in dealing with some of the comments. Good work. Here’s the edits, some probably repetitions:


Extra “the”

head;

I liked this. You need more of this initially I think.

lose the “, but hadn’t”


Chris

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the fairwriting blogs

Barcelona Review story: http://www.barcelonareview.com/64/e_cm.html

Derek_Brown

Thank you, Chris for the critique. From what you've said, you may notice I'm not much of a short-story writer. My focus is in novels. I've been trying to write more concisely of late, and this forum is a wonderful arena in which to do so. Perhaps, even get some instant (relatively so anyway) feedback on boo-boos and technique.

I’m glad to hear someone else note William Gibson in here, he’s my hero and probably second (in my mind) only to Douglas Adams. Yes, many would call both lowbrow, but I contend that brilliance doesn’t have to be, “Serious.”

Just my two cents, spend them how you see fit.