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Neotropolis – A Prequel Story
[The following work of fiction is inspired by the cyberpunk festival/LARP Neotropolis and Sean Kennedy’s “Tales From Afternow” The story makes mention of events and characters from both productions but is not directly affiliated to either. It constitutes the back story of our characters for the LARP and is purely a work of fan-fiction.]
[3700 words all of them fictitious]
Y –
“It sounded like a cool job, megafun with a side of righteous revenge – until the whole thing went tits up and left us adrift in a tin can in Kepler’s orbit.
So what now proxy?”
Talyn –
“Oh yeah, those guys. They couldn’t catch a golf ball with a black hole gun. The shipment was laughably undefended, which I guess should’ve been our first clue that something weird was up. But hey, who doesn’t like easy money.
The timing was right, we were loaded to the eyeballs on RPM, every synapse firing with the synchronized image of the warehouse plan. Our wetwork engineer cut through their firewall like a laser through soycheese and the locks popped with a satisfying sigh, barely heard over the drugged snores of the Sentinel Guard at our feet. Inside the chilly interior, crates bobbed in their harnesses in the low grav field of the storage pod strapped with the same lack of care to this side of the old SpaceStation dock.
The spider eyes of the now dead security cams tracked us with a high pitched whirr as we bee-lined for the single terminal glowing faintly in the corner, perched on a stack of marine batteries bundled in insulation.
The download took seconds, our tech was primo. We spared each other a single tight nervous smile and smashed the rig loose, then delta’d out of there like liquid plasma in a vacuum.
The gig was a TKO. It was time to tally our spoils.
And that’s when our troubles really started…”
Sykes –
“Frictionless – that’s how the run went. Unproblematic, completely uneventful, I almost wanted to test the Fates and hit an adjacent stack – big juicy pile of data, looked like redundant backups of ship manifests. Someone would dish out fat creds for this kinda download – no more wonton piracy, you could hit the exact barge that has the gear you want with surgical, autocannon precision.
But no, stay humble.
Focus on the main packet.
The data stack rose up like a column of light on the gridded darkness of cyberspace. No bleed-thru images for a job. When I’m jockeying for fun I like to set my transparencies low to see the outline of the grubby furniture in my house so I don’t knock something over.
But not this time; I’m in mission mode, blacked out, sunken into my plexofoam aerospace chair. I’m an intelligence-seeking missile, armed and aimed at the crackling wall of energy surrounding the data stack we’re cracking. My fingers twitch in meatspace and the firewall shield goes down soundlessly. With it all the cameras, sensors and armament inside the storage room go offline, severed from the controller stack.
Through my commlink I see my proxies crowbarring the steel terminal out of its thermal container and a smirk twists my mouth.
I suppose I could’ve told them I don’t need the unit to access its data. As they’re cursing and kicking the unyielding chassis, I’m already browsing the stack. Fucking punks. Oh well let them have fun, we can use the terminal in case my download is corrupted.
I reached into my chair’s alcove and blindly pull up and tab a fresh can of RPM, synapses crackling from the mere smell of it.
This is very good stuff. Months worth of Spacestation logs, this tin can interrogates air before it lets it on. And we now know everyone and everything that has arrived and departed through an airlock in the last solar year. It takes another nanosecond to scoop out the name of the mark, the hapless bastard whom our “employer” wanted to know the comings and goings of.
That’s it, big hit for just one name and one address – the rest of the stack is ours to do as we please.
And that’s when it caught my eye.
It was an odd shaped container, a form of data compression that hasn’t been used in a few centuries. Yet despite looking like old garbage, it bore some very interesting licenses – namely about a dozen Old Rock governments all claiming that the contained information was absolutely top secret. Looked like bait.
I vaccinated myself with all my top of the line digital obfuscation and opened the package.
It contained a dozen audio files, harmless.
With a quick glance at my mates now dragging the steel box through some hallway, I settled back into my foam cushion, downed half the can of RMP in one gulp and hit play.
—
“I hope I’m getting through… This is independent dynamic librarian Sean Kennedy the 6th… this is a pirate radio station in queens English from sometime after now… by listening to this you are in violation of your Listeners License…and may be prosecuted.
What do you say to ghosts who died before you were born… what do you say to people who have the only chance of saving you, maybe preventing you from having existed…”
Talyn –
“The girl buying this bullshit story I wasn’t surprised by. She’s clever but has this naive tendency to believe anything that sounds like it might lead to some “mega fun adventure”. A romantic tale of a long lost message in a bottle clattering through space trying to warn humanity of a dark future was perfectly in line with the VR flicks she grew up with. Of course she would want to believe it, because it made her role, our role, of such critical importance.
It made us heroes, the hapless thieves who singularly possess the knowledge to save a planet.
Like I said, she’s naive. But I don’t always mind naivety, yeah? – it can often offer insight not clouded with assumptions and premonitions that come with, y’know … experience.
But it spooked our tech.
Badly.
They went to the ground for half a solar, disappeared in their stacks, unreachable on comms. We thought we had been made and they came for them, and it was the fear of our own IDs being compromised that finally had us banging on their unit shutters.
They opened the door wordlessly, a distant haunted look in their eyes and let us in. That was already fucked up. We’d known them a few dozen solars and they had never spoken to us without goggles on. Much less invited us into their lair. They looked younger and more haggard at the same time without the massive lens VR gear crowning their head. They said they checked it all.. and it all checked out? Whatever the fuck that meant.
Their going theory was *get this* that some poor lad had figured out a way to transmit this message through *time* and the Galactic Government were suppressing this knowledge.
Are you hearing this shit?
Like a low cred VR flick written by fourth Martian Mormons trying to rationalize going to digital heaven. Absolutely bullshit; a fevered fantasy. Bad sci-fi disaster porn.
The girl thought it was gospel, that the entire home planet was about to go nova and that we had received cryptic foreshadowing from a distant prophet.
And despite all logic, so did our hacker.
I was ready to blow my jets and ditch the whole outfit for a more industrious and less demented crew when…
The very next cycle, denizens of MegaSpacestation5 were informed that in alignment with New Earth Comm Standards, all owners and operators of digital equipment were expected to register their Listener Licenses to continue maintaining contact with the planet.
Okay, maybe there’s something to it. But I hold to the adage that has kept my ship drives humming, and made most bi-peds somewhat predictable.
Once is random. Twice is coincidence. Thrice is a pattern.
You’ve got one, kid. And it’s solid. Gonna need to sell me on a bit more.
Y:
“The problem with smart people is they can be so *dumb*.
A smart person thinks they can just apply logic to a thing and make it make sense, which means they never learn to just listen to their gut. There’s always gotta be a why instead of a feeling of “yes!”.
Your gut is what tells you to delta out of a site before the security goons show up, your gut screams at you over the howling winds in traffic and warns you of a yet unseen sinkhole, your gut tells you not to gamble your O supply because the fucking airlock may jam again and strand you in the vacuum for 10 precious minutes.
I may not be be the smartest, but I’m the gutsiest in our crew and seeing as I’m still intact and with my guts are unspilled I *really* wish my proxies would hear me out more often.
Because my gut is often right.
When I heard the first sentence of the broadcast, my trusty guts turned into a bowl of cryocubes in zero g and belly-flopped down a gravity well of fear and nausea.
No amount of road rash, no calibre of gatling-gun, not even the cold vacuum of space has ever made me so uneasy. My nuclear-armed ex and I surfed the deep ocean on a barge full of psychotic zealots and *that* was megafun compared to what happened to this guy… or well what was going to happen to everyone back on Earth.
Sykes gets it, they’re mega smart and they have a good gut too. You learn to trust your intuition when you fumble around in cyberspace without use of your real senses. And their guts were full of bile and mars rocks too after hearing the message. Although I think they’re afraid of something completely different, the whole Praise Server thing got to them in a different, like religious way – I’ve seen that look they had before, the Babel-babblers had it in their eyes too.
Me?
I think that’s giga-dull.
The rules, the sky fires, the endless desert, the mega control shit, fucking sad doggy Carcass.
All of it sounds like a bad time. And whatever happens down there you bet it’s gonna blow back on us. The station is completely linked up with ground control. If they blow each other back to the dark ages we’re just as fucked.
Self-reliance my friend.
Self-reliance and uh..autocracy.
That’s how yours truly likes to live.
That’s what my witty guts tell me is right.
So we gotta delta off this hunk of metal ASAP.
Go deepspace, go to a place that exists just fine without grandpa and grandma down on the ground fumbling at the controls for gigaton tactical nukes.
Trust me, proxies.
I know when to ride a wave and when to bail.
And I don’t wanna be anywhere near this thing when it crashes down.
Talyn:
Oh they were dead serious with the Licensing stuff.
I strolled into the Gopnik Paradise the next cycle, and as soon as I cleared the airlock to the NuSoviet spy-sat-turned-laser-disco I was stunned by the desolate feeling the place had void of patrons, hololights on full dispersal, with faint white noise seeping from its speakers.
Timør was shouting down a pair of hi-vis sweater vests that had an official air about them. His Anglo-Serbian-Khazak barrage of curses had no effect on the Fed dogs. Broadcasting was cancelled until the venue obtained the correct License. License with a capital L.
So we did the only reasonable thing.
Ushered them out, jammed the Station-side airlocks, and turned the music back on.
There were at least a dozen other ways for Paradise patrons to get in and out of the club ranging from valet shuttle parking to quasi-suicidal leaps through the frigid vacuum.
Business went on. Relentlessly.
But the Federation fuckers were also stubborn.
After failing to garner compliance through in person bullying, they simply bricked us out of the Stations networks. Sykes had us eating like kings for a whole solar while their switchboard proxies took on as many network cracking gigs as there were citizens aboard this old geosync heap of shit.
In space, people are savvier.
And less compliant.
We scoffed at their attempts to enforce Listener Licensing but with growing weariness.
Eventually most people just signed up anyway. It was easier and cheaper to just subscribe than keep paying techs to hack your VR set.
They all bought in, even old Timør – although not a goddamn thing that took place in his bar was above board – he nevertheless nailed that hologram studded License right outside his airlock like they told him to. Fucking sellout. I frowned at it every time I rolled in to take up the decks. We took turns pissing on it when the afterhours mood struck. But even that stopped being fun after a while.
After a while…it finally happened.
The imposter syndrome became too real.
Maybe the girl got to me, who knows, but suddenly I was so parabolically *OVER IT*.
This place was doomed.
Mid DJ set I looked out over the 300 odd heads bobbing to the bass lines I was jamming through the GP’s sonic assault system, and I suddenly saw them in a new nasty light – these played out idealists pretending to be edgy because they were hanging out 400km above sea level in a hippie commune funded by OldRock nepo trustfund creds.
The Paradise, the Station, the blue planet beneath us felt suddenly claustrophobic, greasy, dank, like spilled servo fluid gone rancid in a sani-bot closet. Like small game, small fish in ancient oceans.
Fuck them. Let them eat fallout ash.
Somewhere out there, the real jammers were carving new turf outside the jurisdiction of
Federation yokels.
“Liberas, Occasio”.
Liberty & Opportunity.
Literally the motto of Kepler 609c.
Liberty & Opportunity versus Licensing & Ohfuckthisplacesucksnow.”
Sykes:
I don’t know what it is that convinced those two in the end, it doesn’t matter all that much. I couldn’t possibly swing this kind of gig solo so I needed their buy in.
But as quickly as it became real, the thought that we were going to leave the Station terrified me. Me and these two punks were going to, I don’t know, hijack a ship for a 7000 light-year flight?!
What the fuck did I get myself into?
I spent my whole life on the Station, born here, probably conceived in a small unit identical to the one I live in now. I’m basically an extraterrestrian. The first gen of real ETs. And I’m no average Station dweller either. I’m the cryptokeeper. I confer with the Stations AIs in our native arcane Station tongue. The Stations networks are like an extension of my limbic system, my circulatory pathways, pumping data like lifeblood.
I am god here, truly. I could space the entirety of the GP if someone looked at me the wrong way, but I don’t do shit like that because I am a benevolent, technocratic lord, a patient posthuman deity who keeps peace aboard the Station. I… truly am a Node of Server. Here, in the haven of our closed circuits, my proxies and I kept the thieves honest and the laws lax.
Business has always been good.
But it won’t last.
The OldRock will eventually suck us down into its poisoned atmosphere.
The distorted words of the Librarian rang in my temples over the loudest of my mates sets. The croaks of that ghost became my default intrusive thought in the flesh and in virtu, begging, always begging the Listeners to listen, to oppose, to rebel.
Little rocks, chanting monks and radiation burns awaited us all.
I was too scared to be cowardly.
And I think so were the others. That’s why they came around.
So since the topic had never come up before, I now realized there were some seizable gaps in the interstellar travel sections of my godlike knowledge-base.
Time to dip some stacks.
Y:
You “poon” over, that’s how.
You’re really overcomplicating this, guys.
You find a transport going the same way you’re going at nice high velocity, take aim for its iron side. And you poon it. Reel in and wait to see how far it takes you. Keep your eyes peeled for your next ride. Grab and swing like on a 0g access tunnel ladder.
No, I don’t mean grabbing onto an actual spaceship, asshole.
I mean *metaphorically*.
It’s all the same concept.
Look, we have all these dock logs we pinched ok?
Take those. And decomp them with your algorithm, my proper proxy!
Find a ship that goes to Cygnus on the reg.
And then we poon it.
Easy.
Talyn:
“She was a SAAD Girl.
Sovereign Autonomous Artificially Designed Girl.
She spoke the same “language” as the Station’s AI but that’s where the similarity ended. While the Station concerned itself with things like how much water to pump and how often to restock rations, she was a full personality, immortal, post-human intelligence with an enterprising desire.
SAAD Girls and Boys walked among us, nobody quite understood why they chose to be around so much meat. But they walked among us nonetheless.
The SAAD Girl’s intelligence took up an entire ship, a scavenged old trawler she had entirely gutted and converted into a nitrogen cooled fission powered gilded carriage. When she wasn’t hauling around the solar systems running transports, she decanted her intelligence into an absolutely ludicrous bot-bod that belonged in a retro holoporn rendition of gynoid pleasure models. And she still spoke fluently in the non-verbal tongue of the Station, as her twin white retinas studied us blankly across the bar table.
“Six suspension pods, fully life supported. That gets you to the first Accelerator belt, 30 LY from here, and from there,” she shrugged “figure it out. Charter a drop-pod or find another ride, I don’t care. Payment upfront. And no fucking around aboard, or I snip off your O2 supply and space your meat, you got that?”
I was always so impressed at how … current, her dialect always felt. I had always felt that punctuating orders, requests, instructions with cursing was a very … human … thing to do. Knowing precisely not just which words to use, but also which diphthongs to glide over just right – that was the watershed moment for me when the AIs were truly eclipsing humanity.
As amazement rattles around my skull for the umpteenth time, she grinned devilishly revealing rows of perfect white teeth.
“Who’s to say you don’t do that anyway and keep the fare?”, our feisty proxy had clearly manifested an immediate and pronounced dislike of our ride., calling it her damn gut again.
“My reputation, of course”. The brilliant smile again. “You think I’d last 200 years doing this shit by scamming low grade defector scum like you? Why are you in such a rush to get to Cygnus anyway, what did you do?”
“Nothing”. Sykes answered too quickly. Too nervously. Wait a sec, we *hadn’t* done anything that bad really, nothing worse than the odd stun-grenade robbery. Why were they so twitchy?
I considered wrapping up business at GP, I played over the breakup conversation a million times in my head – ranging from a grandiose announcement that I’m expanding my audiences across the galaxy and leaving this rats nest behind, to staging my own death in some freak grav harness accident and going out a legend.
In the end I couldn’t bring myself to do any of the above. After the meeting with the SAAD Girl I never went back there actually… I didn’t know where to start saying goodbye so I just *didn’t*. I glared at the stained License on the airlock one last time exiting the bar but couldn’t even muster the hatred for it. I was done here.
On board the ship, the last thing I saw was the girl and the tech, snuggled in respective foam lined capsules and then a faceplate swung down with a pneumatic hiss.
Something must’ve gone wrong though. It opened a second later, hissing compressed gas.
Only the pins and needles in my legs and hands clued me into the fact that… that was it.
I had been suspended. We arrived. The ships’ instruments showed us in the middle of Centaurus joining a long winding queue of ships around a state of the art docking station.
The SAAD Girl poured itself into her lithe blonde doll’s body and was at the Tech’s throat before either of us had fully regained use of our limbs and could react.
“What THE FUCK did you do?”
They sighed. They knew exactly what was coming.
“I gave the Station some data. Time delayed infodump. They deserve to know the truth…”
She fixed him with a white irised stare that burned like plasma coils. Her servo-strong grip on the front of his jacket then relaxed.
“Well. Good job. The Station went dark after we left. Full lockdown. They all went quiet actually, all three geosync Stations. Cut off Earth on comms.”
He stared back, visibly deflated. “That wasn’t supposed to… how did they…”
She rolled her eyes, a perfectly human gesture that shocked me as much as her next words.
“Whatever. Stale news. That was …6 years ago from their perspective. And yours I suppose.”
Suspended.
I had never been suspended before.
My stomach heaved.
We fucked up the lives of some 10 million space dwelling humans, and bounced out of the solar system. Holy shit.
I thought my farewell to the Gopnik Paradise was cold.
“They’re calling it a terror incident these days. Earth is bracing for war.” A shrug and a swing of her long blonde hair over a pale shoulder.
“So anyway. This is your stop. Get the fuck out.”
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