15 KiB
Auto Bio Graphic: Cyberpunk Nonfiction, Chapter 2
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Author: u/Tinfoil_Haberdashery *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5igax7/auto_bio_graphic_cyberpunk_nonfiction_chapter_2/
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Score: 13
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Created: 2016-12-15T07:44:14
Post:
The following is an exploration of how, when we recontextualize normal life in the language of a fictional genre, the mundane takes on a quality of fiction. The first chapter was submitted here several months ago by another member of the community, so I thought you might appreciate another installment. The names of people, places and things in this story were changed to enhance the aesthetic and protect the nominally innocent. The chronology of events was altered to improve the narrative flow. Otherwise, all details and particulars of this story are true.
“No more lessons until next year”, Jeff said.
I nodded as I slid my fiddle into its polyethylene tube. I couldn’t quite muster the courage to tell him that it might be our last lesson for a long while.
Jeff is the only friend I pay $75 a month for the privilege of his company. Our relationship is quite professional, but I can’t help thinking of him as a friend as well. He’s a fantastic teacher and a genuinely wonderful person…even if violin is pretty much the only thing we have in common.
A 3D lenticular photo of Jesus stared at me from the wall. Half a dozen more renderings stared down at me from the walls and, in one instance, the ceiling, various drawings from his other students and one inexplicably fluorescent rainbow posterization of him that said “Grateful Dead” more than “He is Risen”. Given the decor, it's been a bit hard coming up with a way to ask Jeff if we can work on Christmas carols that are a little more secular and less about 'our' savior.
The only character more ubiquitous in the room than Jesus is Optimus Prime, and a truly astonishing array of other Transformers figurines whose names I don’t know but probably run along the lines of ‘Metazorg’ and ‘Overdrive’.
Next to his chair sat what I suspect is the silver medalist in Jeff’s obsession Olympics, narrowly edging out action figures and losing handily to Jesus—his violin. Not the one he used to play in concerts, surely, but a cheap workhorse that wouldn’t depreciate more than the cost of a single lesson if a 7-year-old sneezed too close to it. It’s made entirely of wood, though, unlike my instrument of glass-reinforced polymer. He doesn’t even use internally geared tuning pegs, though I can’t imagine why not given the number of times per day he must tune the thing.
I paid him and said goodbye, wondering how long it would be until I could get back.
Jeff’s the best, but his lessons aren’t cheap. And cash is at a premium at the moment.
I lost my job with Santiago County two weeks ago. I think it might have had something to do with my rewiring a 2.4 ghz transmitter in my cubicle. Not that I was a fantastic employee otherwise—paperwork has never been my strongsuit— but something on my boss’ face when she walked in on me with a butane pencil torch poised over the strewn entrails of what, given the volatility of lithium power cells, is only nominally not a bomb makes me think it at least contributed.
I left the studio’s air-scrubber and chlorine sterility into the night air of Santiago City. I strapped my fiddle’s cylindrical case to my tricycle, powered up the speed controller, and sped silently down the narrow street.
My trike is proving to be a wiser investment than I’d hoped. Low and sleek, it can cover over 32 kilometers for every megajoule of energy stored in its power cells, approximately 100 times more efficient than my old Subaru. The single massive rear wheel is driven by a large power cell that rests between my legs—a precarious position, given the aforementioned volatility of lithium cells, but I shelled out for a premium battery that—hopefully—won’t explode quite as easy as the aircraft-grade ones I’m used to working with.
The wheels glowed in red rings as I sped through the streets of the city, past sketchy mobile network stores and mini marts lit up like a prison yard at night. It’s amazing—you don’t really appreciate the smells of a city from inside a car. When you’re speeding along four inches off the ground and breathing hard, every scent is there. The acrid stench of exhaust is probably the most prevalent, but sour garbage is common, and every once in a while a manhole cover makes itself known by the aroma of raw sewage—a weirdly nostalgic scent, since I lived very briefly at a sewage treatment plant with my brother when I was working my first tech job out of high school.
I pulled up to a red light and a heard a shout of “Hey!” from the car beside me.
I glanced up and over at a woman in a massive SUV. “You need more lights!”
I blinked incredulously. My bike is covered in diode lamps, including a thousand-lumen monstrosity that serves as a headlight. I’ve got diode lamp arrays on all three wheels that The back one pulses a ring of red lightning bolts when it’s spun up. There’s also a whip of electroluminescent wire coming off my mast. I look more like a rolling discotheque than a vehicle.
“Ma’am…I have more lights than—”
“Alright, but if someone kills you, it’s your fault.”
Her tone was so matter-of-fact I couldn’t really come up with a response. “Uh…Thanks,” I said, but the left-turn light had gone green and she was away.
When I got home, Amy and her puppy were waiting for me.
Amy lights up my life. She’s kind, smart, and she didn’t kick me to the curb when I got fired, which is more than one would reasonably expect.
“What’d you get me for Christmas?” she asked.
“Not telling you.”
“Is it for my gaming terminal?”
“Not telling you,” I repeated, forcing myself to keep my voice expressionless. We play this game every year, and it’s complicated by the fact that her delight in guessing her presents is outstripped only by her disappointment if she guesses right and ruins the surprise.
The little box I’d left under the tree in fact contained a storage module for her newly-constructed gaming terminal. I suspect she built it more for me than for her—I’m far more of a vid-game buff than she is, and have always wished we could play a few together. She put a lot of work into making it happen, which though probably not entirely for my benefit was incredibly endearing.
“Your brother dropped this off, by the way,” she said.
She handed me my old net interface, a now-obsolete model that had died of an unknown malady some time back. But—and here was the key—it did not die of a broken monitor. Unlike my current interface, which had had a steadily spreading spiderweb of cracks across the display for the past few months but which finally flickered into blackness last week, just after I’d lost my job and the faintest illusion that I could afford a new one.
“Thanks, Beautiful,” I said, and took it into the workshop.
I hung my fiddle on the wall and placed the two network interfaces on the glass surface of my desk. I pulled the set of drivers my brother had bought me this time last year out of a drawer and set about dismantling the two devices. The drivers are great, with every conceivable bit, including several that are specifically designed to get past security screws. After about an hour I’d Frankensteined together one working device. I booted it up and was rewarded with a bunch of messages from concerned family members who apparently didn’t realize that modes of communication outside of net interfaces did, in fact, exist.
My dad, frantically telling me to find new health insurance before the new president gets sworn in and makes good on his promise to give the insurance companies free reign to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
My brother, asking if I when I’ll be able to hook back into the net so we can continue our slow conquest of medieval Europe.
My mom, asking about an unfamiliar interface protocol number that’s been calling her (mine, from my terminal, trying to tell her that my interface was broken).
I flicked through some of the others and chatted briefly with an old friend from Sweden about her current lussekatter recipe. Fi fan, she said, [I thought we were in trouble when Sveriges Demokraterna won a seat in parliament. You guys are fucked.]
Jag vet, I replied. [I know.]
[You’re always welcome in Sweden,] she said.
[I wonder if your immigration department would be so inviting,] I replied, [and anyway, Amy doesn’t speak Swedish. Or tolerate temperatures below 30 degrees.]
I have a pretty low threshold of tolerance for discussions of Dean Holn, the president elect, so I bid Maria Hej då and grabbed my little 3-string stick dulcimer from where it hung beside my fiddle and took it out into the living room.
Amy was curled up on the couch with her puppy, Fitz, watching an old TV show on her portable terminal. The Christmas Tree glowed with the too-rich colors of diode lamps, cast incongruously in plastic bulbs to make them look like old incandescent ones.
I sat in my old rocking chair and plucked absently at the dulcimer. I’m not as good on it as I am on my fiddle or tinwhistle, but it’s a quieter, mellower sound that’s nicer in the evenings.
As I picked out The Foggy Dew and Where the Fraser River Flows, I thought about the Easter Rising and the execution of Joe Hill, both almost exactly 100 years ago. I’m not what you’d call an agitator--the most strident political act I ever take is voting (which I suppose makes me more radical than nearly half the country), but even so, the prospect of tyranny has been weighing rather heavily on my mind.
“You ready for your test tomorrow?” Amy asked.
I shrugged. “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
The faces of half a dozen other test-takers were visible in the proctor’s terminal monitor behind her as I placed my palm on the scanner.
“Relax, kid,” she said, “Worrying doesn’t help.”
Her associate led me into a room with a bunch of other prospective teachers in little cubicles. He sat me down in front of a terminal and gave me a laminated tablet and marker for scratch work.
I started in on the questions, glancing somewhat nervously at the little lens above the screen. Almost all terminals have cameras of course, but it’s weird to think about someone watching you when you can’t see them.
I churned through the reading and math sections and finally came to the essay portion. The prompt asked about a work of art that helped you identify with someone, and my mind flashed back to the night before, plucking the dulcimer to Joe Hill’s Last Will.
I wrote about the utopian optimism of a century ago and the poor, misguided men who pursued it because they really thought the Bosses and tyrants couldn’t remain in power much longer. I wrote about a man crying in a jail cell, facing death at dawn and the connection I feel to him through the music he left behind, even though my politics differ so vastly from his.
I finished, pushed back my chair and went back into the proctor’s office.
“I told you not to panic,” she said, “I’ve got your results for the math and reading comprehension sections.”
“I passed?”
“Passed? You’re in the 93rd percentile. We won’t have your essay results for a while, but I’ve never seen anyone who did this good on the reading section fail that.”
“Thanks,” I said, pulled my stuff out of the locker I’d secured it in before the test, and went out to my trike.
Halfway home I pulled over onto the sidewalk and cried. The fucking 93rd percentile on a test I didn’t study for, given only to prospective teachers, all of whom have graduated from university. And I can’t hold down a fucking desk job.
I mean, I get that they’re not exactly interchangeable skill sets, but you’d think there’d be some overlap, or that the ability to take test would at least indicate prowess in other areas.
After a while of feeling sorry for myself, I pulled out my interface and keyed up the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy program the County's therapist recommended. I thumbed through a few exercises.
They didn't help. They're designed for Military Vets coming home from war, not ambiguously aneurotypical angst junkies.
I got up, climbed back on my trike, keyed up The Skepticrat on my interface’s media player, and made my way home.
That night my dad, Amy and I went to the annual Christmas show Molly’s Revenge puts on up in Sutter’s Creek, birthplace of the California gold rush.
The tiny mountain town is one of the few places in the Western US ancient enough to remind me of Scandinavia, with streets almost as narrow as those in Reykjavik.
The cold reminded me of Reykjavik, too, waiting outside the theater for the show to start. Poor Amy was bundled up as warm as she could but was still shivering. I pulled a sodium acetate heater out of my bag and handed it to her. She clicked the wafer inside the pouch and the solution immediately precipitated into a rigid crystal, pouring out its enthalpy of fusion to warm her cold hands.
We hadn’t been waiting long when she looked over her shoulder. “Do you hear singing?”
Over the crest of the hill and down the main street came a flatbed truck with speakers stacked on the back and a guy with an electric keyboard. Following them was a huge procession of people, all carrying candles and singing, and a party enacting the nativity—Joseph leading Mary on a mule to the hotel and saloon across the street from the theater, the proprietor of which dutifully emerged to deny them entrance.
In the back of my mind I wondered which version of the nativity they thought they were performing, since the two given in the bible are mutually contradictory and there’s no donkey and no innkeeper in either of them, but then Amy slipped her hand into mine, the sodium acetate crystal held between our two palms.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked.
“Uh…yeah,” I said, letting the cynicism go, at least for a second, in the face of three hundred candle-bearing carolers.
“Merry Christmas,” she said.
I bit my lip and blinked back a swell of moisture in my eyes. “You know, in spite of everything…I think it might be.”
For those who are interested, here's a picture of my trike.
Comments:
u/rhaps0dy4 [+2] (2 hours later)
In the beginning I thought it was the same character, but as it passed it became clearer. This is not as cyberpunk as the original, but it was still fun to read! Thanks for writing it :)
Your trike is pretty cool.
u/Tinfoil_Haberdashery [+1] (7 hours later)
It actually is the same character--me. Just after a few months' changing circumstances.
I know it's a little less heavy on the cyberpunk, but I felt like digressions on the tech bogged the last one down a bit. I'm happy to field criticism, if you think it needs more.