“what’s the job pay?” i asked coolly, flicking my digi-cigarette into the neon-bathed alley below. the anime district always got busy this time of night, and the low buzz of neotaku and solicitous hentai-bots wended its way smokily through the undercity gloom.
“two hundred lindens,” said lucky_starboy97. “assuming you get it done.”
“bullshit,” i said, flicking another digi-cigarette. lindens were worthless since the cockrain crash last year. “one-fifty bitcoin or i walk. nobody else is gonna be able to get into hardened nexus-govt systems, either.” i smirked, suppressing a heh. his mind was sifting through the options, but there was only one conclusion. he eyed my mono-dachi warily.
“allright, allright” he stammered, sculpted yaoitech cyberfingers making small conciliatory gestures. “you win. you’ll have it in your account as soon as i get my waifu back.”
it didn’t feel good squeezing the neotaku for cash like this, but i pushed the guilt out of my mind with thoughts of all the hotpockets that kind of money would buy. eating like a king for three weeks, in exchange for e-heisting an outlawed anime from fed cyber-lockup? i’d taken worse jobs, with worse rewards. my stomach growled impatiently.
“don’t worry,” i said, flicking my digi-cigarette. “you’ll see haruhi again soon. i promise.”
Vektor extracted the Corsair 32 gigabyte thumb drive from the inside pocket of his pea coat and slotted the stick into his Dell Inspiron’s port. The solid state memory activated instantly, a small LED washing green as the operating system recognized the device.
Data spilled out across his screen, resolving as a pop-up window asking him if he wanted to scan the drive for defects. He clicked yes, but unchecked the option to automatically correct any errors. The drive read clean. The data was good.
Activating his interface, the superior Chrome operating system loaded into the laptop’s active memory. Vektor navigated to a server in Japan, blue alphanumeric spilling across a white field. Cat-eared women appearing in thumbnails. His browser was finely tuned to detect and parse information, increasing the speed with which he could react. It scanned the Kanji characters and offered to translate.
“Not today,” said Vektor. He smirked and clicked past the option.
The website used tables, an old tech, but reliable, sprawling out as he navigated through the pages, burning pixels searing his retinas, his fingers clattering so quickly most of the images did not even have time to load. In a matter of nanoseconds he arrived at his destination.
“Doujins,” he smiled. “Watanabe wasn’t lying.”
Vektor paused to trigger an electric cigarette and consider his options. Purple vapor curled through the air, the smell of vaped tech puff reaching his nostrils and firing in the pleasure centers of his brain at the speed of neurons.
[etc]
i mean i guess “lmao cyberpunk anime pro” is a pretty obvious idea to anyone in our milieu but still. ghostbong’s is way way better
“what’s the job pay?” i asked coolly, flicking my digi-cigarette into the neon-bathed alley below. the anime district always got busy this time of night, and the low buzz of neotaku and solicitous hentai-bots wended its way smokily through the undercity gloom.
“two hundred lindens,” said lucky_starboy97. “assuming you get it done.”
“bullshit,” i said, flicking another digi-cigarette. lindens were worthless since the cockrain crash last year. “one-fifty bitcoin or i walk. nobody else is gonna be able to get into hardened nexus-govt systems, either.” i smirked, suppressing a heh. his mind was sifting through the options, but there was only one conclusion. he eyed my mono-dachi warily.
“allright, allright” he stammered, sculpted yaoitech cyberfingers making small conciliatory gestures. “you win. you’ll have it in your account as soon as i get my waifu back.”
it didn’t feel good squeezing the neotaku for cash like this, but i pushed the guilt out of my mind with thoughts of all the hotpockets that kind of money would buy. eating like a king for three weeks, in exchange for e-heisting an outlawed anime from fed cyber-lockup? i’d taken worse jobs, with worse rewards. my stomach growled impatiently.
“don’t worry,” i said, flicking my digi-cigarette. “you’ll see haruhi again soon. i promise.”
my neural cache pinged download complete just in time; security drones were running scans, picking up illegal spikes piggybacked on the mcdonaldscorp hardline. i double-checked the payload in my wetware overlay, keying into my encrypted node. can’t be too sure in this city, and a bad drop can lose you a lot more than a paycheck. “friendship_is_magic//seasons 1-26” AVINA confirmed, nothing more than a synthvoice purring in my brain. precious cargo.
i shouldered my mono-dachi and unjacked my linkware from the mcdonaldscorp terminal, standing up just as the drones synced my coordinates. crumpling the wrapper from my realflesh(tm) cyburger, i tossed it over my shoulder and keyed my vr shades. i had a delivery to make.
“It sure is fun to imagine a dystopian security state with flying police robots and hacker activists fighting gamely but doomedly against an overwhelming corporate overwatch that has completely saturated the remaining shreds of democratic governance”
- Teenagers in 1986
"
Mad industry » illustrative and factual.
I’ve started modeling for a drawing group that meets twice a week literally across the hall from my apartment, which is ACES. One of the classes is costumed, and they let me dress however I want—the only input I got this week was “science fiction”. Looking very Ashley Wood’s Tank Girl in these drawings by an artist who I’ll call by his nickname, Biz, since I’m not sure if that’s his pro name or not.
I wish this had been a longer pose, because all the costume details are awful for artists to try and deal with only 20 minutes at a time.
artisan-alien leather goods from XENOLUX
(me + creator vol hydrogen modeling; photography by Leslie Herring)
(i have a pair of xenolux gloves that i wear basically 24/7 when it’s not chumpass summertime. they are incredible)
Cyberpunk 1990 by Steve Pyke : Part II
-
PlayNag Tüchir.
this rain doesn’t belong here. still, it will not leave. the volume settings folder.
-
news from the arkh project as of 20/05/2013
-
I drew my friend as a bunny.
-
It’s been a while.
