The Last Cyberpunk

Copyright ©2004 Jack Mangan

Part I.

The old man swaggered out into the center of the pit, his thin frame dripping with sweat and attitude, colliding through the dense swarm of writhing bodies. He moved erratically through the crowd, like an overactive chess knight clad in ancient black denim. The primitive abandon with which he danced was hypnotic, compelling. I watched with morbid fascination as a massive white skinner cut diagonally across the floor and leveled the old punk. The vicious white bishop's face contorted into a channel of jeers, but his words disappeared into the noise. The words, "Jesus Wept", crawled continuously across his forehead in a scrolling relief tattoo, the skin rippling into the shapes of the letters as they passed.

"An Icarus Impact show is not for the weak," I mumbled, recording my thoughts into my embedded jaw microphone. Though it was my own voice, it echoed pleasantly, disembodied, through my person. Even in the midst of the storm of sound from the band, the post-metal high-intensity music screaming out from my pores, I felt a gaping lack of stimulation. My entire being felt hollow and alone inside the club, pressed upon from all directions by the bodies of the general admission crowd. I spent most days inundated in my vices: immersion drugs, immersion art, and immersion extreme sports, but tonight I'd gone out entirely unplugged. Perhaps this wasn't the best night to try and kick my habits, especially with Susurrus's jump coming up after the show.

The old man had picked himself up from the floor again, and had begun to stagger out of the central crowd area, headed arbitrarily in my direction. I started a new audio file in my jaw recorder.

"My personal solidarity is bleeding," I spoke, my lips barely moving. "Hemorrhaging. I feel numb from over-stimulation. I can't stand to feel any more sensations rubbing my raw mind, yet I also couldn't handle any removal of sensory-inputs. I've spent so much time drenched in the concentrated, artificial emotions from the drug triggers and the immersion television, I don't think I'd even know how to feel anything on my own anymore."

The aged punk walked more upright with each step, like an evolutionary chart emerging from the primordial chaos of the mosh pit. Interesting that his ascension was leading him straight to the bar against the far wall.

He brushed past me; our eyes locked for a second. His red-streaked sclera each framed mirrored irises. I saw myself contrasted against him for a subliminal instant in his reflective contact lenses.

Even as he walked slowly and deliberately, he still carried the aura of abandon he'd shown before while he'd thrashed about in the pit. "I envy this old man's capability for true release. I see myself, the cage of tension lining my features in his shimmering eyes. He'd escaped himself to achieve a state of sublime, if temporary, inhumanity; released being, discarded somewhere here in this loud, crowded club. The numbness I feel has also compromised my humanity, but made me something inferior; unhuman. That skinhead bishop who'd taken out the old man, and is now roaming the pit for new victims; he's also dropped his humanity somewhere. He's less than human, like me—but not unhuman; his entire being stretches no further than his uncivilized aggressions. No, the Jesus Wept' skinner is merely subhuman."

I watched the punk dinosaur walk past me to lean heavily on the bar's stained wooden surface. Without a word, the bartender handed him a gunmetal gray thermos.

The deafening music was a tangible presence in the club, projecting from, inhabiting, amplified by each connected person. The all-encompassing bass and the low-end guitar power chords reverberated across the collective rapture, sending vibrations coursing through my bones, shaking my chest cavity. Each bass drum hit was like a surrogate heartbeat, a pulse that kept the hive mind of the mosh pit alive. I turned my attention away from the man at the bar and chanted hoarsely along with the song's chorus, shouting anonymously into the concrete block of sound.

The geezer walked by me again, headed back in the other direction. He brushed closely behind a nearby neo-Goth, caressing his fingers through her long black hair as he passed. She instantly fell into a convulsion at my feet, clutching at her throat in a Third-I-induced death immersion. He moved on without seeing, disappearing into the crowd beyond. I left my perimeter position and merged into the fray, leaving the girl to thrash about on the floor in the grips of her tactile hallucination.

The tide of noise rolled incessantly, mercilessly.

Richard Fuckov, the guitarist/lead singer for Icarus Impact, stood squarely before the mic on the low centralized stage, baring his gritted teeth between each vocal outburst, fending off the stage-rushers from the floor. "Richard will sometimes let one of us take the guitar away from him to play onstage in his stead, depending on his mood. But those who've approached him when he didn't feel like sharing have had their asses kicked offstage at the end of his bootheel. It's worse though, for those he allows to step in who can't really play. I've seen lots of brash, would-be guitarists suffer severe beatings at the hands of the crowd until the instrument was taken forcibly away from them."

My small frame was bounced viciously between three massive skinners who'd claimed a few yards of territory within the pit; I recognized one of them as the "Jesus Wept" bishop. My hands flailed and clutched, but could achieve no purchase on any of their shirtless, sweat-slick torsos. Finally, I managed to roll myself out of the skinners' hostile little clearing and into the thicket of the mob again.

But as soon as I'd inserted myself into an apparent space of refuge, squeezed between two large biker women, I took the treads of a pair of combat boots hard across the forehead. A girl who'd been coasting across the top of the crowd - with what seemed like thousands of hands groping desperately to uphold her frame and/or cop cheap feels - inadvertently kicked me in the temple as she tried to swim across the surface of the sea of wet, intoxicated punks. The elevated girl's randomly directed course led her directly above me, but I could not support her on my own and she fell hard to the floor, taking me down with her like a black-clad bowling pin. I reflexively put up my hands to ward off more blows to the face, trying not to lose focus on the music that still coursed through my skeleton. A thin layer of beer coated the club's tiled floor.

After a few moments, I felt a strong hand tug the back of my sweat-soaked t-shirt, pulling me back to the perimeter of the pit. My mind woke from its temporary daze of over-stimulation, only to see Aph tugging hard at my shirt with her strong slender arms. The crowd-surfer girl staggered nearby and Aphrodite checked her hard back into the fray, screaming unheard curses after her into the dense sound. Then she turned back and hugged me; I could feel the hum of the music reverberating through her petite frame. I kissed the stubble on the shaven side of her head; she turned her lips up to meet mine. The mosh-frenzied mob continued to undulate all around, but the participants took care not to knock into us, not to disturb the sanctity of our kiss.

"You plugged in, Grey?" she shouted in my ear. I nodded and showed her the small purple square that had been adhered to the back of my neck, linking my internal wetware to the club's sound system.

"Richard's solo on the last song set my teeth rattling!"

"No, I mean have you dropped any Third-I yet?"

I shook my head no, to which she frowned.

"I want to leave early tonight, Aph. Get home through the snow in time to catch Susurrus's jump at 12:45." I shouted loudly enough that it scratched my throat, but was still uncertain how many words got through to her. She looked at me with a pout, then produced an eye-dropper full of clear liquid. Her sulky look morphed into a devilish grin.

"Music by itself is far too boring. You need the triggers too."

I rarely needed to be coerced into a Third-I hit, even on a night when I'm trying to kick it. "Oh, what the hell; I'll still have plenty of time to get home for the live dive immersion." I grinned back at her, taking the little tube by its rubber handle and holding it high over my upturned face. A big dreadlocked guy bumped into me, causing the first drop to splash uselessly on my cheek. I could feel Aph moan sadly; she wiped the narcotic off of my cheek with her thumb, then rubbed it into her own eyes.

I held the tube up again and quickly watched the small bulbs of clear chemical fluid drip straight at my exposed iris. I blinked like mad against the sting of its impact, hunched over, then stood upright to find Aph beaming at me.

"Turn off, tune out, drop in," I could feel the tip of her tongue flirting with my earlobe as she shouted over the music. Her hot breath sent sensations down my spine. "Should start working in a couple of minutes." I checked my watch. 11:00. Plenty of time.

"You want a drink?" I always craved alcohol to temper the imminent onrush of a Third-I high. She nodded and I fought through the press of bodies to get to the bar. Once there, the topless, hairless, flat-chested bartender ignored me for what felt like ages. Finally, she looked at me through mirrored sunglasses with jagged holes drilled in the lenses' centers, her pink irises impatiently asking the bartender's undying question.

"Two Earl Grey Harp Lagers," I shouted.

"You 21?"

My only response—the automatic one whenever carded - was to look at her incredulously. Apparently it was enough. She handed me two plastic cups of golden, foamy beers with tea bags in them and I paid. I gulped down most of mine right there to ease the difficulty of maneuvering full cups through this crowd.

The roaring madness from the band screeched to an abrupt halt, answered by the intoxicated roar of the audience. My body felt strangely still in the absence of the loud music it had been re-transmitting.

"Give me back my fucking guitar now," Richard Fuckov growled into the microphone, took the neck of his Japanese Fender Stratocaster back from the long-haired kid who'd finished out the last song, and then shoved the kid off the stage. "All right! DJ Escher has designed some fucked up new Third-I immersion triggers for our live music, eh? Is everybody out there feeling the death?" This was greeted with raucous shouts. A tall Asian man in a suit—DJ Escher - walked on stage and bowed, then quickly departed again. Richard's gaze panned over the audience from his low platform like that of a general surveying his troops. "And you all know that we're not using any speakers tonight, right? All of our music is being amplified through cyberlinks to your bodies. We don't need any fucking amps when we have you, eh? You all should be feeling it in your fucking bones!" More cheers. His mention of this made me acutely aware of the vibration of his voice all through my body. "And finally, I especially want to thank you all for busting out the snowskimmers to get here tonight. What is it, 17, 18 feet deep outside now?"

I mumbled softly to myself, recording my observations. "A cacophony of voices answers his every pause, but he still manages to quiet everyone each time with a mere gesture. As much as the postmodern cyberpunk show is about anarchy and audience participation, there still always has to be a figurehead, a tribal leader to centralize and define our common focus. Richard F. is the ultimate example of a cyberpunk totem."

"You guys live in a fucked-up part of the country. Shit, if I lived someplace that got twenty feet of snow, I'd fucking move. But anyway... we still made it here for the show! No fucking blizzard is gonna keep me from a gig. We're not about to let any of our people down!" Again, low cheers. Again, he held up a tattoo-sleeved arm for quiet.

"I'm also glad that you're here, instead of staying home to sell your brains to Susurrus and his fucking corpo sponsors. That guy claims to be Alt, but he's just another motherfucking tool of the capitalist machine, man." I didn't join in the cheers this time. "All that shit he spouts about ascension through descent', and Stratodiving to another dimension'; fucking do it already, man. Get the fuck out of mine." Lots of derisive laughter; somebody clapped me on the back.

"So let the glamorous Susurrus dive into the sea from space. Sure it's an impressive feat, but he's wrong when he calls Stratodiving the ultimate extreme sport." The bass player suddenly kicked into a low, grinding groove, the strings of his instrument tuned so low that they flapped loosely on the neck. "A goddamn Icarus Impact show is the ultimate fucking extreme sport!" With this, Richard Fuckov ground out a staccato guitar riff at the low end of the fretboard, churning in a violently compelling rhythm against the bass. A second later, full-on snare and machine gun double-bass drums sent the pit into a primal uproar.

The Third-I started to kick in; my first induced hallucination came on right away. I felt sickening vertigo, as if I was falling from the sky. The intense, ecstatic pain of the climactic impact wracked my body, made my eyelids hang limply for a few moments. I sipped at Aph's Earl Grey beer and tried to focus on the crowd, to regain my balance on the earth, which had suddenly slimmed from a huge fucking globe to a narrow tightrope beneath my feet.

From my perspective on the border of the mosh pit, I could see heads jumping high in unison as the people in the crowd went nuts. Bodies of crowd-surfers were flung high into the air, quickly flailing into dangerous drops. It was a matter of seconds before two kids emerged clutching their bloody faces. Aph walked out just behind them and took her tea-beer from my hand.

"See, Richard doesn't want you to leave early to watch the jump either," she said.

"I can't miss Susurrus tonight, Aphie. I went with him on the first two dives."

"OK OK," she'd smiled demurely. "But why don't you stay and immerse into his jump here? He's making the live sensory feed available, isn't he? Jack in from here. Might be intense to mix that with the music and the Third-I. Did it kick in for you yet?"

"Yeah, just a minute ago. I felt like I fell to my death. It was incredible."

She nodded with a satisfied smile. "I felt that one about an hour ago. DJ Escher writes all of the Third-I deathtrips you get off of Icarus Impact music; he's the best there is. I felt like I was getting ripped apart by a machine gun about twenty minutes ago. It was intense."

"I've felt that one before," I replied. I considered asking her to leave and immerse with me, but quickly decided against it. Susurrus's jumps had to be done in solitude.

"You never had anything like Escher's Tommy Gun trip. It makes every other machine gun trip feel like the fucking tropical breeze immersion pills that old people get at CVS. Wait til you feel it."

"She pisses me off," I shook my head and muttered for only my embedded jaw-mic to hear. "Always so smug." I found it amusing though, that just as Aph was ripping society's elderly for using their watered-down legal immercinogenics, the wiry old geezer from before had jumped up onto the stage and begun to create a disturbance. His damp, rag-like, iron-gray locks whipped about his head as he moshed frantically into the band members, knocking them about. Richard F. remained at his position before the microphone, but countered the old man's attack with a solid elbow to the ribs. I thought the old guy's chest would cave in, but to everyone's surprise, he just kept on going.

Two hairless mammoths (bouncers) jumped up on the low stage to corral and remove the obsolete punk; not because he was ruining the music, I suspected, but because he'd become more interesting than the band themselves.

Just as the bouncers set their fat size 13 boots onto the platform, I was hit by a sudden onrush of Third-I. It scared the shit out of me; I checked my arms and legs desperately to see if they really were on fire. I felt crackling flames engulfing my body, scorching me through to my bones and internal organs. The illusory smell and taste of singeing flesh were horrifyingly real, even more horrible than the intense heat.

I somehow noticed through my pain that a few other people nearby had also been suddenly thrown into Third-I fits; DJ Escher must have sublimed a powerful trigger out through the club. Bodies writhed in their own personal reactions to Escher's designed tactile immersions; Aph was doubled over, apparently gasping for air. Almost everyone around me seemed to be experiencing some kind of Painful Death Immersion. I struggled to record my observations, but was unable.

My incendiary skin reached its pain crescendo, but then began to subside. The pain and fire slowly extinguished themselves. I took deep breaths and unclenched my fists as the Third-I turned my sensory inputs back over to me.

"I just burned to death. Escher is a pain sculptor; his asphyxiating death experiences are sometimes tinged with sexual stimulation, but otherwise there's rarely anything pleasurable to be felt in his meticulously crafted, high-intensity trips. You want to be given nice, bland feelings? Get fucking pills at the drugstore with the old people."

I wasn't referring to the feral old guy I was watching onstage, though; he was kicking and flailing hard against the mammoths as they dragged him off of the stage and carried him toward the club's doors. The younger cyberpunks cheered the geezer as he was carried past them; he responded by spitting at them.

"Whoa that was intense!" Aph bounced next to me. "I thought I was really drowning!" I nodded, not wanting her in my thoughts at the current moment, trying to block out the tidal wave of stimulation that surfed me against my will. I watched the bouncers kick open the club doors and drag the geriatric punk roughly outside. The outer snow tunnel that had been carved to reach the club's entrance looked dark and foreboding, even from the bowels of the dimly lit club. My sense of disappointment at the geezer's removal, coupled with the vertiginous come-down from the Escher Immersion, made for a seriously low crash.

"Feelings of helplessness and frustration are common side effects...."

I looked back at Aph. The sweet look on her face angered me enough that I scowled. The kid to my left with the mohawk, who was singing along with each song word for word, suddenly looked very punchable. Suddenly, unexplainably, I wanted a reason to hit him, though he was total stranger to me. I welcomed the coming abandon, yet feared it.

"Something feels wrong," I spoke into my jaw, for no one else to hear.

"What's the matter, baby?" Aph asked gently, stroking my hair through her fingers. "You have a bad death?"

I felt as if I stood on a high precipice, and I'd just let my self-control slip away, floating down below my grasp like a windswept feather. I had no idea what would be in control of my mind once I tumbled down after it....

I shoved Aph out of the way, using more force than I care to recall, and made sure my elbow made contact with the mohawk kid's head on my way back into the heart of the mosh pit. Led by the remnants of my own Immersion into my fury, rage, boredom, frustration, anger, disappointment, disillusionment, emptiness; I flung my skinny frame all about in the pit, elbows and fists extended in maximum-damage positions. Like a dull-bladed shuriken, I whirled through the masses, hitting everyone, seeing no one.

My thinking mind retreated more and more as I lost myself in the music, the noise, the bodies, the sweat, the adrenaline, the Third-I; I kept charging, cutting a swath through the faceless people, encircling the stage, pissing people off. I hardly noticed the strong hands clutching me and redirecting my incision through the densely packed floor. I vaguely remember being picked up at one point and tossed over a few heads, only to crash hard at the foot of the stage.

My frenzy only heightened as I picked myself up off of the slick tiled floor. I leapt up onto the stage in an animal state and launched myself at the bass player, apparently catching him off-guard. The two of us tumbled hard into the drum riser, which held stolidly against our impact. His head caromed off of the crash cymbal and we fell to the floor, scattering a collection of empty bottles like bowling pins.

Apparently my fury was infectious; the bassist jumped up with his teeth bared in rage to equal mine. He swung hard; I'm still surprised that the glass bottle didn't break against the side of my head. I know I struck back at him at least once; but there's a scratch on my mind's internal CD that skips the rest of that melee in my memory.

I can only surmise that the incident was bad enough the get the mammoth bouncers back on stage. I came to consciousness again while I was being dragged to the door, with the black bouncer prying the bass guitar out of my deathgripped fingers. The white mammoth was punching me hard in the back of the head, the ring on his middle finger felt like it was piercing holes in my skull with each impact. He ripped the purple relay box, along with about a hundred hairs, painfully from the back of my neck. The immediate lack of music vibration in my body felt simultaneously tranquil and empty.

The next thing I knew, I found myself lifted off the ground, looking horizontally out of the club's front doors, into the shadowy cavern of the snow tunnel outside. The bouncers threw me hard against the wall of the carved tunnel; its icy surface was as unyielding as concrete.

"Stay the fuck out," the black one growled before pulling the double doors shut and locking me in the tunnel of dark whiteness. Richard Fuckov's screaming voice and lumbering guitar were both instantly reduced to a distant, muffled hum.

Goddamn it was cold outside. The chill felt especially intrusive after the high-Fahrenheit press of bodies inside. The eerie quiet outside also felt odd, contrasted against the thundercloud of sound from which I'd just been forcibly removed. My skin still tingled from the vibrations that had been torn away a minute ago. A wave of Third-I induced numbness suddenly washed over my mind and body, but the immersion quickly died in the absence of any of Escher's external sensory triggers.

Embarrassment flooded my mind instead.

"Jesus wept," I said, without recording it.

I sat on my ass for a few moments to regain my senses. My watch showed that it was 11:40. They'd thrown me out just in time. "If I hurry, I'll make it home and get fully immersed right before Susurrus's Stratodive. I pray that the ice structure won't choose this moment to collapse and kill me."

I got up and began to walk slowly up the L-shaped excavation of ice and snow leading out to the parking lot. "It's sort of tragic that this marvel of icy architecture in which I stand, improvisationally crafted first by the great 18-foot blizzard, then by whatever creative snow-miners the club owners had hired, will be nothing more than an anecdotal memory and perhaps the subject of a few photos once the late Spring sun has finished with it."

Just as I turned bend in the corridor's L, still lost in my newly reacquired mind, I stumbled hard over something like a discarded sack and fell to the ground. I spun around, my hands stinging from the impact with the frozen pavement, and looked into the angry face of the wild old man from inside.

"Watch where you're going. Punk," he snarled.

I mumbled an apology and got up to head out of the tunnel to the parking lot, which was now in my sights.

"Hey," I heard from behind me. I looked back to see him take a quick pull from a flask and then tuck it back into his pocket. He was still sitting against the corner wall, in the spot where I'd stumbled over him. "What are you out for?"

"I attacked the bass player; not sure why," I shrugged, suddenly embarrassed.

"Really? He was my target too. That asshole," the geezer grinned a blade-like smile at me, then took the steel flask out again. I realized that it was actually the thermos that the bartender had handed him inside. "You want some coffee? It's spiked with some fun shit."

I laughed and held up a hand, now feeling somewhat more confident that he wasn't about to leap up and tear out my carotid with his teeth. "No thanks man. I saw how crazy you got inside the club."

"What that? Shit, I wasn't even on anything in there. Just hyped on the music. Icarus Impact sounds just like the metal bands I listened to when I was growing up; goddamned bands today haven't progressed the art one bit. I love it." He shook his head and stood up, leaning heavily on the slippery ice wall. "They say the whole hard guitar rock scene has spray-painted itself into a corner. Well you know what? I'm an old guy. I'm happy to settle in a corner now. You sure you don't want a drink?"

A dread certainty began to germinate in my mind; I feared that the geezer was building up to asking me for a ride somewhere. "No, no. Hey listen, I've really got to get going. And besides, I don't want to mix chemicals in my system. Took some Third-I inside."

"Third-I? Oh man, the kids today are in such a bad way." I instantly regretted volunteering that last bit of information. "You actually like DJ Escher's deathtrips? Experiencing bootlegged sensory recordings of other people's deaths?"

Just walk away. Go to the skimmer.

"Yeah," I said defensively, rather than just leaving. "It's intense. Cyberpunks like to keep it real; the watered down bullshit immersion pills they sell at CVS are too fake, too weak."

"Back in my day, we took drugs to escape reality and to feel good, not to dive right into it, not to feel pain," he continued to shake his head, a look of wonder on his face. "There's enough goddamn pain in life as it is."

"Well that's one truth you've hit perfectly, old man," I said.

"You're damn right. So have some coffee. It's spiked with a hit of something nice from back in my day. Make you feel happy, alive, invulnerable, beyond human. Doesn't that sound good?" He tossed me the flask, which I caught and held in my fingerless-gloved hands. Its smooth surface felt so comforting on my fingertips. I realized just how unhappy, undead, and unprotected I felt, realized for the first time that these three feelings were omnipresent in my life, ruling my everyday like an oppressive triumvirate.

Still, I hesitated.

"Go on. Tell you what, kid. Have a drink and I'll give you a free reading."

"What are you, psychic?"

"Nope. Just perceptive."

I unscrewed the cap and took three gulps.

The sweet drink scorched my throat on the way down, tasted vaguely of caramel, of licorice, of death. The rest of the old man's additives had sufficiently beaten the coffee flavor into submission. I handed it back to him, blinking and shaking my head to clear it of the toxic rush. The geezer smiled with great satisfaction and pocketed his flask again.

"Go on, old man. Tell me my future now."

"I can't tell your fucking future, kid, and I never promised to. The tinnitus killed your eardrums already? I'll read your present, which you desperately need to hear, apparently."

"Hey-"

"You record a stream-of-consciousness diary, right?"

"You're the gypsy here, old man. You tell me."

"You do, of course. You mutter your thoughts into your jacked-in tape recorder to validate your nonexistent existence. You have to feel like the uninteresting, tedious moments of your life are being saved for posterity, congratulating yourself for your pedestrian philosophical insights and commentaries. But all the while you're quietly fearful that no one will ever care to hear it."

An air of thick silence hung in the pause, dissipated when he continued.

"You're an angry kid with a dust-covered guitar leaning against the wall in the corner of your room—which is in your mom's place in the trailer park skyscrapers... You spend every waking moment soaking in immersion movies and sports—and porn - to the point that the feelings of famous strangers are now more familiar to you than your own. And shit, you're so over-saturated on advertisement that your most intimate relationships are with the latest commercial jingles and catch-phrases." A sudden spasmodic coughing attack folded his skinny form, but he recovered with stunning quickness and resumed, nonplussed. "You have a girlfriend who's moderately cute and crazy about you, but you resent her for the way that you imagine her slight imperfections reflect on your image, and you're not very nice to her. You also feel anger toward your mom, though you can't quite explain it. You think you're smarter than 99% of the people around you, and you're sure that your thoughts are deeper than those of everyone around you. You conformed to this group of non-conformist cyberpunks because of your burning rage at the world, but you don't even really know what you're rebelling against. Want to hear more?"

I gave the default defensive response when I could come up with nothing else: "Fuck you." His words had struck me with surgical precision, knocking me off-balance. Or was it the drug in the coffee he'd just given me?

"Enjoy your flight," the geezer said through that scalpel grin, and disappeared around the bend in the tunnel. I peeked around the corner to call him an asshole, but was surprised to see an empty corridor of ice. The old man must have known of a secret door somewhere in the passageway. I turned around dizzily to head out for home.

The horizontal surface of the world felt as if it had lurched itself up to become vertical. My footing on the ground had become as uncertain as the contents of the old man's coffee. The opening of the tunnel lay dead ahead, but it seemed as if I were falling headlong toward a yawning, bottomless chasm. Gravity was just being decent enough to allow me to walk down to it at my own pace, rather than plummet onward. The vertigo lessened when I finally did emerge from the snow cave's entrance, but the uncertainty of mind still remained.

Part II.

The glittering blacktop parking lot looked like the ultimate snow fort, with its twenty-plus-foot high walls all around the perimeter. It had apparently been plowed with the same fanaticism that had carved the tunnel leading into the club. My Mercedai snowskimmer started on the first turn of the key, and in no time, its skis were treading over the surface of the mess left behind by the great blizzard.

"The siege of the winter army, ended just two midnights ago, easily achieved conquest of its territory," I recorded, looking out of the windshields at the snow-bogged town. I wanted to speak more, but fell into self-conscious silence, the ancient punk's words burning in my gut.

I tuned myself into Susurrus's pre-jump broadcast, excluding only the visual channels. I needed my eyes to drive home, but plugged the rest of my senses in to Susurrus's links, so that I could feel, smell, hear, and taste everything just like he experienced it in the satellite. A single login status window framed my real-world vision, scrolling information and data on my connection.

"-less than an hour away from the jump now," his familiar voice vibrated through my jaw. The immersion link to his nervous system relay hummed in my bones, as clear as the black winter sky above. "Time for me to get into my atmospheric re-entry suit." I felt and smelled the cool sterility of the satellite bay where Susurrus stood at that exact moment. My skin echoed the rubbery fibers of his skin-tight inner layer of clothing.

"This suit is guaranteed to protect you against the intense pressure and air friction upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere," said an outside voice. It sounded like that female reporter who'd covered Susurrus's last jump.

"That's right. It's covered with an outer coating of ablative shielding over a skin-tight layer of Silica tiles," he said. I, along with the millions of others who were logged into Susurrus's senses to undergo his Stratodive with him, shared the unique experience of his struggle into the big, cumbersome dive suit. "Look at how thick this material is! Can my immersors out there feel that between my fingers? These suits were designed by the military for their subspace paratrooper program. Since they scrapped that whole project, I was able to get a bunch of them pretty cheap. Good thing too, because these suits can't be reused; they take quite a beating during a jump."

I coasted home across the uneven piles of white, feeling pleasantly high. I wasn't sure if it was the geezer's drink or the escape into Susurrus that had lessened the flame under my usual boil of anxiety. My subconscious eye steered the vehicle through the poorly-plowed streets, while as much focus as I could spare went into being the man preparing to jump into the ocean from a satellite above the Earth.

My handle—"Grey Sun"—appeared in the list of names that ticked across my vision frame's peripheral scroller. It scrolled from left to right somewhere at the bottom of my sight, listing the names of every person who'd logged in to ride the Stratodive from the safety of the Earth's crust. There were lots of new people onboard for this jump, but I recognized a few of the familiar handles. An unusually large number of people seemed to have signed up and logged in with variations of "Susurrus_Is_A_Sellout" as their login IDs.

From literally hundreds of miles away, the woman asked, "Mr. Susurrus, how do you feel about the negative reactions you've recently begun to get from the cyberpunk community?"

"Nothing phases me, nothing distracts me," I felt him reply quickly and calmly. "As for Richard Fuckov and my other detractors; their work will fade while my dives will remain timeless icons of the fearless pioneer spirit. A Rolling Stone journalist took the term cyberpunk' from an obsolete literary movement and applied it to them, but they're really just old-fashioned punk contemporaries. Mindlessly rebellious, conforming to each other's nonconformity. Anyone out there doesn't like that I take money from big corporations to allow them to sponsor my jumps? Good. Don't log in when I dive then."

I felt torn by his harsh words. I agreed wholeheartedly with him, but felt like I was selling out with him by agreeing. I felt like I was letting people like Aph and Richard Fuckov down. Oh well.

"I can't worry about my critics," Susurrus went on, his voice buzzing in my jaw. "I only care about my believers down there. It is with their logins, and their spiritual and financial support that I will finally achieve the Transcendent Dive."

"Explain the Transcendent Dive' concept for our viewers, Mr. Susurrus."

"Sure. One of these times, I will plunge into the ocean and my body will never be found. The news media around the world will declare me dead, but the truth will be that I have ascended this dimension through my ultimate extreme jump and moved on to a higher plane of existence. Not dead, but nonhuman. Elevated."

I always felt embarrassed, yet strangely inspired by his ascension through descent' speech.

After skirting the vehicle around a particularly large snowbank, I could see the six trailer towers looming ahead beyond the park's outer gates. Home. The skyscraper of stacked trailer homes hung luminously in the Mercedai's front windshield. Hundreds of rectangular boxes of aluminum and plywood all piled precariously on top of each other, two-by-two, stretching up into the sky.

"That place where you and your mom live looks like a giant game of Jenga,'" Aph had once said of the trailer skyscrapers. You got blocks stacked up crazily, sticking out in every direction...' They've heaped the trailers in my park on top of each other in a criss-cross pattern, two-to-a-floor, so they can cram as many of us in there as possible. There are seven towers in the park, a short eighth getting started. My rectangular cube is the thirteenth up in my pile; the level right above me actually has three homes crammed up against each other. Yes, that's three different families stomping on my ceiling every fucking day."

I parked the skimmer atop the depths of snow at the base of my tower. The excitement was becoming electric, both in Susurrus and myself, as the scheduled time for his dive drew nearer. I was very glad to be out of the club, to experience this momentous event in solitude. I couldn't wait to get into my room and shut my real-world eyes completely down to allow Susurrus's vision to take over.

I stumbled and fell prone as I got out of the car, feeling suddenly as if I was about to retch into the deep pocket of snow my knees had made. When I closed my eyes, a storm-tossed sea of colorful, fractal images raged before me, below me. I felt myself falling fast toward it-

I opened my eyes again to the colorless wintry world. Cursing the old man and cursing myself for drinking his coffee, I trudged off to the base of my trailer stack.

The cold rungs of the ladder bit into my exposed fingers as I climbed the tower. The only other way up was the painter's lift that hung inertly by the third trailer's front door, but I never trusted that thing, not even in warm weather conditions. I wasn't about to risk it with all that ice.

Two hundred and forty miles above the Earth, Susurrus was currently making the last minute high-altitude weather checks for the places along his route of descent. I tried to pay as much attention to his activities as I could, while climbing carefully and deliberately through my drugged haze up past the twelfth floor.

Trailer level thirteen: home bitter home. I was about to swing across the gap between the ladder and onto the ledge outside of my front door when I heard a familiar shriek from inside. It followed by a crash of breaking glass. "Dammit, my sister is home, and going at it with Mom, as usual.

"Dammitdammitdammitdammitdammit."

As eager as I was to shed my narcotically numbed mind and skin in favor of Susurrus's, I knew I'd never find the necessary peace inside. Their brawls usually went well into the night, and my room-compartment was rarely a safe haven once they got going. Muttering curses at them both under my breath, I began to climb the ladder again. "No time to waste." Another aftershock of Third-I caused me to pause and grip the steel rungs hard in the space between trailers fourteen and fifteen.

I had no idea what I planned to do; Susurrus was in my head, making his final launch preparations. According to my watch, there were only about 8 minutes left before he began his descent.

The woman's voice was speaking again, for the benefit of some invisible television audience. "The satellite is currently drawing toward the optimum jump coordinates, halfway around the world from the Pacific Ocean target impact location. Susurrus is fully sealed in his dive-suit, and has just been cleared for jump. No weather conditions or air traffic will interfere. We'll link now to his live feed again; Susurrus, can you please describe what you're doing now for the audiences around the world?"

I felt his voice hum in the bones of my skull again. "Well, as you just said, I've been cleared to go, so I'm currently being strapped into the Stratodive-frame. The frame is fitted with front thrusters to provide retrofire to slow my ascent through those critical first levels of atmosphere. There are also aft thrusters to help keep my attitude straight. Though I told the frame's designers they'd never be able to control my attitude." Laughter from the crew of the satellite, more enthusiastic than the joke merited, in my opinion. "It also has a thin, membranous Silica shield on the bottom to provide an extra layer of protection against the intense friction. I'll detach from the frame once my sensors indicate that I'm low enough and slow enough to drop into freefall. I probably won't let it go until I'm within 60 miles of the surface."

"And it will also act as a personal aircraft to direct you to the ground in safety, should there be a problem."

"Exactly."

"What about the debris that will break off from the frame and from your dive-suit?"

"Well, hopefully nothing more than the ablative shielding breaks off from the suit; if that happens, then I'll be the biggest pieces of debris," Laughs. "But we will be sending out boats and sea divers to salvage as much of the frame-debris as possible. The items recovered will be available for auction at the Susurrus website."

It felt as if a bottle of black ink had been spilled in my brain, and the stain was spreading slowly throughout my entire body. I was struggling to remain attentive to what was going on in the satellite, but also struggling to keep my fingers and the soles of my shoes on the ladder. Buffeted by the cold winds whipping around the trailer tower, I longed for the warmth and security of my little room. Never before had I felt so lonely... Aph's face crossed my mind, but I couldn't find any solace in her anymore.

There was a sudden violent crash from below, followed by an escalation of my family's screams. I looked down to see our antique television box plunging toward the snowdrift below from the trailer's shattered front window. It broke the top layer of snow with a dull thunk, then disappeared to become a mostly-buried dot of black plastic. The snow had been deep enough to cushion the TV's fall completely. If you could rescue it before the snow melted and fried its circuit boards and tubes, you'd still have a working television set.

I continued to ascend the ladder, climbing away from the screams of my family.

"So I can't freely immerse in my own home. Where then can I go? Where can I seek the quiet necessary to fully appreciate the sensation of Susurrus's hour-long dive, if not my own room?" The act of speaking into my diary had a slightly calming effect on me. "Should I find an unoccupied trailer and break in? Use their HD plasma-screen? Nah, that doesn't sit right with me. And what if they came home and I had to logout mid-jump?"

I continued to climb.

The trailer skyscraper tilted sickeningly in the wind; I closed my eyes against the fear and the spread of the ink through my consciousness. "What the hell was in that coffee?" My knees felt as if they were going to buckle and remove me from the stapled lengths of ladder. I wondered if my toes had ever truly existed; I certainly couldn't feel them now.

The jump-time was drawing near. I clawed my way up the rest of the tower in a daze, finally reaching the roof of the topmost trailer, still uncertain as to my purpose. The snow-stilled town rested quietly in all directions. I sat down and struggled against the outer chill and my growing inner void to focus on all of the things Susurrus was experiencing. The strong winds kept scattering my hair into my face. I closed my true eyes and switched to Susurrus's vision channel. He was already fully locked into the Stratodive-frame and parked at the edge of the satellite's open bay, poised for the imminent jump. Together, we looked out at the sublime blue Earth below.

It curved like a majestic pool, a background of blue adorned with swirls of white cloud and random shapes of land formations. The familiar continents looked unfamiliar, as they always did when seen from space.

A voice from another dimension announced less than one minute to the jump. "There's no time left, I'll have to experience his jump up here on the roof." Some exterior person began a countdown. Susurrus and I, joined by a million other immersed citizens of Earth, withheld our exhalations. This was always my favorite moment of his Stratodives: the final seconds of anticipation before he stepped out of the gate.

Aph, the club, Icarus Impact, the old punk, his spiked drink, my bad trip, the trailer towers, my family; all was forgotten as Susurrus said the words, "His wings turn to ashes, to ashes his grave," and stepped untethered out into space. The thrusters on his dive-frame fired a few short bursts to nudge him in the proper direction.

Downward.

Thousands of us around the world collectively blacked out with him during the initial seconds, but then faded back in, as if after a strong intake of NO 2 . The onrush of vertigo-squared was too much to take for a lot of viewers at home; the numbers of people logged in to the peripheral scroller plummeted almost as rapidly as Susurrus's body. It's hard to believe that his relatively unprotected body could withstand all of the pressures exerted upon it; the heat, the vertigo of ultimate freefall 100 miles above the Earth, the 1700mph wind.

200 miles up.

180.

160.

The altitude miles rushed past at numbing velocity. Around the world and inside Susurrus's dive suit, not a single person dared to breathe during those desperate seconds. A few elated gasps could be heard. I closed my true eyes and watched the approaching earth, patterns of fractal cloud and land formations spinning below.

100 miles and falling.

Atmosphere's edge.

The signal joining us switched to a noticeably less clear, insulated channel during the ionization blackout phase of the atmospheric re-entry. A layer of white noise coated all of my senses.

The very air, thin as it was, felt like a heated sieve scraping our metal and ceramic flesh away as we dove relentlessly through it. The millions of us descended eastward, downward at ludicrous multiples of mach speed. I was vaguely aware of the dive-frame's rockets firing to keep his precision alignment set perfectly. Someone was shouting out in joyous abandon; I don't know if it was him or us both. I struggled to speak my thoughts aloud, but soon realized that I wouldn't be able to record while immersed.

Finally, after agonizingly long minutes, my connection to Susurrus switched back to a clearer channel again and the static disappeared from my senses. Gravity had become God, the only active force in the universe. Though I'd ridden his previous two dives from the satellite, the overwhelming sensation of freefall affected me with more intensity than I could bear. Almost. After another wordless minute, he detached from the dive-frame with a triumphant whoop and shouted out. "We're in the steady dive now, folks! Next stop, two hundred feet below the Pacific!"

I began to click back and forth between Susurrus's broadcast perceptions and my own.

A strangely different feeling of unsteadiness returned me to the real world again; my true eyes opened and saw trailer tower reality for a fleeting second before quickly returning to Susurrus's cradle of sensory input. I realized, as I looked again at the Earth below from the perspective of his eyes, that my body at home had subconsciously stood and walked to the edge of the trailer tower.

Closed eyes back to Susurrus. Wildly spinning images of the lights of heaven and earth, Heaven and Hell, dancing about in gyroscopic chaotic order.

I opened my own true eyes again and looked over the trailer roof's edge, still feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling the buffeting winds of upper atmosphere freefall through the other immersion channel links to Susurrus. Far, far below, I could barely make out the dimple created in the 20-foot snowdrift by my family's television set. Was the snow deep enough for me to survive this fall from the roof? No, it couldn't be....

The Third-I gripped me yet again, seeking in vain for an external trigger. It would find none and give up momentarily, but for the moment, I still felt the dizzying awareness that I might lose control and pitch forward off of the edge. Susurrus's extended fall, in which I was still immersed, echoed this sensation.

Eyes closed—the void darkness of the rising Earth.

Finally, I was released from the failed drug trip, standing at the edge of the topmost trailer's roof with the front toes of my boots dangling over nothing. A jarring sense of change in the texture of the falling sensation from inside.

"Five thousand feet! SmartChutes deployed and steering, only minutes away from impact with the sea now!" screamed a static-laden voice from inside my jaw. A shooting star streaked across the sky.

My feet still hanging over the high ledge, I couldn't force myself to step back. My mind clawed frantically for something to comfort it, but found no purchase. Aph, my mother, my home, my diary; everything slipped through my grasp like sand. Only Susurrus's electronically conveyed feelings were of any substance at all.

But not enough.

He shouted again in elation from inside my head. Once again, the feather flew down from the high precipice. Someone spoke the word, "Ascension" - it may even have been me.

"Abandon," I whispered in response.

My feet stepped forward off of the roof.

...Susurrus broke the surface of the Pacific Ocean at over a hundred miles an hour. His suit absorbed the impact, but would never be usable again. Once he'd sunk low enough, the parachute's smart-fibers automatically kicked in and floated him back to the surface. The second it emerged, its canvas formed into a solid raft, where he climbed weakly up and waited for the rescue helicopters to fly out and fetch him. He returned to American shores a hero, and signed ten more corporate endorsement deals for his next jump, which he assured the press would certainly be the Transcendent Dive.

Aphrodite went around to my mom's trailer three days later looking for me. When they told her they hadn't seen me, she contacted the police.

My body was never found.