If any of you have been paying attention to the
Reaver Publishing group on Facebook, you'll know that we're planning on doing a relaunch soon. You'll also know that we're all for trying to stir shit up in the good ol' American Empire through writing and some social action. Social action's all well and good, but I am a cyberpunk writer afterall and I write what I see and what I live. I write to give cyberwarriors and just plain old regular people who've lived a lot or a little of life inspiration. I write for the people.
So without further ado, here is the sample from the beginning of a new short story serial called entitled "Street Clan":
Street Clan: File 0.5
By Sean P. Nolan
What the hell am I doing?
What the hell is the whole frukin' world doing?
Here I am. Back in the god-damn frukin' old neighborhood, slummin' it with my old crew and the dope boys and all the while trying to start a frukin' revolution. My wife's left me. Kicked me out halfway across the world and here I am back where it all fruking started. Fruk this shit. Sure, I'm comfortable. My family's here. My clan's all here. They take care of me and me them, same as always. But what the hell is that all for? Didn't I leave for something better than this?
Hell.
What if that's why she left?
What if that's why she fruking took up with that prick Andresen damn near the moment I left Kleria. Maybe that's why she's moving in with that fat mother fruker. That fat mother fruker who played at being my gods-damned best friend in the whole fruking world when I didn't have my clan to lean on when shit got tough. Maybe Andresen, being that hypocritical cuntbag he has shown himself to be, played that shit up in hopes that he could move in as soon as I was fruking deported, thinking I would just write it off as my clan taking care of my lady.
He forgot one frukin' thing.
He's not my boy.
He's never run with my gods damned clan.
Mother fruker don't know shit.
My crew wants to fruk his ass up something shocking. It took all I had not to jack in and hack his frukin' InfoNet file and notify his fruking boss that he's boning another man's wife. I'm sure a Scripture teacher at the Cult of Athena Middle School shouldn't be doing things so scandalous. But fruk him.
I'm breeding revolution in the streets of Durik.
Been gone for years, hanging low, staying out of sight from the Central Intel Ministry and the fruking police state they've enforced since The Wars, and you know what? Here I am, running with my boys, tweaking and drinking with the dealers, just like nothing ever fruking happened. Here I am, back on my old streets, seeing the jack-boot of the C-Feds pressing down harder than ever on our necks. Here I am, with all my knowledge weaned from the fruking data-dreaming I did, surfing the InfoNet.
Here I am.
Breeding revolution.
It was about eight at night in the L.E. Sector when Manny rolled up in his sleek little Jimungan Hefflon Corp TX-2999 sports car. Two tons of sleek black micro-carbon-weave beauty encasing an eight conductor JP11 engine. Manny got it while I was gone during a street war with our rivals, The Grey Shunjini, from 55th Street. Their warehouse was ceded to our clan in the peace negotiations, and since Manny had been the one who'd hacked through the security to attack it in the first place, he got first pick of the spoils. Now our clan, The Blue Katanas, was at the top of the heap. I'd left right when shit had started to hit the fan, mostly because of my connections to political dissidents I'd reached through the Black Net in order to get us arms.
Unfortunately, our Shogun had deemed the politics that had rubbed off on me as too dangerous for a clan already being watched so heavily by the Confederate Government. Said that since Durik City State had been under military control since the end of The Wars to Separate, the C-Feds had been farther up our asses than a recharge jack in an android.
I had been a liability, but now I had no other fruking choice.
I was back.
I heard the hum of Manny's engine from my window at my mom's place. She'd just gotten off of a twelve hour shift at the Cyber-Disease Rehab House she worked at, and the crazed jackers had taken a lot out of her. I was glad she'd found the work, mostly due to my clan's help. She'd been unemployed first due to the Wars and then due to the recession that followed. All in all that was almost ten years of being poor and hungry for me and my kid brother. I'd always kept my street work kept separate as possible from my home life. Mom rarely asked where the credits for the food and rent had come from. No matter how tweaked I was, or how good I was with an electro-blade, Mom would have kicked my ass to Hades if she knew that cash was hacked from the C-Fed Bank.
Even after being gone for four years, after having been in love and married in a different country, after dealing with the isolation and nightmares from the guilt of exile, here I was again. Sitting in my room in the tenement block, Mom sleeping on her cramped bed a few feet from me, and the blood-red sunset coming in through the window with the noise of my boys coming up for our ride. It was coming home to another fruking life that I'd damn near thought was a giant dream when I was in Kleria. It was the soggy smell of the afternoon drizzle drying up on the plascrete pavement. It was the Pound Punk music from across the street wafting over like a tribal dirge from the mountainous rises. It was the shouts of Mike, our drunken neighbor upstairs, yelling about his days in the V'Halsen Army in The Wars and how the C-Feds were all a bunch of fruking “cow'rds”.
It was home.
Gods, I fruking hated it.
Pulling the jack out of my neural port, I rolled up the chord and slid my data-pad under the couch. I stood up and shook off the jack-happy endorphin rush that came up on me like the tide with the moons. I'd been chatting with some of the dissidents on a secure Black-Net room about some news from the burgeoning revolution. News I intended to share with my clan.
Making sure my electro-blade was secured to the mount on my forearm, I pulled my proxyleather jacket over my shoulders and secured the clamps on my boots as their nanomachines clung to the form of my feet. I checked my dreads in the window to make sure they were in their proper top knot and tied my blue holo-cloth bandanna over my forehead.
I paused to look at the man in the reflection.
The man I thought had been left behind.
Fruk it.
Revolution.
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