Authors: Bruce Bethke
the first place. If I was wrong, and we really
were
running some
variation on Game Scenario #1...
I decided to block this part of the plan to another folder and rethink
it some more later.
Once I’d reduced the algorithm to
Escape!
, everything else was
sudden hardwired clear. Geez, it was sharp and simple! I kicked it over a
few more times, and each time it looked more and more like a truly great
plan.
Escape!
Find a node. Jack into the local cyberpunk scene. Go
underground. Maybe I could even hang around Seattle a few extra
weeks, to get Mom real pissed at Dad. I started to feel truly derzky,
thinking about all the great tricks and treats I’d show my new Seattle
friends. If I played this right I could be NetMaster to a whole
city
of
cyberpunks! I was feeling so derzky I could hardly stand it!
Trouble was, there was just one little bug in the program. It was all
hanging on the hope that my keepers would give me a chance.
Soon as we landed, we taxied over to a great big green quonset
hangar a good half mile from the terminal building. With a little
skritch
of brakes we jerked to a stop alongside a creaky old wreck of a propengined
airbus, and then the turbines whined down to silence and my
keepers were up and moving. Grim, wordless, one grabbed hold of my
collar and upper arm and pinned me rigid, while the other one reached
across and popped my seatbelt latch. Then, like I weighed almost
nothing at all, the guy on my arm hoisted me rough to my feet, while
someone outside the plane unsealed the hatch and cracked the lock. The
hatch opened with a slow, lazy, gas-strut kind of hiss.
The gestapos pinned my arms to my sides, dragged me out of the
Cyberpunk 1.0
61
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
lear, and marched me straight up the boarding ramp at the nose of the
prop plane. There was a guy waiting for us at the top of the ramp; he
looked like a cross between a small tank and a real
ugly
pit bull, and
even ten feet away he smelled like a river of sweat. Short, muscle-tight,
his face a gritty hash of old acne scars—in other words, a classic
secondary symptoms
roidal
, an old steroid addict—
Correction: An old
ex
-addict. There’s no such as an old
active
roidal.
I looked at this guy at the top of the ramp, and my heart hit my shoes
and I just about gagged. I’d met his kind plenty of times before, both on
video and in the analog. Ever since third grade they’d been warning us
about them. The roidals who don’t die fighting to compensate for their
micropenises wind up as public school gym teachers, usual, checking
out the teenage boys in the locker room and looking for new deltoids to
pump up. That’s how roidals reproduce, I’m told.
The human vise holding my left arm turned to the Incredible Living
Steroid and said, “Thanks for waiting.”
“No problems,” Roidan the Flying Monster growled in answer. “I’d
rather hold the plane than get ‘em after you’ve been sitting on ‘em for a
week.”
“The parents contracted for an off-the-street grab,” the vise on my
right said. “This one’s still pretty disoriented.”
“I prefer ‘em that way.”
Wrong, bozo, I wasn’t disoriented, I was in Total Shock mode.
Parents? You mean like
both
parents?
“Here’s his suitcase,” a third gestapo—probably the pilot of the
lear—added, as he came up the ramp and threw Mom’s old green
tourister through the hatch. “And here’s his paperwork.” He handed over
a thick brown envelope. Roidan looked down as he took the envelope,
and for just a mo a little snicker ran across his face. “What’s so funny?”
the gestapo on my right asked.
“Look at his
shoes
,” Captain Steroid whispered. The gestapo looked
at my blitz yellow hightops and started to smirk, but then Roidan cleared
Cyberpunk 1.0
62
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
his throat and the gestapo snapped to rigid attention.
Satisfied that no one was having a good time, the roidal pulled some
papers out of the brown envelope and, for surprisers, started reading. (I
half expected him to just chew them up.) While he was looking over the
paperwork I took a good long minute to look
him
over. Then I scrapped
every last hope I had of breaking loose in Seattle.
The guys on the lear had looked sour and hard. The Incredible
Living Steroid was short—about two inches taller’n me, which is short
for an Older, but another typical secondary symptom—and total toughlooking.
Shaved head. No neck I could see. Shoulders just crawly with
muscles. Muscles that bulged and popped when he nodded his head;
muscles that stood out angular when he tried to form any other
expression on his angry red face. Each one of his biceps was about as
big around as my waist.
As the image bits clicked in and the total picture formed, I flagged
he was wearing a different uniform, too, from the guys on the lear:
Green suede ‘n’ goretex boots, and a camo jumpsuit with big sweat
stains around the armpits and the name
Payne
black-stenciled on a green
strip over his right breast pocket. Another minute of watching him read,
and I decided he had the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled up. All those
tattoos made it hard to tell.
Oh, great. They were throwing me on a plane with Attila the Scout
Troop Leader. Just fritzing great.
“Harris?” he said soft, not looking up. Tiny beads of sweat sparkled
on his tan, nubbly scalp. I didn’t answer. Maybe I couldn’t fight what
was happening right at the mo, but I was damned and determined not to
cooperate
with it.
“Harris?” he asked again.
“Whadayawant?” I said, in my best sullen punkspeak.
“You will address me as sir,” he said, looking up at last.
“Sir Payne?” I said, sarcastic to the max.
“Oh,” he said gentle, “so we’re a smartass, are we?”
“Well,
sir
-- “
Cyberpunk 1.0
63
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
“
DID I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO SPEAK?
” Spit flew when he
bellowed, and his face turned three shades of darker red. My sullen
routine was blown away, of course. By the time I got the cringe out of
my neck I didn’t know whether to answer, shake my head, keep silent, or
just crap in my pants.
Payne tucked my papers under his left arm, started cracking his
knuckles and making experimental fists, and looked my face over like he
was trying to pick the exact best spot to hit me. Then he gave me a look
that said I was the most disgusting thing he’d ever smelled in his entire
life, and growled, “Get inside. Sit down. Shut up.” The gestapo on my
left popped the cablecuffs off, and the one on the right turned me loose
with a shove. Payne helped me into the plane with his boot. While I was
picking myself up from off my suitcase, all three gestapos from the lear
skittered down the ramp, and Payne lifted the ramp and pulled it inside.
With one hand.
Inside the plane it was dark, but after a few seconds my eyes started
to adjust and I began picking out faces. Good, at least I wasn’t going
into this alone. There were thirty-five, maybe forty other people in the
cabin; as my eyes adjusted even better I started to flag they were all guys
about my age, and none of them were there by choice, either. ‘Cause,
well...
Row One: We had a stringy-haired chemhead sitting next to a fossil
gearhead greaser, across the aisle from two McPunks in standard-issue
electric blue mohawks. Row Two: Three vidiots gone Tommy (deaf,
dumb, and blind) with their earcorks in, videoshades on, and beltclip
vidplayers going, next to a comikaze with his nose buried in a
DynaBook. (The guy who figured out how to make half-animated comic
book ROMs play on standard school DynaBooks must have made a
fortune
.)
Row Three: One very squeamly looking Style Statement wimp with
perfect hair, surrounded by a bunch of horse-maned slammers in studs
and black leather. Row Four: Two Little Hitlers exchanging hot glares
with two Butthole Skinheads, because the Hitlers had only jackboots on
Cyberpunk 1.0
64
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
their feet and swastikas tattooed on their foreheads, while the Buttholes
had genuine Doc Marten “Clydesdale” boots and little blue
totenkopf
tattoos they’d carved in themselves. Row Five ...
Get the idea? Put that mix on the transys and you get Instant Gang
Fight. But here on the plane they were all sitting quiet, hands in their
laps, looking so depressed I wondered if the chemhead was treating
everyone to megahits of Blotter Suicide. Even the McPunks were quiet
(hard to believe, I know). One hugged his boombox like it was a baby
doll; the other did a little furtive tapping on the drumpads of his Casio
keyboard. But what made it weird was their gear was turned off. Not just
down;
off
. I started working up the nerve to open a commline and then
felt hot breath on the back of my neck.
“Move back!” Payne yelled, giving me a friendly kick to indicate
direction. “Find a seat!” he added, giving me a cheerful kick to indicate
what I should put in the seat when I found it. I picked up Mom’s green
tourister suitcase and started stumbling down the aisle. About the sixth
row, it hit me. Cold and sudden, I knew why the punks and flakes were
observing a truce. I knew soon’s I saw the haircuts.
Or rather, soon’s I saw all those white scalps showing through all
those flattops.
The back half of the plane was packed with smiling, nauseatingly
confident young guys dressed in camo. Camo shirts, camo pants, camo
jackets—I bet they had camo underwear. From the feet sticking out in
the aisle I could see they had camo boots. There I was, standing at the
front of their section in my blue spatterzag jumpsuit, blitz yellow hightop
tennies, and horsemane hair, feeling like a fatal error flag, and they
all just
looked
at me.
Then one of them started to giggle. Then another, and another, and
just about the time I was starting to really wonder what was so God
Damned Funny one of them finally spoke to me. He drawled, “Hey boy,
where’d y’all get them
shoes
?”
For a long minute I wished I could just melt and ooze out through
the floor. But the last couple empty seats were in their section, so I
Cyberpunk 1.0
65
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
finally gritted my teeth, picked up my suitcase, and started walking.
Soon as I started moving again my shoes must have turned invisible,
‘cause all the jarheads very deliberately Didn’t Look at me. They went
back to whatever it was they were doing, and I got down the aisle
without too much trouble. But the crap about my shoes had me burning,
so I just kept staring at their heads.
Flattops
. Geez, every single one of
them had the fritzin’ Lance Stallone cut! I was stuck on a plane with a