FLICKER — NaNoWriMo 2016
NOVEMBER 6TH, 2016 — DAY 06
Wasn’t able to claw back any of the deficit and added to it to the tune of 300 words. But feel confident now I know how to get out of it. I’m finding myself limited by a lack of sheer technique in this form, something that has limited the dimension to the writing. That being said, it means I’ve a lot of technical skills to work out for myself, different modes of expression that still feel consistent with the tone I’m going for. Hopefully, this will both help with my speed but also enable me to claw out of the widening gulch.
CHAPTER 7
Eu and Moon were turning over the engines when the hexacopter smeared the sky. They rode far from the camp, past the solar array and brushed the border of the Mojave. The blue bubble of the sky under which the land was pinned was unblemished. But for the approaching black dot of the hexacopter.
Moon slowed the bike, lifted his goggles after he noticed the glitch. A black capsule carried under six rotors, each fanning out on tarantulatic arms, throbbed ever closer. Eu pulled up alongside him and slapped up her visor.
“Is that for us?” she asked.
“Didn’t the guy chasing us just have the four props? Looks like he might have got an upgrade.”
“That’s not the one from the Golden State,” Eu asserted, the size of the copter more apparent as it closed in.
“Is this the part when we run?” Moon ran his fingers over the ignition. Eu held a hand out to the sandy pancake of the land around her.
“Run to where?”
Moon slipped down his goggles, Eu her visor against the dust cloud kicked up by the descending copter. Neither could see the faces of those behind the saturated violet glass. They just knew there were four of them. Moon’s fingers got itchy, ran laps around the ignition ready to turn it over at a moment’s notice.
The first things Moon picked out of the cloud the copter sunk into were the shapes cut from quanta flowing along taps. Luminescent skeletons. The cloud thinned and the thunderous chop of the rotors finally died to let Eu think again. Keiko and Ochoa, flanked by their assistants, stepped up to Eu and Moon still straddling motor.
“What do you call this?” Moon chirped. Ochoa slapped at his own jacket, knocking off puffs of sand.
“That’s quite the machine you’ve got, young man,” Keiko tried, somehow making her outfit’s dusty addition work. “It’s what we actually came to talk about.”
“You can talk all you want, lady, but that doesn’t mean I gotta listen.”
“Why don’t you introduce me to your friend?” Keiko was now but a few feet from Moon. He turned to look at Eu but she couldn’t look back.
Now Eu stood in the interstitial walkway of Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers. The sudden shock of the altitude had her reeling but didn’t seem to affect the two assistants standing in front of her. Both the woman and man in virtualisations of the red-jacket-blue-trousers combo their meat was at that moment dressed in out in the desert.
Pre-speech thoughts oscillated through Eu. Her eyes snapped shut as they probed on her involvment, on details of the device that took their cell off grid. Their search shot molten thorns of thorium scorcing through the tracks of her hippocampus and she stumbled against the glass wall of the walkway, her face against it. Her implant couldn’t shift the weight of two, couldn’t even hold a thought above the din of the agony. Her jaw locked up, incisors sheered into the flesh of her tongue. And blood smeared from her mouth onto the glass.
“Hey!” Moon’s scream reached her. The walkway shook. The glass shattered. She fell through it, the streets of Kuala Lumpur rushed up, and she landed on her handlebars.
“Anything?” Ochoa asked looking back at his assistant. They shook their heads. Eu lifted herself back upright, bottom lip painted scarlet. Moon was off his bike and sticking his face into Keiko’s.
“Tell your MTs to back the fuck off!” he demanded. Keiko gave Ochoa a look of lethal disappointment.
“I wanted to make sure she wasn’t dangerous,” Ochoa admitted. A heap of blood and spit shot from Eu’s mouth and met the dirt below.
“You could have just asked me,” she quipped.
“Lady you better tell us what the fuck you’re doing here because I know the others would have seen your copter land. And it’ll be up to me to explain to them why they shouldn’t chain your neck to the back of a motor and your body to another.”
“They’ve come for the cell we jacked,” Eu said, wiping her bloody chin on the collar of her boilersuit. Moon locked eyes with Keiko. His aggression had cracked a little. “Nishimura-shachō here is Neon’s CEO.”
“Okay, okay, look. I’m not here for that cell or any other you might have. I’d easily have a team sent out if that’s all it was,” Keiko explained. Moon’s heavy breaths began to subside.
“Then what?” Moon pushed.
“Those.” Keiko cocked her head at the bikes. “More specifically, that feeling they give you.” Keiko stepped past Moon to Eu. “I take it you’re the didact who pushed that packet.”
“That’s a good guess,” Eu nodded.
“So that would make me one of your satisfied customers.”
“Appreciated.” Eu sent another gob of blood to kiss the desert. “But I don’t think these guys are much into giving rides.” Keiko smiled, shook her head.
“That’s not quite what I had in mind. Look, José and I are desperate for something to set Neon apart in our media catalog,” Keiko started.
“Media isn’t big enough of a draw for us,” Ochoa said, stepping up alongside Keiko. “The bulk of our catalog can be got anywhere. That’s fine for current subscribers, but there’s no one onboarding for our media alone.”
“We think we can change that.” A dull distant rumble started up, Eu and the assistants were the only ones to notice. “We need to be in a space that our competitors just can’t follow. We’ve pursued rare and superior quality collections but it all just feels too aloof, too elite,” continued Keiko. The rumble grew, Keiko and Ochoa searched for its source. A fleet of bikes were tearing up the desert in their direction.
“Are these you?” Ochoa asked.
“Talk faster,” Moon suggested.
“We came to offer you resources, facilities, and legal pardons if you’d be a part of an experiment.”
“Shoot.”
“We want to turn this whole desert racing thing into a virtualised media destination, exclusively for Neon.”
“You’ll have to give me that one more time.” The chorus of engines arrived soon after.
“Now why’d you wanna go do a thing like that?” Nedaara was far less taken than Moon, who by that evening had worked himself up into a lather. She sipped at an Asahi by the fire pit. “We’ve got a good thing going here, Moon.”
“We could have a better thing, don’t you get it?” Moon leaned back on his bike. The group of boilersuits milled around on tyres and stripped cell seats. A few Cubans, Domenicans, but mostly Koreans. Eu sat against the comms cell, tether running inside. She’d been asked to stay and be the conduit for Keiko and Ochoa.
“I get it plenty but I’m inclined to see us ending up with a far worse thing. Just as an example, you really think they’re going to give us a pass on this racket?”
“They said they would.”
“But that’s just for what they know about.” Nedaara took another foamy sip. Eu’d managed to negotiate an impressive fee simply for staying, indicated that for someone of her capacities, being out here was tantamount to torture. It was easy to lean into the mysticism about myelin tapping. Despite the wide predictions that the process would be universally adopted after its staggered introduction through the mid-twenty-twenties, it still only enjoyed moderate penetration. The relative ease of transient taps — even given their severe feature limitations in comparison to the global variant — just made them more compelling. As such, most understood the concept of global tapping intuitively but as for how those things felt, the specific sensation of ameliorating your organic neural network by having sense data carried in light quanta, that was a little hard to translate. But being out here was the furthest thing from torture in Eu’s mind.
The connection to anchor was spotty at best and even in the small amount of time Eu had spent amongst the boilersuits, with Moon and Nedaara, she’d grown to welcome the newfound silence of the newsboy.
Logs:
S: 16–1106_0851, 7186WE: 16–1106_0918, 7354W | 168WS: 16–1106_0948, 7354WE: 16–1106_1002, 7460W | 274WS: 16–1106_1240, 7460WE: 16–1106_1309, 7610W | 424WS: 16–1106_1454, 7610WE: 16–1106_1600, 8199W | 1013WS: 16–1106_2111, 8199WE: 16–1106_2146, 8535W | 1349WTOTAL: 2.75H | 1349W
