Sector Fifty-Five
Contents
Video
Extended Script
The year is 8,888, and the president’s cousin has been kidnapped.
Your mission is to rescue him.
You speed your lasercycle down the cracked highways of the outer districts.
There is the scent of ozone and rot as you approach your ruinous destination . . . SECTOR FIFTY-FIVE.
It’s the most dangerous place in the world. That’s why the president needed to hire the most dangerous person in the world: you. Blake Smoftsmooch.
Don’t let your name fool you. You’re tough. You’re one of the most notorious criminals in the world. The only time you’ve ever passed a bank without robbing it is because you were too busy beating up a stranger.
You also got kicked out of the special forces for scaring everyone else in the special forces. After lights out, you’d read fighting magazines in your bunk by the light of a lit stick of dynamite. Everyone in your squad would beg you to read faster, or else they’d try to ruin the ending of the article so you’d lose interest. Instead you’d just shush them, and keep reading about all the new kinds of punches being developed in the fight labs.
There’s only one person who’s ever gotten the drop on you and that’s yourself. Every 18 months you throw yourself down a flight of stairs just to show yourself who’s boss.
Let’s see … what else? You have so many scars they’ve turned into one big scar, so now it looks like you have no scars. Also, you wear two eye patches. They’re flipped up so you can see. But still.
If you can rescue the president’s cousin, the commander-in-chief is offering you a full pardon for your crimes. Plus three future crimes, which you’re really looking forward to. Right now you think you’ll either do robbery-assault-robbery or assault-assault-robbery. Or who knows? Maybe it’s time to expand your horizons with an arson-wiretapping-arson.
You’ve never rescued a hostage before, but you try to look at it like it’s a bank robbery. You tell yourself that Sector Fifty-Five is basically a huge, terrifying bank and the president’s cousin is basically just a big coin. It probably sounds silly, but this small reframing helps you feel secure and confident about your new mission.
You slow your lasercycle to a roll as you move through the deserted streets of Sector Fifty-Five. You hear chatter from the ruins of ancient office buildings . . . The sector’s battle gangs are alerting each other to your presence.
It isn’t long before your path is blocked by a dozen men wearing roller skates and old-timey diving equipment.
It’s the rolly-divey boys. This might even be fun.
You step off your lasercycle, and take out your weapon of choice: a hockey stick covered in grenades.
“Alright,” you call out to the rolly-divey boys. “If we’re going to fight, we go by murder rules … If you get killed, you die.”
There is an awkward rattling sound as the rolly-divey boys nod in their old-timey diving suits. So it’s agreed.
You start pulling the pins out of the grenades on your hockey stick.
“Wait,” calls out the leader of the rolly-divey boys.
He removes his helmet and you can barely believe your eyes.
It’s the president’s cousin.
He must have faked the kidnapping . . . but why?
The president’s cousin seems to guess your question.
“I am going to run for president,” he says with a grin. “My platform will be that the current president can’t even keep his own cousins safe.”
A look of madness glitters in his eyes.
“Then he will know what it is to be the president’s cousin! He will know the humiliation of a Thanksgiving dinner spent in the shadow of a president’s power. He will tremble as the yams slough onto my plate. His bones will turn to bile as I lift the gravy boat forever up! up! up! as if to begravy the very heavens!”
You can’t make sense of any of that, so you just start hockey-sticking grenades at everybody.
All the differently-themed street gangs come out to join the fight.
It’s awesome.
You punch a guy dressed like George Washington. After he’s knocked out, you try on his powdered wig out of curiosity. Maybe you should be president. You bet people would start paying their taxes on time if you were beating them up constantly.
These thoughts are interrupted when you’re approached by a fighter who’s wearing two dishwashers like boxing gloves.
“Sorry pal,” you say. “I’m handwash only.”
You give him a roundhouse kick to the face. He falls to the ground and mutters to himself, “… cycle … ended.”
You feel pretty good about this exchange except you’re not 100% sure that being handwash only makes you sound tough. Though you try not to dwell on it.
After that a mega pigeon bursts out of the ground and starts eating people. Nearby there’s also some kids doing donuts in an ice cream truck.
You punch a guy wearing a top hat made out of machetes.
“Man,” you say to yourself with a laugh. “This really is one crazy sector.”
About the music
The bass patch for this track was made on the Roland S1. It can be downloaded using the dropbox link below. You will find it as a PRM file, which can be loaded directly onto your S1 when it’s connected to your computer as a drive (check the manual under backup and restore for details on this process). You can also open the PRM file as a text document if you’d just like to see the value of each parameter in the patch. This file also includes the simple bass sequence used in the track.
Using the same dropbox link, you’ll find the samples I made for this project. Please feel free to use them however you like. Two are recordings of presets I liked in OPx-4. One is a chord progression I made in Repro 5. The chords are C min, C sus4, C maj.
The percussion samples in this track were ones I found on Splice. I’ve included links to those specific samples below:
Kick:
https://splice.com/sounds/sample/45f7b3e1adfd4b75cafd69fa24d440c4f1e832455a3293cc20bb9b90007e3d2c
Snare: https://splice.com/sounds/sample/9c97eae60a36ae17f49c69782225845057b3453736524f6a801142d9829214d5
Hats: https://splice.com/sounds/sample/9fd721d1bbe1afcc4c1f3c816e38f8f9e84f69141e8ceee60152af670caaf6b3
