EPTThis was something my friend and I did in a period of extreme boredom. We set ourself a little challenge, to create a pseudonym and then create a backstory for them that was as cliche-ridden as possible. For mine I decided to go down the cyberpunk/neo-noir avenue. It's probably my favourite of sub-genres out there, and while initially I tried to take the piss, I eventually became a bit more affectionate towards the subject matter.
I don't really write at all, and my grammar is pretty appalling but you guys give pretty useful feedback. I probably won't do anything with it, but may as well stick it somewhere!
Rex awoke gradually in his dingy apartment, as he did most of his days. Consciousness returned to him in gradually increasing waves: the transition between the dream-state and the everyday being blurred by the wide variety of narcotics still floating around in his system. Lacking the energy or the wherewithal to verbalise his pain, Rex felt a groan reverberate within his own consciousness. Christ, his eyeballs felt they were trying to leave the previously comfortable environs of his skull for pastures new.
Turning over to glance out over the cityscape, through a window festooned with the legacy of years of hard-living. Rex felt the memories of the previous evening come back to him. To describe this as a flow is to exaggerate the process, resembling it did a fetid stream trickling its foul contents over previously verdant lands.
He gazed outwards and sighed, structures latticed outwards in a stubborn rigidity, those in the foreground were only distinguishable due to the cracks and dirt that decorated their exterior. As the horizon approached the centre of his vision, Rex’s ocular augmentations strained to no great effect. No amount of machine-aided distortions of his cornea could prevent the imposing edifices blending into a greyish blur at such a distance. The homogeneity of the environment clashed jarringly with the supposed individuality of its inhabitants. Rex let out a bitter laugh, the very layout of this place felt like an elaborate parody- an abstract architect’s ode to uniformity. While this sentiment wasn’t shared by many of the Megalode’s bizarrely optimistic citizenry, it still brought on many a bitter chuckle when he found himself alone: as indeed he often did.
The near-daily ritual of synth-scotch no longer elicited even the most fleeting moment of shame in Rex, any negative emotional response was purely a reaction to the poor quality of the alcohol. In a world whose denizens only achieved a modicum of mental stability by the intervention of pharmaceutical and cybertech companies, the previous century’s mood-alterer of choice had been cast aside into the confines of the black market.
He took another swig, his mouth contorting into pained lines of distaste. To an outside observer it appeared that some lightbulb had just switched on in Rex’s head, the machinery of his brain whirring with an almost palpable hum. The particular ‘problem’ in this instance appeared to be in the process of being solved. He reached groggily around his bed’s headstock and gradually downwards, his hand’s tracing the hand-carved patterns indented in the wood. Rex slept in a rather archaic hand-made coming together of ornate carved wood and rudimentary metalwork. The craftsmanship displayed on the former clashed jarringly with the ad-hoc afterthought of the latter, but he took a perverse pride in that. In a world of machine-precision design and manufacture there was something quaintly charming about items that showcased some of humanity’s foibles. In his more introspective hours, when the blissful onset of unconsciousness stubbornly refused to arrive he would imagine the person who had constructed his sleeping vessel. As good as an investigator as he was, the composite personalities he built up were liable to be inaccurate, based as they were on nothing more than a subjective reading of etchings on wood.
The benefit of the narrator’s all-seeing eye could fill in this particular gap of course, Rex’s romantic image of an eccentric carpenter with a love of the organic idiosyncracies of woods covered up a much more mundane truth. In reality it was the production of a turn-of-the-century Chinese production line, the cheapness of the metalwork a necessary economy to keep the profit margins intact for the decreasing markets that still held affection for products that bore a human hand. His left hand moved steadily downwards from the headstock, his scarred fingers still held enough sensitivity to get a sense of the indentations on the wood. His hand’s trajectory was inexorable, not tempered by feedback from his eyes but taken on a seemingly autonomous course taken directly from its own memories. He let out a contented grunt, his shoulder muscles relaxing as one as his fingers clasped around a crescent-shaped adornment to the leg and started to twist. A small drawer started to emerge from the frame, eking itself outward, an intermittent grating squeak its aural accompaniment. Its journey complete, Rex rolled over and peered within the unassuming vessel and slipped out a glass bottle marked with the logo of a long-defunct whiskey manufacturer called ‘Bushmills’.
His waking ritual almost complete, he mentally prepared for the forbidden pleasures of the whiskey when a distorted voice interjected itself on his thoughts-
‘Mr Decker, you are a hard man to find.’
A neat summation of the synaptic activity within Deckard’s grey matter would probably be ‘fuck’. He had deliberately left his brain organic precisely with the intention of limiting the ways that mysterious disembodied voices could contact him. Despite his moral outrage at having his routine interrupted, his curiosity was piqued.
He supposed he should send out some feelers to his unseen guest.
‘Kind of how I like it. What do you want?’ Deckard spoke to no point in the room in particular; he was finding the experience of speaking aloud to this presence a little disorientating.
‘We have a job suited for your particular talents Mr Deckard. We will see you at the Bar None, 3 hours from now, until then, farewell.’ The strange distorted tones of the voice seemed to fade away towards the end of the sentence. The voice was not identifiable as male or female, was punctuated with no discernible accents or idiosyncrasies, nothing to be read between the lines all in all. Not altogether an unpleasant voice he thought, but its dull, unrelenting monotone was somewhat unsettling to him on a subconscious level. He had scratched out a living from making interpretations and extrapolating data off of very little information, but his skill set wasn’t up to it on this occasion. Perhaps it was being confronted with inadequacy in this instance that was the source of his disquiet.
If nothing else, he needed some income and he wanted to know how they contacted him so he could plug that particular gap in his home security. His wasn’t a line of work in which it was good practice to be reachable. His brain did a brief cost-benefit calculation, the conclusion of which wasn’t surprising given his disposition. He had slightly under three hours to get over to the Bar None, a rather generous timeframe. Plenty of time to scope the place out, plus it was by the standards of the city a safe enough nightspot. Deckard slung on a few additional items of clothing to conform to societal standards of decency and went back to the hidden compartment in his bed. His one ode to extravagance, a military-grade gauss rifle, resided within. So what if he had to live in squalor to afford it? A craftsman, contrary to popular belief is defined by his tools and this was a most special tool indeed.
The warm, contented glow that possessing this precision-made instrument of lethality washed over Rex, suppressing the unease he had felt since the arrival of his guest. Time to go.
The title was more a disgraceful example of me referring to myself in the third person.
