Peer Pressure
No one wondered why the sign was inside instead of outside. In a way, it only made sense. The logic was simple, once you knew it: people who entered already knew it existed. Other people, well, they just didn’t know. The place didn’t need publicity. The sign itself, built especially to be easily relocalized, was more of a symbol for the regulars than a way to grab a few more wallets from the street. Of the three neon letters, only two were still spreading their white light on the chain link that lined the staircase leading down to the basement where the bar was established.
If they called it a “bar”, it was only because they lacked a better word.
Sisen was descending slowly, holding on to the ramp and letting gravity put her body at a weird angle. The neon light reflecting on her bald scalp started to strobe as she entered the main room. The laser effects were more intense than the music; she could quite easily hear the teenager calling her from one of the booths. Five of those were spread around a central monument, some kind of rust tower from where the DJ literally spewed out. The music’s volume was high enough to isolate one booth from another, but not enough to isolate its occupants from each other. Sisen manoeuvred through the electric blue neon-lined concentric aisles to reach the one calling for her. The teenager didn’t seem to have any hair other than black and blue rubber tubes, some of which were decorated with antique transistors. A pair of aviator glasses clasped his forehead, each lens displaying the hologram of a mouthless face. His feet were rested on the booth’s central console, making obvious the ridiculously thick soles of his boots. His legs didn’t seem to have agreed on what to wear that morning: the blue baggy pant covering his left leg was carefully ripped off at the crotch to completely reveal the black latex stretched around his left leg. A carbon-fibre framework was attached over the latex by four bands; two under the knee, two over. The kind of device maimed people wore when they were tired of crutches but still refused to get anything implanted.
He raised his eyes only when Sisen was near enough. He settled for a half-smile, lips pinched, before running his hand on Sisen’s scalp until he reached the circuitry-patterned tattoo behind her head, and pressed his lips against hers. Sisen took a step back when the teenager tried to blow his weed puff right into her lungs. It pissed her off. Every time.
- “Fuck off, KBlack.”
The teenager smiled once more, showing teeth this time, then he pushed a tuft of rubber behind the strap of his aviator glasses.
- “If you’ll excuse me, I have to take a leak.”
His lips didn’t move while saying that. While she settled down on the bench, he thrust the water pipe into her guts, winked at her, then set off to… Deus knows where. Sisen didn’t know where the restrooms were in this one, yet. She observed KBlack walking, noticing once more that the framework he wore was strictly for style; he didn’t limp at all. She shrugged before lowering herself a bit more in the bench and brought the Plexiglas tube to her face. Through the smoke she exhaled a few seconds later, she noticed the three cyberdecks lying on the central console, two of them still connected to the deckers surfing them, absent at the other side of the booth. Beer bottles, ranging from full to empty, were laboriously laid out to make the most efficient possible use of the interstitial space between the decks. Even though the bar wasn’t that far, thought Sisen.
She could already see the mouthless holograms working their way back through the crowd in her direction. At one point where they were near the DJ’s tower, a hand emerged from between the bodies and grabbed an ass. Its owner turned around, looking perplexed at first, but smiled widely when he recognised KBlack. The man was so tall that he had to bend down a little to kiss KBlack, despite the teenager’s platform boots. They called him Sammy Sal. He wore a silvery mesh shirt over two leather straps forming an X on his ebony chest. Sisen knew as well as KBlack that under these straps, his muscled pectorals were pierced with inox rings at the nipples…
The two men, the black one having one and a half time KBlack or Sisen’s age, were now resolutely headed to the booth were Sisen was still sitting, and she was now fully feeling the weed’s effects. The DJ’s words intermittently echoed in her ears:
- “…Come celebrate the moments of your life, they say... Culture is our Nature-- and we are the thieving magpies, the hunter/gatherers of the world of CommTech… Some will say that the last Temporary Autonomous Zone has disappeared, then was reborn from its ashes. They are wrong! It is the nature of the TAZ, OUR nature, to mutate, to sneak in between the cracks in the system, filling them but leaving them empty at the same time. No one here felt himself die, did one? No one had the feeling to be “born again”, because we’re already alive! Everyone, down to the last one! And no one, NO ONE, will revoke our right…”
The crowd’s attention diverted itself from the individual activities of its members to finish the sentence, fists rising above heads:
- “Our right to party!”
The music became louder then, as many got up to dance despite the absence of a dedicated dancefloor. The crowd got denser in the aisles, while others took advantage of the recently freed sitting spaces. The two deckers sharing Sisen’s booth didn’t seem notice the mass movement even though they were jacked out at this point. They both smiled when they told KBlack everything was ready, and he could go whenever he wanted. KBlack then pushed aside Sammy Sal, leaned forward to grab his deck and unwind its optic cable, which soon got burrowed in the rubber bunch. He winked again at Sisen and said, still without articulating:
- “Watch closely.”
- “I ain’t even got my deck. I guess you’ll have to lend me yours when you’re back.”
KBlack, having already pushed the big “Jack in” button on his modified cyberdeck, didn’t hear that second sentence. Sisen said it knowing the answer, though: she never touched KBlack’s deck, and it shouldn’t happen before he got his brain fried. Which she was sure would happen, someday.
Only five minutes went by since the three deckers jacked in and Sisen was already bored as shit. The bong was empty, but all thing considered, she was high enough already. Glimpsing a couple in another booth, and seeing they were up to way more than kissing, she pondered jumping on Sammy Sal for a moment, but shook her head to herself. Despite this place being the most libertarian she knew, she could never do that in front of everyone… even if sometimes she wondered what it could feel like…
The DJ was speaking again, but Sisen listened to him passively. It was a historical speech, the type she never liked. Something about “Pirate Utopias” (not the ones who stole movies and shit, but the ones who stole shit from ships), a time period which felt to her more like a far away dream, a fantasy, than something that really happened. The DJ talked up for Tortuga, for the absence of laws on the seven seas… or something like that. Then he talked about some guy who “liberated” an European city (whose name she already forgot) and offered it to a dictator of the time… after his refusal, the “liberator” decided to transform it into a city of poetry and abundance. Sisen sighed. Boring as shit.
Suddenly, KBlack straightened up and shook with spasms. It only lasted a few seconds, but Sammy Sal stepped aside to give him space and check on the deck’s ASIST status LED. It was still shining blue, which meant no black ICE took control of it, so Sammy carefully laid down KBlack’s head on his lap, letting him disconnect by himself to prevent any dumpshock. When he finally did, one of the other two deckers was already jacked out and laughing his ass off on the bench. When he heard KBlack groan (Sisen was almost certain he used his own vocal cords this time, and not his jawbone-implanted speakers), his mouth contracted in an “Oh!” somewhere between boredom and surprise, then he started laughing again, though quieter.
KBlack, after sitting up, was swearing and massaging his temples when the second decker took the optical cable from his own datajack.
- “What happened?” asked the one who jacked out laughing.
- “Fuckin shit, goddam motherfucker... Shit!”
- “Someone hit him with somethink like a Sparky, but it was without doubt an attack program, not the ICE type. One-hit kill to his persona. Hallucinating stuff. I stayed to see if his MPCP was gonna stay intact; a reboot should do the trick, but I didn’t have time to make a signal capture before the database returned to its original state.”
- “Don’t you have an idea who did that to him?”
- “Not so fast, are you? Who else than Captain Chaos may be watching me so closely?” KBlack had resumed speaking trough his transducer.
- “Himself? In person? He sure doesn’t slack on discipline…”
Sisen was starting to understand what happened. She raised an eyebrow. Jackasses. Abuse of power could get you to pretty low places. It always ended badly when you had a bigger fish watching you.
- “Well, ok. I’ve been stupid to let you convince me to do that, especially if I don’t have any proof now.”
- “We saw you.”
- “Meat eyes are worthless in the cyberspace… but it does mean one thing: I did it, and you say you can testify… so you lose.”
- “Yeah, yeah, alright…” Both voices said that at the same time.
The three deckers pulled the roll-out screens out of their cyberdecks to access the matrix in tortoise mode. KBlack, who now leant against the bench’s backrest, propped his hands behind his head, waiting while the two others tapped their keyboards reluctantly. At the real-time reload of the webpage, the number on KBlack’s screen had gone up a few hundred nuyens. A lot less than what his parents give him each week, thought Sisen. KBlack played back the recorded voice of a nameless female clerk from his maxillary speakers:
- “Thank you for your business” Then, he followed with his own synthetic voice: “Ok. Now I need to… apologize to Sir Cap’n”
He showed a nervous smile.
- “Damn headache”
Sisen smiled too, imagining him relegated to manually sorting Shadowland’s spam…